Friday, April 7

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 11! The blog commenting assignment for this week is available now, and here is a link to the class calendar with Week 11 ... and the four more weeks to go after that.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. There are still quite a few assignments in the stack, but I should be able to reply today to all the assignments turned in before Thursday... although it may be late today before I finish. Thank you for your patience! You can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Languages. In honor of the Eve of Nations tonight (see below), I wanted to share this fascinating chart of A World of Languages.

Punctuation. The poor apostrophe has nightmares of its own:

Word from India. Today's word from India is ASHRAM, and the image below shows the Gandhi Ashram at Sabarmati in Gujarat, India:

Featured Storybook. This project is from the Indian Epics class: Dreaming of India: What is Real Anymore?. A young American student is on a journey to India, and already on the plane his surreal adventures begin: he sees a giant furry monkey with a golden name tag, Sugriva, walking down the aisle, serving beverages . . .

Free Book Online: Today's free book is The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge by L. Winnifred Faraday. See the Freebookapalooza blog for links and the table of contents. This is one of the epics of ancient Ireland, also known as The Tain.

Words of Wisdom: Today's saying is A bow long bent at length must wax weak (an English proverb). Find out more at the Proverb Lab. In other words: you need to relax at least once in a while!

Video: The video for today is a performance by Ravi Shankar together with Jean Pierre Rampal, Sunrise. For more about Ravi Shankar (it's his birthday today!), see below.

Growth Mindset: Today's growth mindset cat is not afraid of making mistakes: Sometimes, being wrong is the only way we can learn. You can find out more at the Growth Mindset blog.

Event on Campus: The 47th annual Eve of Nations: One World, One Stage opens at 7PM tonight in Lloyd Noble (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

April 7: Ravi Shankar. Today marks the birthday of the amazing Indian musician, Ravi Shankar, one of the modern masters of the sitar. He was born in 1920, and he died in 2012. You can read about Ravi Shankar's life and career at his official website and in this Wikipedia article, which is the source for this photo of Ravi Shankar with George Harrison of the Beatles back in 1967. I've included a Ravi Shankar video above, and below you can see his appearance on the Dick Cavett show.

Just last year, Google honored Ravi Shankar's birthday with a Google Doodle:

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.