cholmon

Have her make a madlib script. Fixed at first, where it prompts for a specific list of word types, then prints the madlib. Then have her extend it so it loads a madlib template file to determine what to prompt the user for.

Since she's got the basics of conditionals, she could make a simple text based choose-your-own-adventure type RPG.

Start with http://www.phptherightway.com/

The most interesting point I think is in the conclusion, namely the idea of central banks adding uncertainty in the hopes of bursting bubbles while they're small.

"...if the policy-maker (Central Banks) intervened by randomly buying and selling financial assets, two results could be simultaneously obtained. From an individual point of view, agents would suffer less for asymmetric or insider information, due to the consciousness of a 'fog of uncertainty' created by the random investments. From a systemic point of view, again the herding behavior would be consequently reduced and eventual bubbles would burst when they are still small and are less dangerous; thus, the entire financial system would be less prone to the speculative behavior of credible 'guru' traders."

or .test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.test

"When I left home for college, I studied other religions and found that all the world's major religions teach giving up possessions and doing not for the sake of reward. If all the separated witnesses are saying the same thing, it must be true."

That's kind of...simplistic.

"Go around again!"

I agree to an extent, but instead of "enjoy coding", I'd say it's more "wanting to build things", at least in my experience; I do enjoy coding, but really it's the building of the things that's my primary motivating force.

Or a similar modification of your music analogy: "Some people want to be good at guitar, others like making music".

Programming and configurations: reading, particularly on the same machine where I'm following along with my own working code so I can copy/paste samples, and skip around.

UI/Tools: video, especially when several tools are being used together in a somewhat complex workflow.

> These experiences I think just make people prepare/focus better. Change is good when it comes to environments of learning.

Is this change in environment actually beneficial though? One could argue that the social stress of such a change is detrimental to the students, as it forces them to focus more on the social aspects of their environment than the academic aspects. One could further argue that maintaining a consistent (necessarily smaller?) K-12 school environment is more beneficial as it strengthens the students' social cohesion, allowing deeper, longer-lasting relationships to form among the students themselves, and between the students and faculty/staff.

> If not, then what was the point?

"He went to jail for piracy? I better stop pirating!"

Google instead "Nassim Taleb", in particular his ideas surrounding iatrogenics (harm done by the healer), and "via negativa" as a heuristic for fixing systemic problems, i.e., removing things (chemicals/drugs) from a system (human body) to reduce the complexity of interactions and side effects.

See also, http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/af-glossary.pdf

I had to read the article to understand what on earth the title means. I guess "pips" is slang for "beats" or "surpasses"?

It's also interesting that Turing's "bombe" is not capitalized, even in its Wikipedia article, while its counterpart, "Enigma", is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe

https://imageresizer.codeplex.com/ for simple and quick right-click-to-resize functionality. Works for multiple selected files too.

At first, I read this as an imperative, and tried googling the phrase, "a million miles away from the search engine of my dreams".

+1 for using Apache's vhost_alias module [1]; it's interesting how few people are aware of it. DNS wildcards + vhost wildcards make for a very convenient dev environment.

[1] - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_vhost_alias.html

COGS = cost of goods sold

It's also likely that the vector was a vulnerable module he had installed.

Nope. I had to think about Slide 3 for a few minutes: "...because old people die sooner than the young".

Another way to structure the chain is a chain of unbroken weeks, instead of days, especially for actions that stand a pretty good chance of being derailed by life. Like going to the gym. Mark a week as "checked off" if you hit the gym for at least 3 of the 7 days. That way you've got several "buffer days" to act as a cushion.

I think it's silly to try to subscribe to a set of rules that just aims to get rid of all the bad stuff. It makes more sense to me to simply balance the consumption of these "drugs" (narcotics, alcohol, food, games, children, sports, etc). In fact, don't even call them "drugs"; call them "desire satisfiers". Satisfying any given desire has a cost and a benefit, and we all exist in this huge, messy web of conflicting desires that have varying and dynamic costs/benefits. The challenge of living is trying to balance the satisfaction of all our various desires.

Can you recommend any further reading on these innovations in teaching math? I'm interested, as I'm in a similar boat with my children.

He said that in the very next paragraph. FTA...

"But I think Twitter is fundamentally broken in certain regards. You get a lot of mediocre stuff along with that. Everyone thinks they’re interesting. [snip] So I’m not sure that there is a clear heir apparent. There's power in what reddit does, and what Hacker News does and to a lesser extent what sites like Slashdot still do. But the power has shifted to individuals."

How does Anti-fragile contradict lightcatcher's point-of-view? I understood him to say, simply, that terrorist attacks are from Extremistan, while car accidents are from Mediocristan, thus they aren't comparable phenomena.

It'd be tricky to avoid false positives

"Ferris, get off of the float!"

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Location: Columbia, SC