Virginia Woolf's Birthday

. . . is today. One of the major contributors to the advancement of the British novel. Master of language. Lover of words. Supreme craftsman. Brilliant critic. Born on this day in 1882.

CS101 at udacity.com

Just signed up for Building a Search Engine. It's a 7-week course offered by one of the two Stanford professors who taught last year's AI course. That was a free course and a wildly successful experiment in Open Source Education.

One of them, Sebastian Thrun has since left Stanford to start Udacity. An online, open source university. I mean folks, this is gold on a platter. There are two instructors: Thrun, a Google Fellow, and David Evans, CS prof at University of Virginia and an MIT grad.

I've never used this term before, but two things are happening now to urge me to do it. The NEXT BIG THING. This idea and Raspberry-Pi. Two major efforts to educate those who want to be educated about computers. Doing the job our schools and universities are not. Sure, you can get a CS degree just about anywhere, but how about the youngsters coming down the pike? They show up in my community college classes knowing absolutely nothing about how computers work. Where will they get the spark that might set them on fire to learn, to experiment, to chase, to fiddle, to solve--to create, invent?

I'm not talking about students who pick CS as a major because it's where the jobs might be most available. I'm talking about the students who will dive into the field with passion, wonder, curiosity, and creativity. Those folks don't go after jobs; they go after knowledge and skill simply because they want to.

New Web Site

Starting the New Year with a New web site. I've moved all the contents of what was my personal directory hanging off clairdunn.com to borderlinegeek.com. I cannot believe that I got this domain at this late date! My jaw is still dropping.

Anyway, it's got all the old stuff, plus new stuff as it comes along. Today I added a page for the Raspberry-Pi -- can't wait to get my hands on one. That is one page you need to check out!

From Another World

I have moved. Sold house and land and moved.

Slowly settling in and curiosity, which I thought dead these last 8 months or so is starting to stir. A stumbled-upon word that seemed to be not in context; the word was "processing". I tracked the awkwardness, out-of-context-seeming use and found a new (to me) language call Processing. Two books from amazon.com and five days later, some fruit from the tree I thought dead.

VT2000 Adventures in Processing

I now have four books and my toe(s) is/are in the digital waters. We'll see. But I was excited enough to make the page.

And we wonder why the US is behind ... ?

Here's the subject line from today's email ad from Apple:

Go Back to School with the App Store, Role-Playing Games, and More

I'm getting ready for the fall term at CCV and this just plain ticked me off.

Ball Lightning

I've had a wonderful adventure this morning in using the internet as it was envisioned. It started on the BBC's Tech page following articles about the Bletchley Museum's computer collection, and from there I went to the Science page which led to the World Wide Lightning Locations page and from there to following links about about ball lightning. In one of those articles were these sentences:

And Dr Abrahamson believes their theory will even explain how ball lightning passes through windows and walls.

"Most, especially old, houses have cracks around their windows and cracks near doors," he says.

I've always been interested in ball lightning because of a story told in our family. I've no date for the story, but am guessing it was sometime in the 1920s or '30s. The house it happened in burned in 1937, so it was before that. The house was located in the northwestern corner of Fletcher, Vermont on the Buck Hollow Road. The house was likely close to 70 or 100 years old at the time.

My grandfather was sitting in the kitchen near the old cast iron wood stove when a ball of lightning came in, circled around the stove and wandered out through the wall again.

My family is not given to made-up stories, so I do put stock in this.

Tennis, Anyone?

No. Not tennis; this is me.

But, I've a new addiction: Google's Ngram.

Here's the game. And of course you can make your own.

Find ten NON-NOUNS that pinpoint the start of the industrial revolution to within a decade.

Or maybe you want to play the easy version. Find five.

Ngram

How long before someone with money puts out a game, apps, a Wii Version?

Not long I bet. But you heard it here first.