Technophile周刊（第30期）¶
视频¶
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How to use YouTube to boost your language skills
Whatever is being done in the classroom is not being very effective // YouTube is a community of people teaching and learning from each other // Language mentoring, Lindie Botes, Luca Lampariello, Olly Richards, İclal // Finding things of interest // Steve's Advice: The role of the teacher is to help the learners to find information in the language that is of interest to them. // on-demand grammar instruction // Once you start noticing certain patterns in a language, you become curious. // Asking students to make videos // Steve's Advice: YouTube can and should be used to encourage people to explore on their own and develop a taste for learning.
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The Americas and Time Keeping: Crash Course History of Science #5
In addition to an art style and a writing system, the Olmecs invented a mathematics, including the number zero, and a calendar system that influenced later Mesoamerican civilizations. Ancient Mesoamerican civilization reached a height of astronomical knowledge under the Maya. // The Maya had a base-twenty or vigesimal mathematical system that included zero, but no fractions.("Vigesimal" 形容用20为底数的计量或数制。例如，Maya人采用二十进位制，也就是以20为基数进行计数。) // We aren’t sure what the ancient Maya thought, but it’s true that they made of lot of calculations about time for religious purposes. // These carry both symbolic and phonetic meanings. That is, they can indicate sounds and directly represent ideas. The complexity of the system points to a priest–scribe caste. And there was an academy for them at Mayapán.
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Roman Engineering: Crash Course History of Science #6
The Romans inherited much of their knowledge from the Greeks. From 323 to 31 BCE, the geometry, physics, astronomy, and other disciplines developed by the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle spread throughout the Hellenistic world. // Theoretical knowledge, on the other hand, was epistēmē—the root of our word epistemology, the study of knowledge. Epistēmē is the sort of knowledge we most associate with “science.” Science is abstract, represented by formulas. When historians of science talk about the possibilities of what we can know, they use the word “epistemic.” // Some estimates hold that one in three people in Roman Italy were enslaved. These people were involved in knowledge creation, if against their will, by building and maintaining all those great roads and other structures. Roman slavery was a little different than plantation slavery in the American South. Slaves could be highly educated. Many physicians were even slaves. They could buy their freedom and become voting citizens. But most remained chattel—meaning property.
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The Medieval Islamicate World: Crash Course History of Science #7
The religion of Islam significantly influenced knowledge-making in the greater Mediterranean and western Asian world. Islamicate scholars—meaning people influenced by Islamic civilization, regardless of their religious views—gave us terms such as “algebra,” “azimuth,” “algorithm,” “alcohol,” “alkali,” and “alembic.” // For example, observatories arose throughout the Islamicate world. Al-Maʾmūn built two observatories, one in Baghdad and another outside Damascus. At these sites, scholars refined astronomical handbooks, called zīj, that helped fix prayer times. // Algebra introduced a theory that treated rational numbers, irrational numbers, geometrical magnitudes—all numbers—as similar objects, ready to be manipulated.
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Medieval China: Crash Course History of Science #8
Like Egypt, Sumer, and Mesoamerica, ancient China represents a hydraulic civilization—one that maintained its population by diverting rivers to aid in irrigation—and one that developed writing thousands of years ago. // Later, between 400 and 0 BCE, Chinese scholars measured the length of the solar year to 365.25 days, predicted eclipses, recorded supernovas and sunspots, founded a Bureau of Astronomy, and even determined the 26,000-year cycle of the precession of equinoxes! Alongside this research, Chinese culture developed a grand model of the cosmos: in an infinite, empty space—enclosed by the great celestial sphere—celestial bodies float around, directed by a h“hard wind.” This mysterious force explained how the stars and planets moved around. // But it was the succeeding Han Dynasty that instituted an imperial university and the state examinations, also called the civil service or imperial examinations. // The Song state produced a lot of infrastructural and social change across China, starting with the key to everyone’s heart, their stomachs. During the eighth century, rice cultivation took off in southern China and the Yangzi Basin. Then, in 1012, the Song state introduced new early-ripening and winter-ripening rice from the Champa kingdom in what is now Vietnam that allowed rice to be produced faster with less water. // The list of Chinese “firsts” or true technical inventions is so long that it could be its own episode. The wheelbarrow, silk production, earthquake monitors, lacquer, gunpowder, the crossbow, porcelain, umbrellas, fishing reels, suspension bridges, and paper money.