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Joined 3 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月2日

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  • One of my kids started to play the piano at about 13. By the age of 18, he was playing pieces that were Royal Conservatory grade 10 level, and he was accepted into several universities.

    He only had one hour of lessons a week during those 4 years of high school, but usually practiced 2 to 3 hours a day, without any pushing on my part. In some of his lessons he wouldn’t even touch the keyboard, they would just analyze a piece of music or discuss the theory behind it.

    In university, the professors sometimes told other students to watch him play. His technique, they said, was not great (he himself admits that playing scales early on would have helped), but his feeling was superb.



  • That would be fine if the book was to be an objective, historical approach. But how likely do you think that is, as opposed to a self-serving screed to push her own agenda?

    Are we going to get an honest critique of the Liberal politicians with whom she worked and politicked? An exposé of things that should have been but weren’t, or that shouldn’t have been but were? People who should or shouldn’t have been successful, in either case to the detriment of the country?

    Put simply, I don’t see that there could possibly be anything of value in this kind of first-person account.





  • What bothers me is that I haven’t seen any reporting on actual discoveries of human remains at any of these sites.

    I think that the residential schools were a shameful part of white Canadian society’s desire to wipe out indigenous peoples. There is no doubt about that. But after more than five years why have we not seen even a partial exploration of the sites? If there are remains, let’s at least get them back to their communities.

    Meanwhile, one of the places in Ontario (Grassy Narrows) has lost its funding after receiving more than 3 million, because they have not provided any audited financial statements for how the money was used so far.

    The best way to combat denialism is to provide the proof of these claims. I want a complete reckoning of everything that was done, and how the native pupils suffered, so that it can never again be denied.





  • The definition of dumb is very elastic.

    There is one summer student who came to work at my software company. He was in a very specialized and elite program at a top-flight Canadian university. Both his parents were professors at this university.

    One day he came to our boss, and said that his family always went to Europe for 2 weeks in the summer, and he needed time off. My boss explained that he had been hired because we wanted to do a special project during the summer, and it would be very difficult to not have him on the team for a significant part of it.

    My boss asked the student when the vacation was going to start. The student replied, “tomorrow”.

    At first, my boss was angry, but then realized that the student actually had no understanding that this was an unusual and onerous request. That’s about the time I started learning about autism (and later realized that I was somewhere on the spectrum as well, just not as far along it).