Coming off the busiest four months of my professional life, soon I'll send my annual newsletter, laying out all the projects! (you can sign up to receive it via http://www.davidbrin.com, or in comments below). Hope that helps explain my slow pace of postings.
Still... and so that you know it's not all politics, here's another civilization-boostin proposal that's not political! Everyone who pauses to understand it has admitted "Yes, that would work," multiplying by 10x or 50x the number of youths who try their hand at a little computer programming. And again, it will never, ever, even remotely be tried, alas.
So I'll finish with a little tech miscellany.... and for those who hang around to the end... some lame attempts at humor!
== A pragmatic reform to get kids coding again! ==
Some of you recall my most-hated of all Salon articles: “Why Johnny Can’t Code,” about the disappearance of standardized coding languages - easily used by teachers and kids - from our computers and devices. However serious (or not) you deemed the problem - and I think it’s been devastating - the max solution would have been trivial. Apple, IBM, MSoft, Google etc could each ask ONE FTE employee to work with the others for one month and voila, there’d be simple, lingua franca, portable versions of BASIC, Python, LISP, Scratch etc. on every device any kid might own.
Why is that important? Think through why MILLIONS of kids did coding in the 1980s and almost none do now!
It's simple: Back in the 80s and 90s, teachers used to assign simple programs as homework! Not just in AP classes, but in regular math, physics, chemistry, biology... even in Junior High. Because the assignments were right there in the textbooks of that era!
Those simple, ten line assignments gave millions of students at least a little exposure to what a program is... how pixels move because of algorithms. And millions did it. Because it was assigned! Easily 20 times as many students sampled line-level programming, in the 1980s adn 1990s, as do today. Bet me on that.
One month of one FTE effort to coordinate. With that one minuscule act by 6 companies, we’d then be able to ask textbook publishers to once again include “Program It” problems for each chapter - whether it be the population equation in bio class or simple statistics, or making a robot turn around… and half of the students in North America would get at least a few, brief tastes of programming. And then, for the rest of their lives, they’d know that every pixel on a screen, every swerve or a drone or a self-driving car, came from someone’s algorithm.
Short of that, I suppose the best outcome to emerge from all the hoorow over my “Can’t Code” article was that somebody went out and simply solved the problem! Well, sort of. He created a cool and easy and accessible Basic site, offering a simple and obvious entry and display system. This one seems to offer the complete package. Accessibility via any mere browser, ease-of-use and instant applicability to simple textbook exercises. Nothing to download...Quitebasic is instantly ready to use. See: http://www.quitebasic.com/
Now comes CodeGuppy! This type-in booklet contains fun JavaScript programs for young coders. Each page contains a full program, so you can share only one page at a time with a kid.
But alas, all of these patches miss the point I've tried repeatedly -- with utter futility -- to make. There's no solution until all kids can access several basic languages on all devices. Something those Big Six companies could achieve almost overnight, at trivial expense. At which point "Try It" homework assignments will return and teachers will assign them.
And that is how we'll get back a nation and civilization whose youths have at least had that crucial insight, that first taste of a power they might choose to develop.
== Interesting Miscellany ==
I promised some stuff... so...
An interesting essay on 1968 (you'll see lots of them, this year)...
...though it leaves out most of what went on. My father was 40 feet away when Bobby Kennedy was shot. Not one week went by without some soul-testing event or some stunning piece of music. And especially the final coda of hope from the Apollo 8 image of our Earth... that seemed to say: "Here's all that matters."
Elon is branching out. (When has that ever happened? ;-) Now... into comedy. He's been poaching staff from the Onion! I can't wait. The suspense is killing... oh, wait, I suppose I could ask. But no. Whatever it is, it'll likely be cool and fun.
The Shine Scanner has a patented 'Curve-flatten' Technology that let’s you “Scan A Book In 10 Minutes.” So maybe we won’t have to shred-whirl-scan libraries of books the way Vernor does in RAINBOWS END.
An aside... Here's something weird. The 30-year-old CEO of Vancouver-based cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX Gerald Cotten passed away in late 2018 — taking to the grave the passwords to crypto holdings worth about $137 million and which belonged to 115,000 QuadrigaCX users. The incident sparked numerous conspiracy theories: did the CEO fake his own death and run with the money?
== Finally... some... humor? ==
John Fugelsang on Twitter imagines an Abbot and Costello "Who's On First?" conversation between Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. (And sure, while we wait for healing to make them just go away, we can at least use them for chuckle-memes.) Oh, I just added the last half (below) just now, meself. With no intent to offend any ethnicity or person other than Trump!
-What's the name of that guy who leads China, Jared?
-Xi, sir
-She? No, it's a guy
-Xi
-A guy!
-That's his name
-Who?
-Hu was the last one
-Who?
-Yes
-Who is the leader of China?
-Not anymore. Hu was the last guy
-Why are you asking me? I don’t CARE about the last guy. I WANNA KNOW THE GUY NOW!
-The guy is XI.
-Correcting pronouns again? Are you going PC?
-It's PRC
-Oh what crap. Who started all this?
-No, Hu didn’t start the New China.
-Why ask me? I don’t care who DIDN’T start it. I’m asking the name of…
-Oh, that would be Deng
-You mean... Oh, crap, when did all this...
-Wen was Hu's number two
-You're asking Me? HOW SHOULD I KNOW WHEN OR WHO DID NUMBER TWO?!
-What?
-Now there's a Chinese WATT? Never heard of him. Watt is new?
-Well, now…
-Okay now we’re getting somewhere. Who is Wel Nao?!
-Different people, sir, Hu is….
-THE LAST GUY!
Again, parse it out. No person or ethnicity is insulted, above... except the one person whose mental faculties are portrayed with perfect accuracy.
-- Oh, that didn't work for you? Then how about this lagniappe?
Neil Armstrong spelled backwards is gnort s mr. alien.
0 comments:
Post a Comment