Life Long Learning

One of the ‘goals’ of the nursing department is that we develop ’life long learners’. What this means, I suppose is up for some debate but I think, generally, that what is meant is that we prepare our students to learn how to identify their professional learning needs and help them develop the skills needed to meet those on-going needs. After all, health care is an ever-evolving field and constant learning is required. As I have pointed out to my students for many years, many of the diseases that we deal with today were not identified

Changes in my Weather Station

For the past 8 years I’ve managed a personal weather station consisting of a Davis Vantagse Pro and a Windows computer running the excellent Weather Display software. Last December I decided that the inexpensive computer I was running the scripts on may well be coming to its end-of-life and went looking for alternatives. Another goal of this move was to lower my cost of operations. The Jetway computer I was running didn’t use a lot of power, perhaps 25 W, but if I could do better, I would. After all, at 25 watts, that’s about 219 kW or $26.25 annually. With the growth of small computers such as the Raspberry Pi, I knew I could do better.

Blogging with Jekyll

Over the past nearly 10 years I’ve tried numerous times to maintain a blog. I enjoy writing and figured it would be a good way not only to practice the skill, but to share my thoughts with others. I don’t really care whether anyone reads my work, to be honest; I just want to write.

The problem is that, while I don’t care so much if I’m read, I do want to be able to keep my files and refer back to them from time to time – something of a journal (which is what the blog was originally conceived to be). That means that I need the writing in form that is easily saved and retrieved. Another concern has been that I be able to write from essentially any computer, any where. I started, as most folks do, on Blogger, then moved to Wordpress, each time abandoning my work and the platform, as I moved to another. That’s not what I intended. Making the process more difficult is that the writing is stored in a database. This makes retrieval of the raw data difficult, particularly if you’ve forgotten the password, or the database is corrupt, etc. And, to be honest, those platforms are simply more complex than my needs. What I needed was a simple, easy to use platform that allowed me to maintain a file of my work.

Designing Your Life

I ‘attended’ a presentation by Story Musgrave, the astronaut, on “Designing your life” or some such similar topic. While I wasn’t overly impressed with his general rambling presentation style, I was very impressed with the message that threaded throughout his story. I took several keys away from the presentation.

The value of curiosity

The first takeaway was the importance of curiosity in achieving an effective life. From high school drop out, he went on to earn a BS in math and statistics, MBA in operations analysis and computer programming, BA in chemistry, MD, and MS in physiology and biophysics within an 8 year period. He would later earn an MA in literature. To me, the broad range of areas, as much as the time frame for these accomplishments, says a great deal. He explored the areas that interested him. He committed himself to those areas. Most students today would be counseled to choose a singular path and follow it. Yet, the life he built for himself was one based on the intersections of his interests. Each area of interest exposed him to ideas that he wanted to explore further and so he did.
By not limiting himself to a given field, he opened up new avenues for self expression and provided himself the skills to create new opportunities.

Some Thoughts on Philosophy

So, I’ll begin this treatise with a question: What is philosophy? And perhaps another, just to follow on that, why is philosophy important?

To take things in order, my simple answer to the question of what is philosophy is to say that it is, generally, the creed by which one lives one’s life. I think the dominance of big names in the field – Nietzsche, Hume, Watts Marx, and so many others – and the deep, convoluted and difficult writings that these big names have produced have left most people with the impression that philosophy requires deep, almost mystical thought on very esoteric subjects. And, from my readings, I think there’s sufficient evidence that this impression is not wholly inaccurate. But, the depths of thought that the writings of these great names reveal are, I believe, the exceptions rather than the rule of philosophy.