Day: April 12, 2018

Curious David Redux: Experimenting with WordPress.Org

Still clowning around with transitioning to WordPress.org from WordPress.com. I am helped immensely by the physical presence and attendance to details of my student research assistants.

As I move closer to publishing some ebooks, I am going to experiment with different capabilities of WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org. Forgive any confusion I cause as I fumble a bit.

Books I hope yet to finish reading and writing reviews for this semester:

1. The Sharpbrains Guide to Brain Fitness (2013). Thanks to Alvaro Fernandez for helpfully responding to my drafted notes of the 2nd edition of his book.  I look forward to seeing the 3rd edition and to attending the 2018 virtual summit.

2. Happiness is a Choice: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old (2018)

3. The End of Old Age: Living a Longer, More Purposeful Life (2018)

4. Two Weeks to a Younger Brain. (2015)

5. Keep Your Brain alive: 83 Neurobic Exercises to Help Prevent Memory Loss & Increase Mental Fitness (2014)

6. Not Pink (2018). More can be found here about colleague Pegg Kasimatis’s new novel

Curious David Redux : Food for Thought

I am over 50 years of age though when with my students I forget and am closer to their age:) I am very impressed by recently released Global Council on Brain Health reports dealing with brain health for adults ages 50 and older. Among those I have so far read are those dealing with nutrition (found here), social engagement (found here), sleep (found here), physical activity (found here), and cognitively stimulating activities (found here).

That most recent detailed report draws upon the expertise of thirteen specialists from four continents and from gerontology, neuropsychology, neurology, neuroscience, psychology, public health and speech-language pathology who met and agreed upon ten best-science-based consensus statements summarizing the impact of cognitively stimulating activities on brain health. The report’s appendices list the participants, provide a glossary with carefully defined terms, share the discussion questions framing the deliberations, clearly explain differences, reveal disclosure statements of potential conflicts of interests, indicate sources of funding, and provide selected references. I find these reports understandable, well-written, full of practical and actionable advice, myth-busting and extremely important. Definitely enriching food for thought.

Curious David Redux: Dropping Off the Net

Once I have tearfully witnessed Commencement, I don my invisibility cloak.  From the perception of many persons used to finding me ubiquitous, I disappear from the Net. Summer is a time for being outdoors, for travel, for gardening, for playing with children, for taking advantage of our living on North Lake and for being mentored by Leo the Great Pyrenees.

Here are prior expressed summer ruminations when Robin the Newf mentored me.

Reading with the Newf

After last semester I pretty much dropped off the Net for a couple of months (due to an unreliable home networking situation) and spent time reading printed books, hard copies of magazine subscriptions and paper newspapers. I highly recommend it. I am convinced that online reading is a different experience. I look forward to reading Naomi Baron’s latest thoughts on this.

Here are books I found well worth my having read:

  1. Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things– praised by several of my favorite contemporary authors David Mitchell, Philip Pullman, and Yann Martel.
  2. John Scalzi’s Lock In: A Novel of the Near Future.
  3. David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks.
  4. Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age.
  5. Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
  6. Andy Weir’s The Martian

I presently am finishing Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings and am looking forward to reading Ann Morgan‘s The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe when it becomes available in the US in May 2015. Before then I plan to read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

Tomorrow, after my classes, I’ll invite my students into my office to take any books I have read. It always pleases me to see them walk off excitedly with some pleasure reading.

What books do you recommend that I read? That I encourage my students to read?