“How children lost the right to roam in four generations” and other links…
David Derbyshire: “The contrast between Edward and George’s childhoods is highlighted in a report which warns that the mental health of 21st-century children is at risk because they are missing out on the exposure to the natural world enjoyed by past generations.”
“I call bullshit on Computer ‘Science’”
raganwald: “But let’s be honest with each other. Until we start treating programming as an Empirical Science, what we have are superstitions and mass hallucinations. They might be comforting and somewhat consistent hallucinations, but when it comes to writing software, our beliefs are almost all equivalent to the belief that waving palm fronds in the air will summon airplanes.”
I too freely admit that most of my career—especially the 1990s—was dominated by the politics of IT instead of technical strategy and science. I do respect the advice about the importance of a “technical person” needing to know “the business”—but I have often learned that “the business” is less about shareholder value and more about Byzantine posturing with smoke and mirrors.
“What Math?”
Dr. Robert H. Lewis: “Sadly, the same thing has happened in far too many high schools in the United States in the last twenty five years or so in mathematics education. Well meaning ‘educators’ who have no conception of the true nature of mathematics see only its outer shell and imitate it. The result is cargo cult mathematics. They call for the gods, but nothing happens. The cure is not louder calling, it is not more bamboo antennas (i.e. glossy ten pound text books and fancy calculators). The only cure is genuine understanding of [authentic] mathematics. ”