Impromptus

A majority of teens have a cell phone today, and with many schools unable to afford a computer for every student, teachers are starting to see them as a helpful learning device instead. The AP Newswire I keep throwing this out in idle conversation after I heard Bruce Sterling say something close to it. We [...]

1st RULE: You brag all about turducken. 2nd RULE: You brag ALL ABOUT turducken. 3rd RULE: Once there are no more bones and the meat is over 160 degrees, turducken is over 4th RULE: Only three birds to a turducken. 5th RULE: One turducken at a time. 6th RULE: No mammals, no invertebrates. 7th RULE: [...]

I can’t seem to stop playing with Logicly! It allows you to make circuits in flash and then watch them run. I made a clockless circuit, but the more industrious out there may want to try making something with a little more power. Try and make a circuit that adds in a gray code! Or [...]

So I am teaching CS 1 this term, and tonight the asskicker assignment is due. I didn’t mean it to break people, but I screwed up and made it a little too hard. Almost everyone has been able to figure out each piece on their own, but put all of the pieces together and the [...]

I recently tried to read Digital Shock by Hervé Fischer and actually managed to read and to finish Small Pieces, Loosely Joined by David Weinberger. They were both problematic for me, in similar ways. Both of them, in the midst of talking about technology, made philosophical claims for which I would like better citation than [...]

In order of priority. Rule 1: No touching. Your car is prohibited from touching other cars or bikes or pedestrians. This is the most important rule. Rule 2: Don’t slow anyone else down. The only acceptable reason to slow people down is to prevent touching. Rule 3: Follow all the written rules of the road, [...]

I just finished reading Born Digital and I can’t stop thinking about it. Not because it was so insightful, but because many of their major insights seemed so obvious. I’m a little too old to be what they term a “digital native”, and I started with computers a little too late in development, but I [...]

While it is teenagers who have embraced social media, the people who should really embrace it are the elderly. Being old is, among other things, socially isolating because it is harder to travel and meet people. Social networking was designed to bring old friends together in spite of distance, and it does a great job. [...]

My degree is in Computer Science.  But I am part of a combined mathematics/computer science department.  This means that I also teach the odd math service course, so far always Calculus I.  It is profoundly strange to be a Calc teacher when you are pretty sure that it is 1s and 0s at the bottom [...]