Dave English's profile

Good advice for HS dropouts and PhD candidates alike, November 5, 2009

Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)

"The beginning is a terrible place to plan. It's the moment of greatest ignorance."

This is just one of many great lines in this fantastic little book. Most of us can read this as an enjoyable autobiography of a high school dropout with a famous father who made it big in an unrelated field. This ideas explored are intrinsically thought provoking and can be used for working on all kinds of projects. The actual HS dropouts who are bored with traditional education should read this -- but also most PhD candidates would gain a lot of insight from the project management tips included. Learning diverse knowledge sets, herding an open-ended project along, finding a niche, etc are all… Read more

Nice little book, but there are many errors, November 5, 2009

It's a nice little book, reflections of flying hang gliders and living life. But given such a great subject, the content is a little unoriginal and it never really lifts off. There are some nice quotations and some cute little pictures.

And there are mistakes that show a lack of attention to detail -- something every pilot should strive to avoid! Hemingway is credited with a slightly misquoted Ursula K. LeGuin line from 'The Left Hand of Darkness.' Other quotes are not quite exactly as originally written. And there is a huge aerodynamical blunder when she states in words and a diagram that the four forces in glider flight are lift, drag, gravity and momentum. Er mo what… Read more

The way to learn conversational Spanish, October 10, 2009

Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)

This is an excellent way to learn some Spanish, while trying the Pimsleur method before plunking down some big bucks for a whole course. I'm familiar with Rosetta Stone, the excellent Fluenz software and an older version of the Pimsleur comprehensive course -- and can say this is a worthwhile investment of your time and your money.

Most of us want to learn to speak the new language, and to understand Spanish speakers, rather than write or read. To learn to speak and hear you have to speak and hear. For unless you have a working knowledge of Romance language phonetics, you will pronounce words you read completely wrong if you just read them. My wife is a native Spanish speaker,… Read more