No, that will just print the number of elements in @WeirdSyntax. ITYM print "@WeirdSyntax";
Re:But Jason still can't clean worth a damn
on
Perl and XML
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· Score: 1
The Macross ones? I have those. I'll return them next time I drive up to Cowardsville.
Reminds me of "The Library of Babel"...
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 1
Maybe pi is what happens if you take the place described in Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" and run it through an encryption or compression scheme we haven't hit on yet.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings...
Thanks for the feedback. I need to clear up this statement; I didn't mean that I based ComicsML's first tagset around Western comics ideas to the exclusion of all else, but rather that I created them based on what I knew best, which I decided to label as 'Western' since I'm not nearly as familiar with manga, only enough to know that Eastern comics have developed their own idiomset, and I didn't want to look like I was ignoring it. (Ironically.:) )
It's important to note that ComicsML's panel-description markup detail logically what's going on, not physically. So there's no giant-sweatdrop tag, no more than there's a Western-style sweat-flying-off-the-forehead tag. ComicsML would, instead, have a this-character-is-nervous tag, or something similar. Things like this are visual idioms that are crucial to the comic, but not so appropriate to its descriptive markup.
As for the other issues you raise, about unusual layout and non-verbal balloons, these are both examples of the many challenges and questions ComicsML has ahead of it. It's pretty much open to all suggestions, right now, and I'm glad you bring these up! Now I invite you and other interested parties to bring them up in email to me, or on the ComicsML mailing list (see esp. the ComicsML resource page), instead of on Slashdot, where they'll go away in a couple of days.;)
Bzzt! So sorry, but you lose! Please play again, McIntosh-san!
I'm of the opinion that XML can help web-based cartoonists, both spare-time amateurs (like myself) and professionals trying to make a living, in lots of ways, inlcuding self-syndication, accessibility, and content management, and further help open up the road for a lot of the future technology standards that'll have to take hold, such as micropayments, before digital comics can enter the state Scott McCloud dreams of in "Reinventing Comics".
How pleased I am to see IFComp finally mentioned on Slashdot! I know people in the IF community have been trying to have this happen for at least the past couple of comps. I hope that this will help to not only generate more IF players, but also authors.
One that note: I see folks have mentioned 'em, but nobody has done the service to the truly lazy and linked to 'em, so allow me then then to list off some favorite sophisticated interactive fiction authorship engines:
Inform, based on the parser Infocom used in its games (as of the late 80s), is a fully object-oriented language with a C-like syntax. It's my personal language of choice for the little bit of IF dabbling I've done; you can see the source for a small and silly game called 'Calliope' I wrote for last year's competition (I came in 23rd, heh (but I got to win an Honest Bob CD anyway, hurrah)) linked from my own IF info page(which also has the compiled game, and links to lots of other modern IF games (much better than mine!) and authors I like). Inform is also open-source, and binaries exist for any platform you might reasonably care to name.
There's also TADS and Hugo, about which I know little, but are both popular enough with other authors to be worth checking out for the interested newcomer.
...or pursue a BA somewhere else in the humanities, if you are already confident in your techie nature, and know how to nurture it by yourself.
In the five years I spent in college earning my English and Journalism degrees, I absorbed a tremendous amount and -- more importantly -- a very wide range of information and experiences that I really don't think I'd have been able to duplicate were I in the job market that whole time. I entered the Real World with a mind exposed to years of reading literature from various intersections of the world and its timeline which I'd have never investigated on my own, vastly improved my ability to express myself by taking composition classes with lovably draconian English professors, and earned invaluable production and management skills from my years as an editor at the university's student-run newspaper.
I consider all these to have a more-than-tangential impact on any work I might do in the future, which is way they appeared on my resume two years after I graduated, when, after a friend advised me to learn Perl, I rather easily got my first full-time programming job. Things have been going along very well for me since then.
The time gap came becuase I orignally had my eye on a career in the publishing industry; had I sought out a hacking job from the get-go, I've little doubt I'd have been able to find one as soon as I graduated.
It also doesn't hurt that I can write cover letters that usually crush any competition for jobs that interest might me. Heh. J MacOS Open Source
I have a little site that lists, describes, and links to a bunch of open-source projects available for the current MacOS. Starting the site and getting it linked from Macintouch was all it took for me to contribute my little bit of open source advocacy to the Mac community, and I strongly recommend similar routes for people with messages of their own. It's easier than you may think.
In the year I've been maintaining the site I've received enough feedback from people to convince me that open-source projects have as much of a place in closed-source OSes as open ones. It's all good.
No, it's a sad commentary on the direction the internet is taking. Radio used to be an exciting new technology, promising instant communication, like the net.hype promises today. Then it was dominated by large corporations, and today it is nothing but top-40 crap and insipid talk shows. Anything creative or thought-provoking has been squeezed out in favor of safe, easy to digest, bland, boring, profitable pablum.
I don't think you can compare the two media so directly, here. The reason the Web has taken off is the accessibility that anyone with relatively minimal means has for placing content on it. Even in its heyday, radio never allowed people to step up and broadcast their own arbitrary material over it, unless they were heavily moneyed corporations or whatnot. The Web allows these companies, as well as any other entity or individual with something to share, to all live in the same space. The big companies have the flashy advertising, but that doesn't mean that your website or mine is going to go away, or even receive fewer visitors; heck, they'll probably get more hits, if anything, if the urging of megacorps draws more people to investigate the Internet for themselves.
So the moral is, this is the first medium that really does promise room for us all. Don't be discouraged just because some of the noiser users have a purpose in mind you don't like; just keep visiting the sites you like, and keep building your own!
Any proof of the "DBI"? I wore a "Taz" shirt to Disney to see if I would be hassled. Not a peep.
I think the hassling comes from presenting yourself not so much in a way that the Disney Corp. might not like, such as wearing images of their competitors' trademarks, but in a way that might squick an average person, who is there to have an average sort of fun, a concept mutually exclusive from squicklement.
I should think that people wearing gonzo-slogan T-shirts into Disney, of all places on earth, are itching for confrontation anyway.:) J MacOS Open Source
Cost of living has a lot to do with variations in salary between places. Of course, not putting salaries on the job description... I can't figure out why they're doing that [snip]
Well, you almost answered your own question, I think. The company I work for will be putting up ads for open programmer positions soon, and it wouldn't shock me if we chose not to specify a starting salary, because it may look pretty bad on paper, without any context! Once one learns a little about the area, though, the value of that number changes significantly, as it's easy to see the cost of living in central Maine is rather miniscule; I live in a palatial apartment on a monthly rent that might be able to net me a broom closet in the seedier part of a big city a few hours south of here. Add in various benefits and I actually get paid pretty well, even though sometimes I get 'You make WHAT?! How do you EAT?' from friends living in other, far-away places when I tell them my salary.
Plus, the whole area's atmosphere inherits Northern New England's very laid back attitude about life in general, and the pace at which it is lived; a lot of people might consider it easier on the psyche to live here than in a booming hi-tech city, and who knows how to put a dollar value on that?
So really, yes, while a salary figure is obviously a basic thing to consider when looking for jobs, it's important to know how many location-dependent factors, both practical and personal, affect what that number actually means! J MacOS Open Source
This doesn't mean a throw away culture is OK - but if you need the service or product, it might make sense. There is L O T S of room for L O T S of garbage on this planet - more than we will ever need, 'cause we'll do ourselves long in based on current population projections before this is an issue.
While I agree that the concept of throwing things away isn't inherently a mortal sin, and don't know enough about the effects of landfills on ecology (if any) and the amount of "dumpable" space left on Earth's surface to argue those points with you, the rationalizaion you provide above is frighteningly broken.
I think humanity has at least a fighting chance to see a bright and indefinitely long future, a future on worlds beyond our trusty little mudball, but the surest way to doom ourselves is to have enough people believing fatalistic statements like those above. Thinking 'eh, we'll eventually nuke/starve/plague each other into oblivion anyway' leads to short-term thinking, which leads in turn to self-fulfilling prophecies.
Throwing things away won't in itself lead to mankind's destruction, no. But doing so in the belief that there's no future worth preserving? That just might.
(Homework assignment: "Earth", David Brin. One view of what the world might look like in 50 years if people (and governments) learn to become far-sighted only after starting to lose bits of civilization due to 20th century myopia. Very scary, and thought provoking.)
(And I bet there are cell phones in it. Yay, I'm on topic!)
I hate to make generalizations, but everything on Television is fake, not real, untruthitudes, falsities
I don't like to make generalizations either, but I probably would have felt similiarly if I had taken the time out to watch the show. It's hard to watch crappy TV and then feel good.
But really, you gotta have some perspective, if you're going to have any hope of staying out of a insidious self-swallowing cynicism cycle! Remember, whenever you see crap, that 90 percent of anything is crap. If it seems like there's more crap now than the last time you checked, it's because there's more media. There's also more Good Stuff to enjoy and learn from, but, alas, the crap tends to have a better advertising budget. Keep an eye open!
Normally I don't repsond to things like this, but statements like "The culture of the world is going downhill," even if the comment's author perhaps made it while in a temporary bad mood, push my evangelism buttons: Crap will always be with us, and as our global mass communication abilities grow, it becomes more and more visible... but so does good stuff! Accept the presence of crap, seek out and become enriched by good stuff, and your life will stay happy. Yay!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go read a good book. J MacOS Open Source
The predictions of Kibo, as posted last month to alt.religion.kibology, and which I can't find on deja, because I'm dumb:
1999 -- Everyone has to listen to that bad song.
September 9, 1999 -- Moon catches on fire. Also, CNN insists some computers will break.
September 13, 1999 -- Moon blows out of orbit.
December 31, 1999 -- CNN insists many computers will break.
2000 -- Lots of bad sci-fi movies take place.
2001 -- Monkey throws bone at space shuttle, large LSD swirls come out of a big black halvah bar. Also, the solid black sky is filled with orange clouds and little UFOs that go "ping!" at the end of "Time Pilot".
2010 -- Peter Hyams makes an inferior sequel starring that guy from "SeaQuest".
2032 -- Michael York attacks the "SeaQuest" with his deadly "subduction laser" fired from "Macronesia".
2037ish -- Many computers will break but nobody cares because that's years away, dude!
2061 -- Arthur C. Clarke's brain falls apart.
2069 -- Lots of bad sci-fi porno movies take place.
2076 -- Isaac Asimov's short story "Tricentennial" comes tragically true. In the ensuing riot, The Bicentennial Man is killed prematurely.
2084 -- Robotrons take over the world, destroying humanity, except for Mommy, Daddy, and Mikey.
2090's -- We land on the Moon in this decade, according to "Forbidden Planet". At an unspecified time over a hundred years later, Leslie Nielsen gives Gene Roddenberry the idea for William Shatner.
2100 -- Aliens that look like shower curtains try to blow up the Moon, which drives Martin Landau insane.
2134 -- My old ATM password comes true.
23rd century -- The dot in Michael York's hand turns red. William Shatner is given a position of responsibility.
2262 -- "Babylon 5" gets cancelled.
24th century -- Bald men are finally accepted as sexy because, for the first time, Starfleet Command awards a captaincy to someone who doesn't have poofy hair.
2374 -- A world where APES evolved from MEN?
2417 -- Gil Gerard gets thawed out. Then he gets fat.
2525 -- Everyone has to listen to that bad song.
2995 -- There will be TV commercial where some guy keeps yelling "I'll paint any car in twenty-nine ninety-five!"
3000 -- "The Terror From The Year 3000" collides with "Futurama".
3001 -- Arthur C. Clarke starts getting really confused about his own backstory.
9999 -- All eight-thousand-year-old computers will break.
802,701 -- H. G. Wells predicts that humans will have evolved into dumb kangaroos. Of course the book would have been ruined if he had nailed this year as 802,700 or 820,702.
The wonderful thing about teaching programming to little kids is the way it offers instant gratification when they do something right, because they made something really real happen on the computer. Compare this to most other stuff kids have to sit through: they write down answers under the little line, and the only thing that happens if they're right is they get a checkmark on their paper. @Whee. Even the simplest computer programs encourage a child to engage in mental play and spontaneous experimentation that's either inappropriate or impossible in more traditional areas of education.
In my previous job, I got to do a little bit of programming instruction with early elementary school kids. Inspired by books like Mitchel Resnick's "Turtles, Termites, and Trafic Jams", I installed a flavor of Logo on the lab's Macs, and gave the students three lines of code to type in, which would summon a "turtle" (a programmable drawing tool that lies at the heart of Logo) and make it move up the screen a little, drawing a line behind it as it went. The first kid who typed it all in correctly and ran the program saw the results and cried, "My turtle pooped!!" The others, of course, instantly latched on to this agreeable metaphor, and only a moment passed before other children discovered that the length and angle of the poop (despite the fact they probably hadn't yet been taught what an 'angle' was!) changed in certain ways if they typed in bigger or smaller numbers than the ones I provided. And what happened if they added more turtles?
The class spontaneously broke down into a turtle-poop contest. And thus they all became hackers! Of a sort.:)
So, really, I support having wee ones learn programming not so they'll know how to code per se (though that certainly is a great benefit), but because it rewards them for thinking and creativity like no other 'ordinary' school activity can!
Slashdot Mirror
No, that will just print the number of elements in @WeirdSyntax. ITYM print "@WeirdSyntax";
The Macross ones? I have those. I'll return them next time I drive up to Cowardsville.
Maybe pi is what happens if you take the place described in Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" and run it through an encryption or compression scheme we haven't hit on yet.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings...
Thanks for the feedback. I need to clear up this statement; I didn't mean that I based ComicsML's first tagset around Western comics ideas to the exclusion of all else, but rather that I created them based on what I knew best, which I decided to label as 'Western' since I'm not nearly as familiar with manga, only enough to know that Eastern comics have developed their own idiomset, and I didn't want to look like I was ignoring it. (Ironically.
It's important to note that ComicsML's panel-description markup detail logically what's going on, not physically. So there's no giant-sweatdrop tag, no more than there's a Western-style sweat-flying-off-the-forehead tag. ComicsML would, instead, have a this-character-is-nervous tag, or something similar. Things like this are visual idioms that are crucial to the comic, but not so appropriate to its descriptive markup.
As for the other issues you raise, about unusual layout and non-verbal balloons, these are both examples of the many challenges and questions ComicsML has ahead of it. It's pretty much open to all suggestions, right now, and I'm glad you bring these up! Now I invite you and other interested parties to bring them up in email to me, or on the ComicsML mailing list (see esp. the ComicsML resource page), instead of on Slashdot, where they'll go away in a couple of days. ;)
Bzzt! So sorry, but you lose! Please play again, McIntosh-san!
Okay, thanks.
J
MacOS Open Source
This might be a good spot to subtly mention my ideas about "ComicsML", a collision of digital comics and XML.
http://www.jmac.org/projects/comics_ml/
I'm of the opinion that XML can help web-based cartoonists, both spare-time amateurs (like myself) and professionals trying to make a living, in lots of ways, inlcuding self-syndication, accessibility, and content management, and further help open up the road for a lot of the future technology standards that'll have to take hold, such as micropayments, before digital comics can enter the state Scott McCloud dreams of in "Reinventing Comics".
J
MacOS Open Source
How pleased I am to see IFComp finally mentioned on Slashdot! I know people in the IF community have been trying to have this happen for at least the past couple of comps. I hope that this will help to not only generate more IF players, but also authors.
One that note: I see folks have mentioned 'em, but nobody has done the service to the truly lazy and linked to 'em, so allow me then then to list off some favorite sophisticated interactive fiction authorship engines:
Inform, based on the parser Infocom used in its games (as of the late 80s), is a fully object-oriented language with a C-like syntax. It's my personal language of choice for the little bit of IF dabbling I've done; you can see the source for a small and silly game called 'Calliope' I wrote for last year's competition (I came in 23rd, heh (but I got to win an Honest Bob CD anyway, hurrah)) linked from my own IF info page(which also has the compiled game, and links to lots of other modern IF games (much better than mine!) and authors I like). Inform is also open-source, and binaries exist for any platform you might reasonably care to name.
There's also TADS and Hugo, about which I know little, but are both popular enough with other authors to be worth checking out for the interested newcomer.
Have fun!
J
MacOS Open Source
...or pursue a BA somewhere else in the humanities, if you are already confident in your techie nature, and know how to nurture it by yourself.
In the five years I spent in college earning my English and Journalism degrees, I absorbed a tremendous amount and -- more importantly -- a very wide range of information and experiences that I really don't think I'd have been able to duplicate were I in the job market that whole time. I entered the Real World with a mind exposed to years of reading literature from various intersections of the world and its timeline which I'd have never investigated on my own, vastly improved my ability to express myself by taking composition classes with lovably draconian English professors, and earned invaluable production and management skills from my years as an editor at the university's student-run newspaper.
I consider all these to have a more-than-tangential impact on any work I might do in the future, which is way they appeared on my resume two years after I graduated, when, after a friend advised me to learn Perl, I rather easily got my first full-time programming job. Things have been going along very well for me since then.
The time gap came becuase I orignally had my eye on a career in the publishing industry; had I sought out a hacking job from the get-go, I've little doubt I'd have been able to find one as soon as I graduated.
It also doesn't hurt that I can write cover letters that usually crush any competition for jobs that interest might me. Heh.
J
MacOS Open Source
I have a little site that lists, describes, and links to a bunch of open-source projects available for the current MacOS. Starting the site and getting it linked from Macintouch was all it took for me to contribute my little bit of open source advocacy to the Mac community, and I strongly recommend similar routes for people with messages of their own. It's easier than you may think.
In the year I've been maintaining the site I've received enough feedback from people to convince me that open-source projects have as much of a place in closed-source OSes as open ones. It's all good.
J
MacOS Open Source
Those of us with Macs can enjoy at least one of the classic Ultima games, as well as several derivatives, as downloadable shareware.
Ultima III: Exodus
The Exile Trilogy by Spiderweb Software (I love these!)
Cytheria by Ambrosia Software
J
MacOS Open Source
No, it's a sad commentary on the direction the internet is taking. Radio used to be an exciting new technology, promising instant communication, like the net.hype promises today. Then it was dominated by large corporations, and today it is nothing but top-40 crap and insipid talk shows. Anything creative or thought-provoking has been squeezed out in favor of safe, easy to digest, bland, boring, profitable pablum.
I don't think you can compare the two media so directly, here. The reason the Web has taken off is the accessibility that anyone with relatively minimal means has for placing content on it. Even in its heyday, radio never allowed people to step up and broadcast their own arbitrary material over it, unless they were heavily moneyed corporations or whatnot. The Web allows these companies, as well as any other entity or individual with something to share, to all live in the same space. The big companies have the flashy advertising, but that doesn't mean that your website or mine is going to go away, or even receive fewer visitors; heck, they'll probably get more hits, if anything, if the urging of megacorps draws more people to investigate the Internet for themselves.
So the moral is, this is the first medium that really does promise room for us all. Don't be discouraged just because some of the noiser users have a purpose in mind you don't like; just keep visiting the sites you like, and keep building your own!
J
MacOS Open Source
Any proof of the "DBI"? I wore a "Taz" shirt to Disney to see if I would be hassled. Not a peep.
:)
I think the hassling comes from presenting yourself not so much in a way that the Disney Corp. might not like, such as wearing images of their competitors' trademarks, but in a way that might squick an average person, who is there to have an average sort of fun, a concept mutually exclusive from squicklement.
I should think that people wearing gonzo-slogan T-shirts into Disney, of all places on earth, are itching for confrontation anyway.
J
MacOS Open Source
Cost of living has a lot to do with variations in salary between places. Of course, not putting salaries on the job description... I can't figure out why they're doing that [snip]
Well, you almost answered your own question, I think. The company I work for will be putting up ads for open programmer positions soon, and it wouldn't shock me if we chose not to specify a starting salary, because it may look pretty bad on paper, without any context! Once one learns a little about the area, though, the value of that number changes significantly, as it's easy to see the cost of living in central Maine is rather miniscule; I live in a palatial apartment on a monthly rent that might be able to net me a broom closet in the seedier part of a big city a few hours south of here. Add in various benefits and I actually get paid pretty well, even though sometimes I get 'You make WHAT?! How do you EAT?' from friends living in other, far-away places when I tell them my salary.
Plus, the whole area's atmosphere inherits Northern New England's very laid back attitude about life in general, and the pace at which it is lived; a lot of people might consider it easier on the psyche to live here than in a booming hi-tech city, and who knows how to put a dollar value on that?
So really, yes, while a salary figure is obviously a basic thing to consider when looking for jobs, it's important to know how many location-dependent factors, both practical and personal, affect what that number actually means!
J
MacOS Open Source
This doesn't mean a throw away culture is OK - but if you need the service or product, it might make sense. There is L O T S of room for L O T S of garbage on this planet - more than we will ever need, 'cause we'll do ourselves long in based on current population projections before this is an issue.
While I agree that the concept of throwing things away isn't inherently a mortal sin, and don't know enough about the effects of landfills on ecology (if any) and the amount of "dumpable" space left on Earth's surface to argue those points with you, the rationalizaion you provide above is frighteningly broken.
I think humanity has at least a fighting chance to see a bright and indefinitely long future, a future on worlds beyond our trusty little mudball, but the surest way to doom ourselves is to have enough people believing fatalistic statements like those above. Thinking 'eh, we'll eventually nuke/starve/plague each other into oblivion anyway' leads to short-term thinking, which leads in turn to self-fulfilling prophecies.
Throwing things away won't in itself lead to mankind's destruction, no. But doing so in the belief that there's no future worth preserving? That just might.
(Homework assignment: "Earth", David Brin. One view of what the world might look like in 50 years if people (and governments) learn to become far-sighted only after starting to lose bits of civilization due to 20th century myopia. Very scary, and thought provoking.)
(And I bet there are cell phones in it. Yay, I'm on topic!)
J
MacOS Open Source
I hate to make generalizations, but everything on Television is fake, not real, untruthitudes, falsities
I don't like to make generalizations either, but I probably would have felt similiarly if I had taken the time out to watch the show. It's hard to watch crappy TV and then feel good.
But really, you gotta have some perspective, if you're going to have any hope of staying out of a insidious self-swallowing cynicism cycle! Remember, whenever you see crap, that 90 percent of anything is crap. If it seems like there's more crap now than the last time you checked, it's because there's more media. There's also more Good Stuff to enjoy and learn from, but, alas, the crap tends to have a better advertising budget. Keep an eye open!
Normally I don't repsond to things like this, but statements like "The culture of the world is going downhill," even if the comment's author perhaps made it while in a temporary bad mood, push my evangelism buttons: Crap will always be with us, and as our global mass communication abilities grow, it becomes more and more visible... but so does good stuff! Accept the presence of crap, seek out and become enriched by good stuff, and your life will stay happy. Yay!
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go read a good book.
J
MacOS Open Source
The predictions of Kibo, as posted last month to alt.religion.kibology, and which I can't find on deja, because I'm dumb:
1999 -- Everyone has to listen to that bad song.
September 9, 1999 -- Moon catches on fire. Also, CNN insists some computers will break.
September 13, 1999 -- Moon blows out of orbit.
December 31, 1999 -- CNN insists many computers will break.
2000 -- Lots of bad sci-fi movies take place.
2001 -- Monkey throws bone at space shuttle, large LSD swirls come out of a big black halvah bar. Also, the solid black sky is filled with orange clouds and little UFOs that go "ping!" at the end of "Time Pilot".
2010 -- Peter Hyams makes an inferior sequel starring that guy from "SeaQuest".
2032 -- Michael York attacks the "SeaQuest" with his deadly "subduction laser" fired from "Macronesia".
2037ish -- Many computers will break but nobody cares because that's years away, dude!
2061 -- Arthur C. Clarke's brain falls apart.
2069 -- Lots of bad sci-fi porno movies take place.
2076 -- Isaac Asimov's short story "Tricentennial" comes tragically true. In the ensuing riot, The Bicentennial Man is killed prematurely.
2084 -- Robotrons take over the world, destroying humanity, except for Mommy, Daddy, and Mikey.
2090's -- We land on the Moon in this decade, according to "Forbidden Planet". At an unspecified time over a hundred years later, Leslie Nielsen gives Gene Roddenberry the idea for William Shatner.
2100 -- Aliens that look like shower curtains try to blow up the Moon, which drives Martin Landau insane.
2134 -- My old ATM password comes true.
23rd century -- The dot in Michael York's hand turns red. William Shatner is given a position of responsibility.
2262 -- "Babylon 5" gets cancelled.
24th century -- Bald men are finally accepted as sexy because, for the first time, Starfleet Command awards a captaincy to someone who doesn't have poofy hair.
2374 -- A world where APES evolved from MEN?
2417 -- Gil Gerard gets thawed out. Then he gets fat.
2525 -- Everyone has to listen to that bad song.
2995 -- There will be TV commercial where some guy keeps yelling "I'll paint any car in twenty-nine ninety-five!"
3000 -- "The Terror From The Year 3000" collides with "Futurama".
3001 -- Arthur C. Clarke starts getting really confused about his own backstory.
9999 -- All eight-thousand-year-old computers will break.
802,701 -- H. G. Wells predicts that humans will have evolved into dumb kangaroos. Of course the book would have been ruined if he had nailed this year as 802,700 or 820,702.
J
MacOS Open Source
The wonderful thing about teaching programming to little kids is the way it offers instant gratification when they do something right, because they made something really real happen on the computer. Compare this to most other stuff kids have to sit through: they write down answers under the little line, and the only thing that happens if they're right is they get a checkmark on their paper. @Whee. Even the simplest computer programs encourage a child to engage in mental play and spontaneous experimentation that's either inappropriate or impossible in more traditional areas of education.
:)
In my previous job, I got to do a little bit of programming instruction with early elementary school kids. Inspired by books like Mitchel Resnick's "Turtles, Termites, and Trafic Jams", I installed a flavor of Logo on the lab's Macs, and gave the students three lines of code to type in, which would summon a "turtle" (a programmable drawing tool that lies at the heart of Logo) and make it move up the screen a little, drawing a line behind it as it went. The first kid who typed it all in correctly and ran the program saw the results and cried, "My turtle pooped!!" The others, of course, instantly latched on to this agreeable metaphor, and only a moment passed before other children discovered that the length and angle of the poop (despite the fact they probably hadn't yet been taught what an 'angle' was!) changed in certain ways if they typed in bigger or smaller numbers than the ones I provided. And what happened if they added more turtles?
The class spontaneously broke down into a turtle-poop contest. And thus they all became hackers! Of a sort.
So, really, I support having wee ones learn programming not so they'll know how to code per se (though that certainly is a great benefit), but because it rewards them for thinking and creativity like no other 'ordinary' school activity can!