Ian Finnesey's Acknowledged Web Presence

Sorry to those who attended about the software problems. It involved some problems with some aspects of how hard disks are handled under Windows that I did not discuss. Suffice it to say that if you never try to install two operating systems on the same computer at the same time you will not have the problem that I was having.

Here is the presentation in PDF format. You should be able to view it on most computers, though you may need to download a plug-in for your browser in order to do so.

BUILDING_COMPUTERS_2_ (1)

You asked a lot of good questions, and that made me realize that I should cut the presentation way down, moving most of the information into a separate reference document. Not that this isn’t information you could use, but time for questions is more important.

Anyhow, thanks for coming, and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

A page I put together has finally been posted to the Arizona State Museum web site.  This is the web exhibit for the Paths of Life exhibit.  This is an exhibit about the Native American tribes of Arizona and the surrounding area.  Most of what I know about most of these groups I learned while putting this site together.

I didn’t make the template for this site, which is used on most Arizona State Museum pages, I just put together the Paths of Life content within that template.  The most complicated part was the clickable imagemap.  There are about 600 links in all the different versions of that map (a different one for every page in the site), but Dreamweaver made quick work of creating and modifying all those different imagemaps.

The “Virtual Tour” links require Quicktime VR (which I don’t actually have on my machine, apparently Quicktime Alternative doesn’t support it).

I believe that the best way to overcome the anthropomorphization and mystification of computers…and the fear and distrust that generates it, is to have at least a vague idea how they work.

To this end, I intend to teach a class at the Kingman library that will let people build computers.  I figure once you know what everything is, what it does, and how it is put together, at the very least you won’t need to pay someone 50 bucks to install a stick of RAM.

The outline is as such:

~1 hour – powerpoint-driven lecture.  I have finished the slides, now I need to write notes, so I don’t forget what other things to mention at each slide.  Regardless, the most important stuff will all be on the slides, and students can use the slides as notes.

~1 hour – building the machines.  I intend to have everything sorted so that it will be as painless as possible.  Or I might mix things up so that people have to take the right components.  Regardless, everyone will get a checklist, and all components will be marked (possibly in a foreign language so that students won’t be able to use that to identify components) so that I can put everything back where it belongs afterward.

~1 hour – installing operating systems, getting connected to the Internet.  The objective here is to just load a web page, ANY web page.  I will test the installation process on each machine, or each model of machine, before the class so that I know it will go without a hitch.

I have the program room for FIVE hours, just in case I’m way off on the time it will take.

Edit:  Change of plans:  Students won’t be building computers, just installing RAM and Hard Disks (that’s all I expected them…like SERIOUSLY EXPECTED them to learn anyway)  Also it is postponed at least a week.

This is the powerpoint I will be using.  DOWNLOAD

It isn’t perfect yet.  Let me know what you think.

A couple of weeks ago I taught a class for the first time in a couple years.  It was a lecture on email security, and my students were 5 or 6 senior citizens (meh, word didn’t get around too much, I guess.)  Anyway, they were all pretty engaged, and smarter than I expected given some of the people with whom I have previously spoken around here.  None of them were in much danger of falling for obvious scams, so that section went quicker than it otherwise would have.  I still covered it to make sure.

I wanted to follow it up with an email-delivered quiz, but it turns out that Gmail (which some of my students and I use) doesn’t even allow you to send executables, pretty much no matter how you try.

Anyhow, this is the powerpoint around which I based my presentation.  Yeah, a lot of lame visual metaphors and Lords Privy Seal.

I’m working on another one, this one will be about building computers.  This is going to be aimed at peole who barely know how to turn a computer on.  I think it will be a useful exercise.  I think I’ll design the flyer, though.  Roxy means well, but I don’t think she can convey the message I want to get across.

The idea is to get through the ppt/lecture part in about an hour, spend an hour or two putting the pieces together, then an hour or two installing operating systems (I’ve got to make certain myself that this will go smoothly for that to be realistic.)  I want to have them install at least one (preferably JUST one) driver.  I also want them to get their machines to connect to the internet.

I’ll plan for it to go up to 5 hours, preferably 4.

part 2 of at least 4

Going from J to K yields a set of possible Korean sounds for each Japanese sound.  However, since there isn’t a one-to-one correlation, and all of the Hangeul characters in the set corresponding to a Japanese phoneme may not correspond to the same OTHER Japanese phonemes, it is necessary to display the K to J relationship in a separate table.  In most cases, I have used different examples from the previous chart.

Note that while in Japanese there is only one consonant (and really, it’s not even a separate phoneme…it’s one of the two ways of writing “z”) that does not have a corresponding consonant in Korean.  In Korean, there are two, possibly four.  Korean is a bit heavier on the consonants than Japanese (and the vowels, too…Japanese is phonetically quite poor).

These two charts are approximately 1/3 of what you need to turn your Korean vocabulary into a passive Japanese vocabulary and vice-versa.  (The other parts are the vowel, and any final consonant)

This is intended to be the first of at least four parts.

When I first started learning Korean, I already knew Japanese pretty well.  So I caught on pretty quickly that the two were similar.  I shouldn’t say that…there are others who speak Japanese who didn’t do so well at Korean as I did.  I’m going to assume it’s because they didn’t notice all the cognates.  Yeah, something like 70 percent of Korean is actually bastardized Chinese.  Something slightly less than that in Japanese.  And while neither shares much in common with Chinese grammar, they share a LOT in common with each other.  (J-K or K-J translation is like 90+ percent word replacement.  It’s easier than translating between either language and English.)

The reason some people don’t notice the cognates is that they aren’t instantly obvious.  It isn’t like English and every European language.  It can be pretty obscure.  The only way to notice some of them is to notice patterns over lots of words.  You have to notice that a sound in Japanese will always have one of several sounds in Korean and vice versa.

This isn’t because they developed one from the other.  They mostly didn’t.  It’s just that the ways in which they both mangled the Chinese pronunciations over the centuries differ…and they differ in a consistent manner.  I believe that not only do the Chinese-origin words follow these patterns…so do the actual cognates between Japanese and Korean.

This is probably more controversial than the assertion that there are patterns in the Chinese words.  God damn the Koreans and Japanese so don’t want to be related in any way.  I base this belief on a few words that I noticed that DO follow the same pattern as the Kanji/Hanja.  The two I keep near the front of my mind are “snake” and “bee.” へび (hebi) 뱀 (bem) and  はち (hachi) and 벌 (beol). (edit:  adding to the list for future reference:  kom/kuma)  Those don’t look too similar, do they?  But they do follow the same patterns as the Chinese words.  With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why these patterns aren’t more obvious to more people.

(There is also the fact that many Japanese adjectives ending in “-ui” have corresponding similar adjectives in Korean ending in “-yeopda.”  I have not yet figured out how or if that relates to my tables)

It occurred to me that I could explain these patterns as tables.  I’m starting with the initial consonants.  Japanese and Korean are both syllabic, and the initial consonant of a syllable is the most consistent part of the relationship between the two systems of pronunciation.  The other parts are the vowel sound, and the final consonant (of the Korean syllable…the first consonant of the SECOND Japanese syllable, if any) if present.  They are more variable, the vowel to the point that I prefer to define many relationships in terms of what does not correspond rather than what does.

Anyhow, here is the first table.  Learn it well and turn your Japanese vocabulary into passive Korean vocabulary.  (If you try to use this to learn to SPEAK, people will look at you like you’re nuts.)  The first column is the consonant on the Japanese syllable, the second is the list of equivalent Korean syllables, and the third is an example, given in chinese character, Japanese pronunciation (the “onyomi” only), the Sino-Korean pronunciation, and the English meaning.

To clarify…while I believe this system may more or less apply to non-Chinese cognates (or possible cognates) between Japanese and Korean, it is intended to apply mainly to the Chinese-origin words in both languages.  It is quite reliable for that.

This isn’t a scientific survey, this is just all the examples that I have found.  There may be others I missed.  To make it a bit more meaningful, I would need J-K and K-J dictionaries in text file form, so that I could compare thousands of pairs of words and come up with frequencies for every example.