I've alway been fascinated with how people learn. Why is it that some people seem to pick up on languages really easily and others (namely myself) don't seem to get it? I believe a good amount of it is simply the way you are wired, some people are better at it naturally. Some of it is the way my brain has been trained over the last ten years of being in consulting and IT. As soon as I start to hear information my brain attempts to put it in boxes, define them, and make connections between the boxes. It must be why I need to have a white board in my office when discussing things, I'm constantly drawing boxes and connections. I believe even have a rows of stick figures on my board right now with lines connecting them.

I figure I'd be a very good mechanic if I took the time to learn about engines, it's the same pattern.

Languages are far too anarchic to be nicely put in to boxes. No boxes and flows, no remembering by me. Yes, languages inherit from other languages and there are basics like Latin that are roots for many rules of language. Yes there are rules in English like "I before E except after C" (although I heard they are thinking of scrapping that one) but those aren't really rules, they're suggestions. How are you supposed to learn something if the rules keep changing or being ignored? It used to drive me nuts trying to learn French by memorizing the 'rules' first and then attempting to apply them.

The only reason I understand English is because I'm constantly bombarded by it, not because I have any sort of aptitude. I couldn't tell you what a hanging participle is, but if I read a sentence I can tell you whether it is grammatically correct. Sadly it's a binary sort of ability, either it is correct, or it isn't. I couldn't tell you exactly what is wrong with it.

Of course since I have no grounding in rules for English I have to wonder why I'm so pedantic about them. If my understanding comes from constant references then you'd figure I'd be faster at accepting regional differences and new ways of speaking. I still wince whenever somebody in southern California says "Uh-huh" instead of "You're welcome".

Kat is studying for her first test so we are back at the coffee shop, her decrying the lack of highlighters in her bag and me with the laptop. She is planning on acing the tests so studying is a requirement. We had to leave the house so she could get some studying done, which I can completely understand. As I've probably mentioned before, I'm all about avoidance of temptation. Staying at home means there are things to distract Kat from studying, like playing Warcraft. One of the reasons I bought the Mac Air is (other than being really cool) that it isn't powerful enough to play any interesting games. That way when I'm using it I have removed some temptations. So Kat could either sit at home and constantly resist doing things she would rather be doing, or we can leave and remove the temptation. Thus here we are. Of course now we have to resist desserts. It's a dangerous world out here.

Part of her studies are about nutrition so it was doubly funny when she ran in to an article in the Economist about fried butter. Now not only does she dislike the idea on a visceral level, but she can dislike it on a molecular level. She's trying to explain to me about ionic and covalent bonds but all I can think about is ionic vs. doric vs. corinthian columns. I'm not going to mention that to her because it'll mess up her studying and that would be bad.

I've been looking in to using surveymonkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/) to gather information from customers but I cannot get past the name. I keep having this image of a closed room with statisticians in lab coats, clipboards and thick glasses at one end and a horde of monkeys at the other end. What could possibly go wrong?