Perpetuitas wrote:
Not again, would you be so kind and introduce yourself?
I few years ago I decided I would attempt to learn 120 things over the next 20 years. Not for any particular reason, but just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I started with aquaponics and it was actually the idea of aquaponics that set me on this twenty year quest.
I cant remember the actual google search I did first, but it was something along the lines of "What's worth learning".
I just checked that search, and it's definitely not the search I used, but it was something like that.
The actual search gave me the wikipedia entry for "
polymath" Which seemed like a worthwhile thing to aspire to being.
I was born on the Woomera rocket range in South Australia in 1966.
I was raised in Papua New Guinea where I was taught a basic understanding of those things you might find useful when trading in a market stall.
When I came back to South Australia at age seven, I had an excellent grasp of volume, weight, and small denomination currency handling. Sadly I was not as good at reading as I was at avoiding having my reading inadequacies detected.
At avoidance I excelled.
I continued to for nearly the next decade.
Twenty years or so later, a large Australian financial entity named AMP demutualised and gave it's policy holders shares in it's newly formed entity as a company. As the result of two life insurance policies that were mine since birth, with contributions of around $125 a year, and that I had changed to superannuation policies once I turned 18 and started working, I discovered I suddenly owned some shares. Around $8,000 Australian dollars worth. I'd never owned shares before, so I decided that I needed to learn something about such things.
The result was that for the first time in my life, I studied.
I discovered that after I did it, I knew a bit more about stuff than I did before.
It totally blew my mind.
I actually knew more than I did the day before, and nobody hit me.
I was around twenty eight years old (I'm making this number up based on what I feel is approximately true. I often do this and it it creates problems for me. I don't think it's important that the reader should know if it was twenty three, eight or nine. I make no apologies for this behaviour, but would not like people to think I make sh*t up. I simply don't care enough to be sure)
So...
I discovered that in spite of my extremely poor grades, I could in fact learn.
I also discovered books.
I also discovered talking books.
To this day, if there is ever a time when I cant read, I listen.
I read reasonably quickly, but I tend to consume history and fiction through talking books, and everything else through text either online or in book form. I suspect it's because science needs to be re-read sometimes and the nature of the narrative experienced in a talking book is best suited to those topics that don't require re-wind. (when I listen to history, I'm never really interested in dates and names, so I don't really care if I miss something. My interest is in the general story, rather than in Fakts.
I decided that in order to learn stuff faster, I really needed to learn how to learn.
This proved to be a little more difficult.
Learning was easy it seemed.
Learning how to learn was a little tricky.
That's probably worth reading again if for no other reason that to have a better grasp of my own confusion... so ... read those last few lines again.
I soon realised that the secret to everything was learning how to learn.
I took some notes.
As far as I know the solution was probably taught to me years ago in school, but for some reason I was a little distracted and didn't pay attention, but I was pretty sure there was a way to query the universe in such a way as to break down whatever problem I might pose to it into discrete problems, and as a result, to perhaps gain some insight as to a solution.
After the original entering of the "What's worth learning" search, I became a little obsessed with gaining ... not so much knowledge... but gaining the superpowers which knowledge provided.
A little knowledge is never enough.
It's a daunting realisation to grasp that you know nothing. Nothing at all.
One day when I was talking to my two year old friend Sarah, I asked her where wind came from. She explained to me that trees make it by waving from side to side.
See?
Anyway...
I started my journey toward learning 120 things in 20 years.
Things like
aquaponics and making cheese, and hand made fishing lures, and bread, and making stirling engines, and electronics and whatever else caught my eye.
I'm way behind my own self imposed schedule.
But in the process of all this study, I keep trying to learn how to learn. Part of learning is of course learning how to solve problems that nobody knows the answer to.
That was a big eye opener.
As part of my learning adventure, and to a large degree as part of my first interaction with a forum member (on BYAP) I discovered a few social "shortcuts" in dealing with forums and their power users. My learning adventure sees me interacting with shiploads of forums. I've been online for a while, and traded a car for my first modem equipped computer that allowed me to interact with a BBS (then "Adam", but now "Adam internet") when a 64 user BBS connected to FIDOnet was a pretty awesome thing. I was a lurker and didn't really have anything to do with contributing to the online world.
During this time I was also being a production potter making a domestic range of stoneware pottery.
I was very good at this.
Also I spent some time creating software for a recruitment company.
But the learning thing upset all that a little.
I wanted to learn a lot of stuff.
I wanted to learn stuff that other people hadn't learnt yet.
To this end I've been working on trying to create a way to solve problems wherever they occur, and in whatever form they may take.
I've been working on a problem solving regimen that might address whatever is put to it.
So far I've used it to solve random problems that I throw at it to hone and improve it. This past year I have been trying not to use it to see if there is a noticeable difference in the quality of my efforts to solve problems put to me. I think there has been. It's been tough not using it.
The first test of what I call the "invention engine" was created out of a BYAP thread claiming that the holy grail of aquaponics was the ability to split flow between first one grow bed then to another sequentially. I didn't know why at the time, but it seemed important. I started reading the thread when it was being introduced as a thing to aspire to, so I thought it would be a good way to test the engine. The results over the next year or two gave me a bit of confidence in what I had so far. These where the first results where I had no real interest in the output, but the output was still of use.
During this time I got a bit sick and went to hospital a lot. One year I spent flat on my back attempting to seduce nurses using nothing but mind power.
That failed.
I moved on.
In this time I invented a new kind of salt-proof fishing reel for use when wading, some stuff to do with car headlights, and a device that might help with office based occupational health and safety.
That's pretty much it really.
I'm here to learn about worms and mushrooms
Backyard Farming Forum
Oh no, he found us! 
