Posted in Art, Education, Programming, tagged air guitar, Education, guitar hero, Programming, south park on June 10, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Since I started listening to Alan Kay’s ideas I’ve kept hearing him use the phrase “air guitar” to describe what he sees as shallow ideas, both in terms of educational and industry practice, which are promoted by a pop culture. Kay is a musician, among other things, so I can see where he’d come up [...]
Posted in Art, Education, tagged edin, john dowland, music, sting on May 31, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I know this is going to be old news to some people. I first heard of this through PBS in 2006. I just got inspired to write about it now.
Sting, with Edin Karamazov, created a wonderful collaboration, bringing back to life the 400 year-old music of John Dowland. Sting and Edin, both playing lutes, and Sting [...]
Posted in Education, Programming, Squeak on March 17, 2008 | 3 Comments »
I found this through The Weekly Squeak. Randal Schwartz demo’d the current Squeakland version of Squeak/EToys on Leo Laporte’s show, “The Lab” (video link). I just think it’s neat it’s getting some mainstream recognition.
Schwartz and Laporte gave a quick history of Smalltalk at the start, and they told it pretty accurately. For the uninitiated it may go by too [...]
Posted in Education, Math & Science on February 27, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Bill Kerr, a teacher/blogger I read regularly, wrote a post recently that I enjoyed immensely, called “What is maths?” He doesn’t answer the question, but what I like is he cites some other articles that talk about what math is not. They make it clear that a) we’re probably not being taught math completely in schools–even though we think we are, and [...]
Posted in Education, Programming, Technology and Software on February 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The XO went into production late last year, and I’ve been looking for interesting material on it to talk about here. David Pogue of the New York Times did a review of the XO last year, but I just found the video for it.
I think he does a really good job of presenting it in [...]
Posted in Analysis, Education, Programming on November 16, 2007 | No Comments »
…playing off the name of an old Bangles tune…
I ran across a case in point for this, thanks to James Robertson’s blog. Steve Jones is talking about the current state of the art in the organization of IT software development:
So why do I choose to have strict contracts, static languages, early validation of everything and [...]
Posted in Education, History, Programming, Technology and Software on October 19, 2007 | 8 Comments »
I saw that lispy wrote about this. I happened to spot the original speech by Richard Stallman on reddit. The title intrigued me: “My Lisp Experiences and the Development of Emacs”. I’ll go through some pieces of it, because there are some interesting stories in here.
My first experience with Lisp was when I read the Lisp [...]
Posted in Education, Movies on October 3, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Mike Judge, who created the movie “Office Space”, came out with a movie that’s on DVD now called “Idiocracy”. The name and the cover drew my attention. It shows the classic “Ascent of Man” from ape to homo sapien, and then shows man devolved into something less. (Update 10-3-07: I should point out this movie was rated R [...]
Posted in Art, Education, Programming, Technology and Software on September 26, 2007 | No Comments »
Dr. Randy Pausch gives his last lecture (h/t to Mark Guzdial)
Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University and the creator of Alice, is dying of pancreatic cancer. I learned this past weekend that he had given his last lecture recently, while he was still in good health. It’s become kind of commonplace for universities to have [...]
Posted in Analysis, Education, Math & Science on August 20, 2007 | 2 Comments »
On July 7 The Aspen Institute held a public panel with some corporate leaders and policymakers on American competitiveness. It was aired on C-SPAN on 7/21. From what I understand this video is only up temporarily, so at some point this link will become dead. You can watch the video of the panel by selecting ”American Perspectives: [...]
