The End of Esperanto? [Article]

Ludwig Zamenhoff invented the simple international language in 1887. The Economist sees doom for the language that has never really taken off.

It remains thin on the ground… partly because language, more than any other tool, benefits from network effects. The more people who speak a language, the more desirable that language will be. This is of course why Esperanto speakers play up the biggest possible numbers for their community—the hopes that others will join, for the benefit of being able to use Esperanto with more people.

How to read faster & retain more [Article]

Mark Manson has some advice:

These are strategies anyone can use and require little practice. You can be up to speed and doing this stuff within a week or two. It will just take some conscious effort at first and a little bit of practice. For the most part, these tips are practical and logical, not some uber-speed-reading techniques.

Check out  Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book as well.

New Approaches to teaching fractions [Article]

For the parents struggling to teach fractions, research suggests using pies isn’t necessarily the best way:

When two pizzas sit side-by-side, slices of one divided into sixths may not look that different from slices of another divided into fifths……..Fraction bars and number lines are considered easier than circles for children to draw and divide into parts. They also let students line up fractions in a row and see the difference in size, something they can’t do when dividing up a pie in the traditional approach.

Rewired nerves control robotic leg [Article]

A 32-year-old man whose knee and lower leg were amputated in 2009 after a motorcycle accident is apparently the first person with a missing lower limb to control a robotic leg with his mind. A team led by biomedical engineer Levi Hargrove at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago in Illinois reported the breakthrough last week in the New England Journal of Medicine

Spain’s new website ownership rules [Article]

A reminder to be thankful that you can view this link, because in  Spain, website owners can now get six years in prison for linking to copyrighted material.

The country enacted the law as a response to pressure from the US, where ironically the law is not as strict. Spain is in danger of being added to a list of countries that Washington considers to be the most egregious violators of copyright law, meaning it could be subject to trade sanctions from the US.