Teaching is a skill on its own, it's orthogonal. I've read, and believe through my own intuition/experience, that being a "true expert" in most things is often such an intuitive place to be that it cannot be translated mechanically in that person's mind into steps for teaching it.

It's arrived at after years and years of "doing" and growing past internal boundaries and goals.

One thing you can be a "true expert" at is teaching itself.

Teaching relies on two things, primarily, beyond ___domain knowledge: making connections, and empathy. A great teacher understands not just the topic, but how it relates to other topics. Furthermore, a great teacher also has the ability to probe the person being taught to discover which connections are missing. Finally, of course, the connections have to be communicated, but communication skills are the least important. (If you don't have ___domain knowledge, if you can't make connections, and you can't get inside the head of the "student," you can't teach. If you can do all of those things, but you struggle with communication, you can eventually get your point across if you are determined).

It's the ability to make connections that we mostly associate with "understanding."

I'm suspicious of "true experts" who can't explain themselves. I think what a lot of people witness are people with deep ___domain knowledge ("experts") who just don't bother to make the connections. In my view, making the connections is a large part of being an expert.

Here's something just out--I doubt it would interest the community at large, but I thought you might enjoy it.

http://www.quickanded.com/2008/12/gladwell-kane-theory-of-te...

What is the value of this over Google CSE (Custom Search Engine)?

http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

s/affect/effect/

I know, you already knew that. But if nothing was said, we would descend into chaos.

From the article:

* 92 percent of VCs thinks investments will slow in 2009. (Translation: We are all going to be hiding under our desks.)

* 19 percent say they are going to invest in more companies.

* 60 percent are decreasing their seed investments. (Translation: We are not taking any significant risks)

Led me to http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/

Funniest single serving site ever.

You need to try it out, for example:

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=something

LOL, that's awesome! A few years ago I had a similar idea and registered googlefor.info, but like so many of my "site ideas", time got the best of it.

Now I just need to remember to letmegooglethatforyou.com'ify every question someone asks me before I tell them "just Google it!".

That's even better than justfuckinggoogleit.com, which has been around for years. I wish they'd take you to a standard results page, though.

That would break their business model.

Ah, I didn't stick around long enough to notice they had one. Such bad taste :)

I also won't store my backups in anything but my own S3 buckets (they are encrypted, privacy is not the issue). Is duplicity stable in your opinion? I am usually one to use alpha/beta software etc. but this is a long term need. I am a big rdiff-backup fan, this looks like a good alternative to my current strategy.

My current strategy is a little lame but works quite well: rsync daily to my home server and about once or twice a week an EC2 instance is fired up with elastic block store attachment and the home server does rdiff-backup to it.