On second thought, I’m starting a new thread for this reply.
Bert wrote:
A little ‘aside’ question; Why is it that so many classicists are also computer experts (or at least computer geeks.)
I’m neither. I can pretty well maneuver my way around online, and I can do most things with computers that I need to do (i.e., format a manuscript on Microsoft Word or outline a resume on Publisher), but calling me a computer expert would, unfortunately, be like calling someone an expert in Greek just because they know that “alpha” is the first letter of the Greek alphabet.
If it comforts you at all Keesa, I don’t know any programming languages either. At least Latin and Greek won’t change over time and become useless in a few years time, when new programming languages are needed.
My school is helplessly behind - the only programming language you can learn here is Pascal (which is really old and you can only use it on Stone Age PCs).
People suggest this to me a lot, but I’m not sure there’s really any good relationship here. Programming languages are much closer to mathematics and symbolic logic than anything people actually speak.
It was funny…a friend of mine felt sorry for me because I didn’t know any programmer languages, so he gave me a link to a PDF file of a textbook on a programmer language, but-I couldn’t read it! It would say things like, “Now, when we say ‘this’, all we’re saying is ‘that’,” but the thing was, I didn’t understand “that” any better than I understood “this”.
I’m an application developer, so programming is my work (VBA only, so rather easy ).
My Latin teacher at school said, that people who are good at maths often like Latin* for its structural grammar, where you can list exceptions because there are relatively few of them. The way I learned Latin at school - decoding sentences - is a bit like a programming language: if this, than that (else…). I hope to go beyond decoding this time, so I think there will be fewer similarities.
Ingrid
BY the way, as one of my classmates demonstrated, being good at Latin didn’t mean you like maths…
Maybe it’s just a general ability to analyse information - I don’t really believe in “maths ability” or “music ability” but some of us are good at processing written or verbal information, some are good at mechanical things, some are good at communicating with others. I think that a person with good mechanical skills might be just as talented had they been an auto mechanic or a watchmaker - it just depends on family influence, the educational training on offer and plain old fate. I would have to say I am good at the 1st two and hopeless at #3! So I should never become a politician or a salesperson.
I did a lot of study for IT, programming, systems analysis etc, then got sick of it and changed to music and now Latin (but still play music). We had some discussion about this about 6 months ago, but didn’t really reach much of a conclusion other than some skills seem to “cross over” from seemingly unrelated areas of study.
I’ve read a neat book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain which associates the right side of the brain with “pictures” (i.e., thinking in images rather than words) and the left side with “words” (rather than images.) The idea behind the book is that the left side of the brain (the verbal part) tends to be the dominant one, and they give exercises for transfering “control” to the right side of the brain for drawing. It seems to work. My art is definitely better.
I wonder if the relative strength or weakness of areas of the brain contributes to or even controls our talents in different areas. I wish Scientific American Frontiers would run a segment on that…
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