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“ musician Judah Dadone, sound engineer Jeremy Sklarsky and graphic designer Marcos Ojeda, all in their midtwenties, vouch for the food’s authenticity.

—

TOUR NEW YORK - Time Out New York

Judah notes that the reporter got it wrong, i had the torta, i think he had the tacos and jeremy got the enchiladas… :)

“ The API grew out of Casey and [my] work, and our like/dislike of various approaches used by libraries that we’ve used: Postscript, QuickDraw, OpenGL, Java AWT, even Applesoft BASIC. Can we do OpenGL but still have it feel as simple as writing graphics code on the Apple ][? Can we simplify current graphics approaches so that they at least feel simpler like the original QuickDraw on the Mac?

—

writing | ben fry » Is Processing a Language?

it really bums me out when people overcorrect i for me.

“ Someone once described Processing syntax as a dialect of Java, which sounds about right to me. It’s syntax that we’ve added on top of Java to make things a little easier for a particular work domain (roughly, making visual things).

—

writing | ben fry » Is Processing a Language?

i still don’t buy that java syntax is all that friendly, but hey, mileage varies, right?

“ me: j0!
kate: j0?
me: it’s the oldschool hacker yo
me: the 1337 yo
me: j0
kate: yeah, i just wanted you to feel how nerdy you were
me: thanks

— chatting over aim

“ Kermit and coterie were primarily created to entertain adults, and they live in the real world. Henson was so insistent that they stand apart from his “Sesame Street” creations in personality and tone that he (misleadingly) titled the 1975 pilot that would boost their careers “The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence.

— Film - Disney Prepares to Use Its Marketing Magic to Bring Back the Muppets - NYTimes.com

“ High school really needs to be reinvented in many ways,” he said. “For the most part, it is not effective enough. There needs to be more inquiry and discovery learning and fewer lectures.

—

Two Neighbors Create a New High School for Greenwich Village - NYTimes.com

I do not personally believe that lecture dissuades learning and inquiry, but most lecture does not make place for it. A lecture can be structured in a way that encourages those moments of skepticism, but it’s not as easy as assigning a project.

“

Educators, school administrators, and school boards have made “integrating technology” so big a deal that computers are put into classrooms for their own sake. They become devices for delivering lame games and ineffective simulations. We teach Apple Keynote, and students think they have learned “computers” — and so do most teachers and parents. When we consider what “computers in schools” means to most people, we probably should keep kids away from them, or at least cut back their use.

At first, I thought I was irked at Stoll for saying this, but now I realize that I should be irked at my profession for not having done a better job both educating everyone about what computers really mean for education and producing the tools that capitalize on this opportunity.

— Knowing and Doing: August 2008 Archives

“

“They’ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean’s temperature do fish make, and they’ll try to come up with a plausible answer.”

“What this suggests to me,” she added, “is that the people whom we think of as being the most involved in the symbolic part of math intuitively know that they have to practice those other, nonsymbolic, approximating skills.”

— Basics - Gut Instinct’s Surprising Role in Math - NYTimes.com

procedure vs object

While talking to clement a few days back, i was surprised to hear him rail against procedural programming. Where what he really meant was:

event driven programming on objects is often more closely related to how the world actually operates.

This is true to a certain extent: the world is full of events that happen somewhat chaotically and are not mediated by a decision tree. Or at least not directly. An event happens: alarm clock goes off. You, the object, react: wake up. Your dresser ignores the alarm.

In effect, you don’t know to pay attention to an event until you learn that it is significant.

Events are happening all the time, but we tune most of them out. Procedural programs, to the extent that they do not operate in an event-driven model, are specialized tools that are good for perhaps one kind of task.

But wait, we’ve gotten off topic: The difference between object oriented programming and procedural programming that clement noted is not actually one of how they work: they all, at some point, run procedures or methods or what have you. The real difference is in how you structure and vocalize the operation of your program.

Which means: procedural programming as defined in the initial conversation is just: what an object does. object oriented programming, as defined by the same conversation is not necessarily concerned with how a task gets done as much as how to describe the entire system.

The argument isn’t about procedural or object oriented programming, but what you learn: architecture and design of applications (oop) or how to think about procedures of programs (procedural).

The argument against the intro to creative programming is that the focus is on low level programming skills and not high level system design. For artists, what is the point of programming? What should they focus on and what can they toss out?

“ if my curriculum had been some stranger’s standardized script, these girls may not have found their voices. To educate like this, a teacher shouldn’t have to break the rules. Experiences like this should be the rule of any curriculum meant to engage this generation. If we want to convince dynamic, young educators to choose the inner city as the place to master their craft — we’ve got to remember that the best are artists.

— Teaching Without a Script - Lesson Plans Blog - NYTimes.com