Why Airplanes Crash

I’ll preface this by saying I’ve never gotten a parking ticket before. I’ve also never broken a bone before (though I did sprain a finger once). By any measure (or at least those two) I’ve led a sheltered life.

I didn’t break any bones today, but this morning I did get a parking ticket. Here’s how it happened:

I stopped at the post office in downtown Takoma Park, Maryland on the way into the office. It’s street parking only, and this morning there was only one space. I pulled in. Since I just needed to run in for a moment and there was no line (I could see through the window) I figured a nickel would do for the meter. I pocketed a nickel from my dash holder, go out, reflexively locked my door. Only to find that this meter, unlike any other on the block (where I have parked many times), only took quarters. Now at this point you’re thinking I just decided to scr*w it and pop on into the PO. Nope. I walked back around to the other side of my car, unlocked the door, and reached in to replace the nickel and get a quarter from the dash holder (even though such an expenditure seemed excessive). Just then a woman two spaces ahead got into her car and pulled away from the curb, vacating the spot (which I could see had the regular meter). So, I started ‘er up, pulled out of my spot and into the new one, got out, reflexively locked the door, and walked over to the meter—only to find I had forgotten I had already replaced the nickel in my pocket with a quarter, and was thus faced with the prospect of either feeding a quarter into the meter (when I knew a nickel would suffice) or walking back around to the other side of my car, unlocking the door, reaching in, and getting the nickel back. This was when I decided to scr*w it. I ducked inside, concluded my business at the counter, and re-emerged—not three minutes later—only to find a crisp pink slip under the wiper.

And this, my friends, is why airplanes crash, at least in many cases: a chain of unlikely and improbable events, all combining to produce a catastrophic outcome that would have been avoided had statistical normalcy intervened at any point to break the chain and restore equilibrium.

"This has been a day of solid achievement."

Does anyone know the significance of this sentence in the history of computing?

(You’re on your honor not to Google for it.)

Magnetic Disk Heritage Center

The Magnetic Disk Heritage Center. Excellent collection of images, video, retrospectives, and other archival matter pertaining to the history of disk storage.

How To Think Like a Computer Scientist

Geoff Rockwell mentioned this series of electronic books in his response to my earlier programming and pedagogy posting, but I thought they deserved their own separate entry: How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, with versions available for Python, C++, and Java.

At a glance, I really like them: the prose seems to assume a reader motivated by intellectual curiosity as much as deadlines (the “I just have to finish this project by Friday” crowd catered to by the various majority of commercial instructional texts). Chapter one, for example, includes a discussion of formal languages and natural languages.

Mote on Public Higher Education

University of Maryland President C. D. Mote, Jr. on “Lower Expectations for Higher Education?” in this Sunday’s Washington Post (annoying free registration required):

My guess . . . is that the large majority of universities will opt to maintain access at lower tuition rates and that, as a consequence, quality will decline. In the access-vs.-quality equation, access will eventually win the day, because policymakers can understand it and measure it, whereas quality remains an abstract idea that can be ignored until it is too late to save it. This leads to what I call the “graceful decline model,” and we find ourselves at the beginning of it today.

No easy answers here, but some strong suggestions and an excellent historical overview of the life cycles of funding models for public higher education in the US.

Kingdom of Loathing

Via Jess: The Kingdom of Loathing.

Acid-Free Bits

Now available: Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature, an electronic pamphlet by Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Published by the Electronic Literature Organization on behalf of its ongoing Preservation/Archiving/Dissemination project (PAD). From the document:

If special efforts aren’t made now, students, professors, authors, and readers won’t be able to access many important works of electronic literature in the future. For electronic literature to contribute to our culture, it’s important to have works that readers can return to later, literature people can recommend to others with some assurance that the work will still be available in readable form. Preserving e-lit, and creating e-lit that will remain available, is essential to the very concept of electronic literature, the basic idea that the computer can be a place for new literary works that make use of its capabilities.

The Pedagogy of Programming

I took programming courses in both high school and college, at least three or four all told (Basic and Pascal—I’m dating myself). I couldn’t have been less interested. The pedagogical approach was entirely vocational. Just as my French and Spanish courses revolved around hypothetical trips to Paris or Madrid (like I was going to get there any time soon), my programming courses were filled with unlikely scenarios that read like a cross between an inter-office memo and a GRE logic problem: “You own a small hardware store in Schenectady. Write a program that will display items in your inventory sorted in such and such a way, but not screwdrivers on Tuesdays when the moon is full.” That sort of thing. I can see in retrospect that lots of fundamentals were being taught here: variables, arrays, conditionals, control structures, sorts, loops, etc.—but there was nothing to engage my imagination, nothing to suggest why formal logic was a unique and powerful lens through which to view the world. Lately I’ve become interested in the pedagogy of programming, and I’m going to collect some initial links here. In no particular order:

• RAPUNSEL, by Mary Flanagan, Andrea Hollingshead, and Ken Perlin. “The RAPUNSEL research project team is researching and building a software environment to teach programming concepts to kids. Someday, it will be a multiuser game. For now, we are tackling small interactive modules. We think our approach will attract as many girls to programming as it will boys, and this might help out with the shortage of women in computer-related fields.”

• Processing, by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. “Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It was created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as an electronic sketchbook.”

• Nomic, by Peter Suber: “Nomic is a game I invented in 1982. It’s a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process. While most of its initial rules are procedural in this sense, it does have one substantive rule (on how to earn points toward winning); but this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves.”

• Grow, by Eyemaze. Michael Mateas (of GTxA) comments, “When you first start playing, the placement of objects on the sphere and their transformations seem random - there’s no reason to prefer placing one object before another. Discovering the internal logic that governs the transformations of the initially abstract elements is the primary addictive pull of the game.”

• BlueJ, by a joint research group at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, the Mærsk Institute at the University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. “BlueJ is an integrated Java environment specifically designed for introductory teaching.”

Updates

• Via Jason: Squeak, by Alan Kay, et al. “Squeak is a project by some of the original pioneers of personal computing and networking, joined by enthusiastic more recent colleagues, to get wide spectrum authoring for all back into the mainstream of computing.”

• Via Liz: MUPPETS, by Andrew Phelps, et al. “Through capitalizing on research in the areas of gaming and virtual community social psychology, RIT is engaged in a project to develop a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) entitled “The Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study” (MUPPETS).”

• Via Francois: Logo (of course), by Seymour Papert, et al. “The Logo Programming Language, a dialect of Lisp, was designed as a tool for learning. Its features - modularity, extensibility, interactivity, and flexibility -follow from this goal.”

• Via Andrés: Jeliot 3. “Jeliot 3 is a Program Visualization application. It visualizes how a Java program is interpreted. Method calls, variables, operation are displayed on a screen as the animation goes on, allowing the student to follow step by step the execution of a program. Programs can be created from scratch or they can be modifyed from previously stored code examples.”

• Via Geoff: Design By Numbers, by John Maeda, et al. “Design By Numbers was created for visual designers and artists as an introduction to computational design. . . . DBN is both a programming environment and language. The environment provides a unified space for writing and running programs and the language introduces the basic ideas of computer programming within the context of drawing. Visual elements such as dot, line, and field are combined with the computational ideas of variables and conditional statements to generate images.”

To be continued . . . suggestions welcome. As the above suggests, I’m interested in a pretty wide range of materials, from IDEs and other environments to games and conceptual tools. Special thanks to GrandTextAuto, where I first picked up several of these links.

Stuff

First up, new toys. Matching his and hers. Mine’s set to play “Ode to Joy” when K. calls. I know, I know: how original is that? Approximately 62,918 other people also have their ringer set to play “Ode to Joy” when their sweetie calls. ‘Course Lev Manovich would say that the most original option is simply to leave the ringer set to its factory default.

In other news, the Silver Spring Voice ran a piece on local bloggers and my entry on putting the milk in first got a mention.

Speaking of Silver Spring, if you’re local check out Silver Sprung.

What Kind of System Are You?

Could be because Kari and I are both shopping new laptops (whee!) but we came up with the following this morning:

What Kind of System Are You?

How would you profile yourself in terms of RAM? Storage? Display (hi-res people are more image-conscious)? GUI or command line (do you multitask)? Laptop, desktop, or handheld (creature of habit or footloose and fancy free)? Dial-up, ethernet, or wireless (are you always on)? And the ultimate measure of self-knowledge: Mac or PC?

Come on now, be honest . . .

Me, I think I’ve got fair RAM and a lot of storage. Call it 256 MB/80 GB by current standards. Resoultion 800 x 640. Ethernet (when I’m on, I’m on). Desktop (definitely a desktop, though I have aspirations to become a laptop). GUI (I multitask well). And, yes, deep down I know the awful truth: I’m a PC.

If I had more time/ambition I might work up one of those wonky Web quizzes (which in fact I hate). But something like the above might actually make a fun ice-breaker on the first day of an appropriately themed class.