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Aral Balkan

We shouldn’t be teaching colonialism in history class.

We should be teaching it in every class.

@aral I wanted to "um, actually" this but I honestly can't think of a subject that wouldn't be improved by some discussion of colonialism.
- Biology? Eugenics, brah.
- Art? Where do you think all the "native" art came from, and what do you think happened to the people who made it?
-Physics? Boy have I got a story to tell you about the real motivations of dropping the atomic bombs.
- English? Hey, want to hear why Scottish almost became a dead language? (A lone survivor from many)

@willbeason @aral i wonder how much diversity in English relatives as well as Celtic languages has been flattened by UK state policies as French-relative languages have been flattened in France.

@willbeason @aral Just saw a story about how when a western person created the first Thai typewriter, they "couldn't fit" 2 consonants...so they just left them out - causing them to become effectively obsolete and no longer used in the language

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_typ

en.wikipedia.orgThai typewriter - Wikipedia

@pixelpusher220 @willbeason @aral

The same happened to ß in Switzerland and to ð and þ in English.

@Life_is @pixelpusher220 @willbeason @aral Seems to be happening to č, š and ž in Slovenian, too, because modern smartphones apparently don't have space for these 3 letters, and you can only access them by long-pressing c, s and z (this is as if phone keyboards didn't have q, w and x, and you could only access them by long-pressing p, v and k).

@jernej__s @Life_is @pixelpusher220 @aral That's interesting! When typing in German, swipe-to-text correctly substitutes umlauts and even "ß" even when I, for example, swipe double-s for a word like "weiß". It means I don't have to internalize when to use "ß"

@pixelpusher220 @willbeason @aral

a similar thing happened to welsh actually. When they went to print the welsh translation of the bible, the English printers didn't have enough k's to layout the pages so they switched them to c's and that pretty much dropped the letter k from the language:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_or

en.wikipedia.orgWelsh orthography - Wikipedia

@willbeason @aral And also

- Art: how were the works you see in museums acquired?

@willbeason do you have a good resource where I can read about that story about the atomic bomb motives? You piked my interest.

@aral
I have for a long time been thinking that the study of #economics should start with a unit on the socio-economic history of #Haiti.

@RD4Anarchy @aral Interesting essay. It's a pity it didn't reference A Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart. Lockhart's essay doesn't have quite as radical an edge, but otherwise largely agrees, and makes the point that mathematics education, through calculus, is stuck in the 18th century, and doesn't even prepare students for study of modern mathematics.

I took calculus in my thirties, and was struck by how the text and teaching never explained what we were doing conceptually.

@RD4Anarchy @aral I'm still puzzled how it works. I barely managed a C in Calculus 1, and was putting more work into it than all my other classes combined.

I couldn't even figure out what the successful students were doing. They had no concept of how the math worked and no curiosity. They just followed arbitrary rules very quickly.

Big shock was when I realized how much simpler and clearer were Newton and Leibniz's explanations of calculus than anything in the textbooks. Didn't help me though.