On Proper Metaeducation, or Why Don't I Get Bloom's Taxonomy?

I am no educator. I'm a software engineer in testing with a hardware background.

I am also a student.

As such, I have had Bloom's taxonomy of learning and cognitive domains thrust upon me many times. My university classes' "learning outcomes" were full of Bloom's (oddly not Anderson's) terms and concepts from this set of tools for picking apart and understanding how humans in general learn. I think I got most of the concepts and even the skills (earliest kudos go to Mrs. Haufle and Ms. Hassenfritz), but I never absorbed the terms or the long lists of keywords or the definitions.

Now I'm staring at another Bloom's Taxonomy assignment:

Literature

Once upon a time there was a group of writers in Spain whose work became known as Red Fiction.

A prominent critic of their work, also a Tolkien fan, called them what?

The Writers of Roja.

(Could've been serials, in which case they were the Writers of Roja N. It just didn't sound as cool.)

Big Shiny

Just because you can see something doesn't mean that you can tell how big it is.

It took astronomers hundreds of years to develop equipment and theories that could handle the minute details of the sky, and even then it took some careful measurements of celestial coincidences to tell how far away the sun is.

That is now I feel sometimes. I used to be a tech in a small Merc much company. Sandstorms, bullets, Hell and high water didn't phase those guys. Build it small, build it tough, build it fast. They didn't have room, time, or money for the fancy stuff, but when they hit the field the job got done as quick and clean as you can imagine. We were a tight crew. Anybody could sit down with the boss and get coached on everything from Merc ops to manual combat to drinking, and when I had questions I just glanced over my shoulder and asked the guy who knew.

Feeling

Three worlds exist simultaneously.

In the first, cool, carefully prescribed inputs follow clean, mechanical pathways of polished cams, balanced levers, and oiled ways through a vast, steady ocean of linkages and stored history to produce elegant, unquestioned outputs. At the edges of the ordered world, restraining walls keep the ethereal tumult of the second out.

In this second sphere, whirling vortices clash. Great rivers of emotions slam into restraining dikes, spilling over and sometimes meeting others leading to synergistic amplification of their mutual innate chaotic intensities. Uncertainty and despair vie with hope and constancy, each flow waxing and waning as streams of anger, joy, uncertainty, vision, fear, and hope rush through the strained aether. Crossed streams variously yield singularities or supernovae, violent sparks or hardened silence depending on the nature of the meeting. It is quite hard for any solitary denizen to keep the overall maelstrom from rending the very fabric of the world; peace and silence are never an option, especially when The Accuser makes his destructive voice heard, but the sole occupant of the realm still seeks them ploddingly. This is what life is when the ordered world slowly grinds to a terrible, fatigued halt and the worlds' walls melt.

The third world is the one you, dear reader, share. It's the one called reality.

Here, when the world of emotion begins to invade the place of reasoned order and the flags for help are set, few answers indeed are sufficient to the plea "Help me feel, for I am feeling and don't know how."

Drumsticks

Gandalf opened the dusty book, slowly turning to the last written page of the History of the Mines of Moria.

After a surprised expression crossed his brow, he began reading, "Drumsticks, drumsticks in the deep!" After solemnly choosing the great tome, he declared "...there is nothing more."

Turning, he addressed the fellowship of chickens, "Fly, you fools!"

Semantic Jellyfish

There is a thin semantic line separating weird and beautiful.

And that line is covered in jellyfish.

Welcome to Night Vale.

The podcast episode this somehow refers to is here, its Wikia page is here, and the project's home page is here.

I haven't listed to the Night Vale podcast. Perhaps I'll do that while I'm travelling to Washington. Still, my wife found the quote on Pinterest, and it's been eating at me. What does it mean?

And I don't mean, "How does this strange line fit into the Night Vale world?", no, I mean "What does that English construction actually say?" The more superficial question interests me here.

(Two friends of mine inspired this dig.)

Semantics: semaphore antics, when two Army signals specialists get bored.

Thus we see that the military is training jellyfish to assassinate writers in an attempt to control the global supply of--

**cough**

Pardon me. Now where was I? Ah yes...

Semantics: the study of meaning. (Thanks, Mirriam-Webster and Google.)

So what I get out of this quip is that the meanings of "weird" and "beautiful" are actually fairly close. I don't think I understood this until I saw this rendering, which made me realize that jellyfish really do play with that line. They are surreal and beautiful, especially when their colors are brought out like that. They are also utterly alien to me, a dry midwestern boy.

So I think that there is a line. It's thin, if it's not a proper probability field, and many things are in the same in-between-almost-both zone that jellyfish lie in.

There you go. That's what I think it means.

(With modern Art attempting to explore the distinction, I think the tentacles and neurotoxins could be brought in for an extended, painful analogy...)

Steam vs. Fedora 18

(Yes, this is a boring technical post. :)

I recently installed Steam on Fedora 18, as the post title implies.

The instructions from sten's ask.fedora post work magnificently...until it tells me that I'm not online:

Fatal Error: Steam needs to be online to update. Please confirm your network connect.

There are a number of awkward fixes like changing a config file that doesn't exist and simply reloading a dozen times. None worked for me, though, so I kept digging until I found Aleksandar30's post that details a snafu in Steam's server configuration in the 1.0.0.39 package Steam was linking to when I wrote this.

I haven't tried removing the /etc/hosts line since the Steam client updated.