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How Melinda Gates Got Her Daughters Excited About Science (geekwire.com)
theodp writes: GeekWire reports that Melinda Gates concluded a Davos panel discussion about gender parity with a personal story about her own family, explaining how she originally became interested in computer science, and how she later played Lab Manager to Bill's Mr. Wizard to help pass along their passion for science and math to their kids. "On Saturday mornings," Gates explained, "I wanted to sleep late. So you know what I did? I made sure there were science projects available, and that's what he did with our two daughters and our son. And guess what my two daughters are interested in? Science and math."
This, for what its worth our strategy which seems to have worked so far was to spend time on a bunch of Parks & Rec classes on diverse things and see what clicked. If it clicked she got more of them. Since P&R courses were (relatively) cheap, we could afford to do the shotgun approach.
We ended up with a kid who loves electronics, piano and skiing.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
How are those sour grapes? Would you like a little cheese with that whine?
I love how you imply that MS only made its fortune because it dared to bundle a free browser with the OS, whereas its money actually mostly came from MS Office being used by pretty much every company in the world. Of course, now it's perfectly normal and expected to bundle a browser with an OS, so it's the anti-trust case that looks bad in retrospect, not Microsoft. But yeah, don't let the facts get in the way of a good envious rant.
Rediscovering Things of Science: For many years [1940-1989], the Science Service produced a monthly series of science kits called "Things of Science", available by subscription. When I was a kid (in the 60s), I subscribed to Things of Science for several years. I suspect that many of us who chose careers in the sciences found at least part of our inspiration in those blue boxes that arrived in the mail every month (well, almost every month; sometimes we'd get manila envelopes, filled with stuff that wouldn't fit in the boxes). Each kit ("unit") had a booklet of experiments, and usually everything needed to perform them.
Years ago, l switched to Linux because windows XP sucked donkey balls. Linux's repositories, customisation, and freedom (from viruses as well as anti-consumer bullshit to help Microsoft's bottom line) absolutely rocked, and I was a huge Linux head for a while. Also, for all the rumours of Linux being bad with hardware, just about everything worked out of the box on my kubuntu install. Windows was the one that made me scour the net for drivers.
But recently I tried windows again (windows 8), and although the interface takes some getting used to, it's actually easier to use than Linux, and dare I say, more secure. Haven't seen a blue screen so far, whereas Linux has constant crashes (blame KDE if you wish, but the fact is that programmes crash quite often). Yes, I know Microsoft tries to sap all your private data, but other than that and KDE's customisation, there's really nothing Linux has over windows now, and windows feels much more mature and integrated now. It also boots much faster than Kubuntu and has the start screen, like it or not, is quite useful (showing weather, for example).
If you wrote off windows a while ago, I dare you to give it a try. Have an open mind and see if windows works better for you.