Tag: Great Courses

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Banned Books, Burned Books

“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.” ~~ Mark Twain in a letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, 7 February 1907

I recently finished watching a truly excellent and very timely course from Wondrium, Banned Books, Burned Books: Forbidden Literary Works taught by Maureen Corrigan, Ph.D. Ms. Corrigan is a professor at Georgetown University, a book critic for NPR, a contributor to several of the most prominent newspapers of the country, has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, an author in her own right, and on and on.  She is unquestionably Continue reading “Banned Books, Burned Books”

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Reconsidering JFK – A Wondrium Course

If you are of my generation or older you remember the day President John F. Kennedy was shot, 22 November 1963.  I was in 6th grade at an elementary school in Toms River, New Jersey. It was the first time in my educational career that I had had a male teacher.  He was a very tall, skinny man who I remember mainly because he was male and his reaction to the Kennedy news.  When they announced over the loudspeaker that the President had been assassinated, this man cried.  However, when I raised my hand after Continue reading “Reconsidering JFK – A Wondrium Course”

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #500

yeah I know you did not ask!

I am currently watching a Great Courses series (we have a streaming subscription) called: Maya to Aztec: Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed. I was utterly fascinated by the unit on Mayan math. They used a based 20 system and only needed 3 symbols to represent all the possible numbers.  It was a positional system like our decimal system and unlike Roman numerals. The professor said the joke was that they counted on their fingers and their toes.  He then reinforced that it was a joke and went on to say that no one was quite sure why they came up with a base 20 system.

Obviously we all work with base 10, more or less daily. As a programmer I worked extensively with a base 16 system of math and symbology.  I occasionally also worked directly in base 8 and base 2.

All which started me thinking about an Okie I once knew who invented a base 21 system.  Of course, he was skinny dipping at the time he had this brain storm.