The Learning Thread

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xrg

Golden Squire
180
59
Post links to good educational resources, tutorials, and interesting things. Anything that helps people level-up IRL.


ART
-Ctrl+PaintFundamentals/Digital
-EnliightenFundamentals/Digital
-Feng ZhuConcept Art
-idsketchingIndustrial Design
-Gas13Pixel-Art
-Drububu.comPixel-Art
-Final Boss BluesPixel-Art
-Mark CrilleyManga

-CGCookieBlender/3ds Max/Modo/Unity
-BlenderGuruBlender
-Hard Surface Essentials
-NSFWHair Techniques
-Polycounts for Games

-Flash AnimationFlash
-12 Principles of AnimationPixel-Art
-Video CopilotAfter Effects

-drawshAnatomy
-NSFW360 degree female models



COMPUTER APPLICATION
-ShortcutFoo
-Microsoft Excel
-LibreOffice/OpenOffice Writer
-LibreOffice/OpenOffice Calc



COMPUTER SCIENCE
-ComputerScienceforEveryoneC
-CodecademyHTML/CSS/Javascript/Python/Ruby
-CSS-TricksHTML/CSS
-PHPAcademyPHP
-UdacityPython
-edXC/PHP/Javascript/SQL/CSS/HTML
-Coursera
-iTzAdam5XC/C#
-TheNewBostonC#

-TheChernoJava Game Programming
-Sin & Cos: The Programmer's Pals!Game Dev/Math



ELECTRONICS AND CIRCUITRY
-Intro to Modern Electronics
-edX



GENERAL STUFF
-OMGFacts
-Listverse
-TEDtalks
-Debatabase
-Terms of Service; Didn't Read
-Memrise
-Anki - Flashcards
-Freerice



HISTORY
-Ancient Aliens Debunked
-Crash Course World History
-Hardcore History Podcast
-Khan Academy
-Huge thread about Real Life Artifacts
-Voices of History
-Keith Hughes
-Ancient History Encyclopedia



HUMANITIES/HEALTH
-Coursera
-NSFWHow to Eat Pussy
-Khan Academy
-MIT OpenCourseWare
-Weight Training, Exercise Instruction
-NutritionData
-ErowidDrugs



MATHEMATICS
-Numberphile
-Vi-Hart
-Wolfram Alpha

-Khan AcademyArithmetic/Algebra/Trigonometry/Calculus/Linear Algebra
-Udacity
-Coursera
-PatrickJMTAlgebra/Trigonometry/Calculus
-IntegralCALC.comCalculus
-MIT OpenCourseWare



LANGUAGE/GRAMMAR
-DuolingoSpanish/German/French/Portugese
-Memrise
-How to Learn Any Language



LIFE-HACKS
-Instructables
-Lifehacker
-Household Hacker
-YouShouldKnow (Reddit)
-LifeProTips (Reddit)



LITERATURE
-60 Second Recap
-Crash Course
-VlogBrothers - Catcher in the Rye Part 1|Part 2



MAGIC TRICKS
-ScamSchool



MUSIC
-Classical Net
-Learn to Play Piano



SCIENCE
-Scishow
-Vsauce
-SmarterEveryDay
-ASAPScience
-Sick ScienceExperiments

-Bozemanscience.comBiology/Chemistry/Physics/Earth
-Crash CourseBiology
-Khan AcademyBiology/Chemistry/Physics
-Periodic Table of VideosChemistry
-VeritasiumPhysics
-MinutephysicsPhysics
-MIT OpenCourseWare



SOCIAL SCIENCES
-Reuters
-NYTimes
-AP NewsFeeds
-AFP
-Stratfor | Global Intelligence News & Analysis
 

xrg

Golden Squire
180
59
Added both, also alphabetized by category. Recommendations on categories is helpful too. Some sites are difficult to categorize because they have so much stuff, so I place them in multiple spots.

Also if anyone finds a bad/broken link let me know that too ~
 

Ichu

Molten Core Raider
845
278
http://www.memrise.com/home/

Paced learning that reinforces long term memory. I've used it for language so far and its decent. However, I haven't played on there since they reformatted the site and apparently it's worse than the beta, so hopefully some of the features will return.
 

xrg

Golden Squire
180
59
I thought about GUF but it doesn't get as much traffic as General. Plus there is controversy over moderation regarding that forum that I don't really care to get involved with.

- Added Memrise under the Language and General categories for now - that one looks interesting. I'll have to check it out more.
- Added Keith Hughes to History
- Minor formatting adjustments.
 

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
2,161
786
- Periodic Videos Chemistry
I thought this said 'Period Videos - Chemistry,' was kinda
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Lunis

Blackwing Lair Raider
2,247
1,470
Not sure how many of you studied linguistics in college but there has been an interesting debate going on for the last ten years or so about a number of important things. The pioneer of this field Noam Chomsky has argued for a while now thatlanguage is not for communication. What that means is that while we use it for communication, it's core function is something else entirely. He co-authored a very influential paper back in 2002 in the journalSciencethat makes a claim about the evolutionary origin of language:http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20021122.pdf

In layman's terms it basically says that the language faculty did not evolve by Darwinian natural selection (and therefore the communication aspect was not specifically selected for), but rather it emerged almost instantaneously (~50,000 years ago) from a single mutation that gave us the capacity for recursion. Those of you who studied computer science know that a recursive routine is one that can call an instance of itself. In this case, Chomsky argues, it gave our brains the ability to generate an infinite array of hierarchically organized expressions. Chomsky first made a name for himself back in the 1950's by arguing quite convincingly that language was not only an innate system, but also is a hierarchically based one. This overthrew the prevailing B.F. Skinner view that it was simply the result of reinforcements and that there was no innate structure.

Since then the study of language takes the form of creating a branching syntactic tree. Even a simple sentence like this has a very complex underlying structure:

rrr_img_3350.png


If this didn't utterly bore you then you might want to check out the bookThe Language Instinctby Steven Pinker. It's a very easy read and you don't need to have any background in the field to understand it. Each chapter slowly builds up to explain how and why language is structured like the above image. He does come out on the other side of Chomsky in the debate on the evolutionary origin of language, in the later chapters he argues why language could have evolved piecemeal by natural selection.

rrr_img_3352.jpg


rrr_img_3350.png


rrr_img_3352.jpg


rrr_img_3350.png


rrr_img_3352.jpg
 

McCheese

SW: Sean, CW: Crone, GW: Wizardhawk
6,882
4,236
To go with Luxer's post,here'sa really interesting article about a language that (supposedly) doesn't have recursion, which pretty much flies in the face of a lot of Chomsky's claims. It's far from conclusive of course, but it does raise some interesting questions and shows just how little we really know about the origin of language.

Also, I'd like to add how-to-learn-any-language.com to the list of resources for Languages. It's an amazing forum for anyone trying to learn a language.
 

Lunis

Blackwing Lair Raider
2,247
1,470
I read Everette's book and while it's interesting, the conclusion is that the tribe apparently doesn't usesyntactic recursionin the surface structure. The underlying representations could, and probably do have some sort of recursive element.
 

xrg

Golden Squire
180
59
That's actually the pixel art tutorial I was trying to find when I found the other two. Apparently, I have it bookmarked somewhere in my zillion bookmarks but can't find it. Anyhow, thanks, added.
 

xzi

Mouthbreather
7,526
6,763
That's actually the pixel art tutorial I was trying to find when I found the other two. Apparently, I have it bookmarked somewhere in my zillion bookmarks but can't find it. Anyhow, thanks, added.
Yup! And thanks for this thread. I'm delving into the world of oldschool RPG's so I'll probably be posting pixel related stuff here and there.
 

Tortfeasor

Molten Core Raider
1,008
179
I came across this last night and it sucked a few hours out of my evening. It's basically an ancient history wiki with a nice skin. It it has lots of useful timelines and they link embedded scholarly papers to articles associated by topic.

http://www.ancient.eu.com/
 

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
2,161
786
I came across this last night and it sucked a few hours out of my evening. It's basically an ancient history wiki with a nice skin. It it has lots of useful timelines and they link embedded scholarly papers to articles associated by topic.

http://www.ancient.eu.com/
Dude I think I love you, I spent 2 hours reading about the collapse of the roman empire on wikipedia yesterday (at which stage I opened too many tabs and crashed my browser). This site looks awesome.