Blog more, especially about kid-oriented media and culture. There’s a big lack of free culture when it comes to kids stories and media. I want to try to catalyze some kind of free culture project for an audience of kids.
Do better in the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction class than I did in Introduction to Databases last year. (I learned a lot, but didn’t end up finishing because the final was scheduled for right when Everly was born, so I didn’t take it.) These Stanford online classes are awesome.
Get involved with local politics. Somebody’s got to do it.
Make a functional web app. I’m going to try to learn Python and Django web development by trying to build an open reviews site, where anyone can review anything. In 2012, I want to at least build a very basic site, whether or not it goes somewhere.
Looking for a cool gift idea for the geek who has everything (or the anti-consumerist geek, or the free culture geek)? I just claimed slot #3 (out of 20) in the WTactics “become a character” program. That means someone special to me will be having a freely-licensed portrait made of her as a fantasy mermaid priestess. The portrait will also become a card in the community-developed open source collectible card game WTactics, which is a spin-off of the successful (and fun!) free computer game Battle for Wesnoth.
This TED talk, by the guy behind Khan Academy, is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. The basic concept is just educational videos… over 2,000 short lectures, all done in smooth but DIY style by Salman Khan. His non-profit is now going from videos to an educational system built around videos.
That by itself is nothing revolutionary, but what’s inspiring is all the little things they get right. The result is what seems to me like the first credible implementation for computers and the web really fundamentally changing the way we do primary and secondary education.
One of the big ideas is to flip the classroom/homework dynamic: students watch lectures at home, at their own pace, and spend class-time working problems and discussing the curriculum with peers and the teacher. As Khan puts it, the basic lecture concept is “a fundamentally dehumanizing experience: thirty kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other”. And ironically, replacing live lectures with videos has the potential to humanize the educational system.
What’s really exciting, though, is the non-video components that Khan Academy is developing right now. The curriculum is based on proving your proficiency in elementary topics before moving on to advanced ones that depend on what you already know. And they are doing great things with video game mechanics: skill tree (similar to the tech trees of strategy games like Civilization; it hooked me right away), badges, tracking tools for teachers.
In short, I see a lot of inspiration for how Wikimedia projects should do things with video and interactive content. Khan Academy has made a compelling system in a short time with just a handful of programmers, showing pretty clearly that great things along these lines could be within Wikimedia’s reach as well. Sadly, what Khan’s team is designing isn’t open source, and the videos are CC-BY-NY-SA, a license incompatible with Wikimedia projects.
4:15 am. Faith and I are on a brisk walk before our planned 6:00 am check-in at the hospital.
6:14 am. Check-in was quick. We’re in our big room, the baby’s heartbeat is on speaker, and the nurse is taking a focused history and asking about birth plan stuff.
7:43 am. Three different nurses tried to start IVs but hit valves. Our main nurse, the mother of a blogger I met at the West Hartford townhall meeting, is very nice. She started the IV successfully on a second try.
8:20 am. The oxytocin drip is going now. Amazing how the same chemical that makes you feel good after you donate to NPR (or so Ira Flatow tells me) also brings babies out quicker.
9:34 am. Faith is bored so she’s doing work: scheduling residency interviews, checking icanhascheezburger, etc.
9:55 am. Our nurse is setting things up so the doctor can break the water. I’m not allowed to post anything specific about the labor after this. Faith and the nurse are bitching about private insurance and their profiteering ways; it’s a good thing Faith qualified for Husky (Medicaid) when she got pregnant, since there were important things that her primary insurance didn’t cover.
10:15 am. Faith reports that the contractions are “starting to not feel so good any more.”
11:37 am. Things are getting more exciting. We’re watching the BBC show Merlin as a distraction. This is the apparatus the baby goes in for his exam after he’s born:
12:55 pm. I just got kicked out of the room. It’s hospital policy that family aren’t allowed to be there when they administer an epidural; fathers tend to faint and injure themselves. Our nurse says she’s had to drag fathers out by the feet. Here’s the medicine, ready to be hooked up:
1:41 pm. Nap time.
3:10 pm. Our nurse was going to leave us for a while, but then she realized that it’s almost BABY TIME! We start pushing as soon as our doctor is available, it looks like. The nurse estimates half an hour until then.
4:23 pm. He’s here!!!
5:46 pm. He’s 8 pounds 1 ounce. He’s already fed once and he’s very good-natured. We’ve been testing his reflexes; one pic is the Moro reflex (startle reflex), one is the palmomental reflex, and one is just cute.
6:48 pm. Brighton is 19.5 inches long.
9:22 pm. Brighton has been snoozing for a while. It’s my objective assessment that he is, in fact, the cutest baby ever. Thanks so much to everyone who offered congratulations and kind words. To those scheming to steal and/or eat him: we’re on to your shenanigans, and we’ll have none of it.
It’s been a while since I’ve post anything personal. The most interesting news is probably the trip to Europe Faith and I took with her Dad. There are lots of pictures on Flickr, but I’ll put up some of my favorites here:
These pictures are all the results of my new camera, a Canon PowerShot S2. Unfortunately, I didn’t have it for Thanksgiving vacation (in Orlando with my family, including the cousins), which was also a great time.
WASHINGTON, DC—High levels of student concentration suggest that Iran may be a mere five to eight years from developing a nuclear scientist, according to a Pentagon report.
Does anyone one else suspect that europeangoldfinch.net is the portal into a Prison Break related alternate reality game? It’s a seemingly fake forum, supposedly about the European Goldfinch, but the comments are unrealistic and there isn’t actually a way to sign in, post, or anything else.
Maybe it will become active later in the season, when the characters actually begin using it on the show.
About a year ago, I dug up a skinny maple sapling, stuck it in a flower pot, and decided to learn the art of bonsai. Since then I’ve dug up a lot of other small trees and shrubs, killed a fair number of them, bought some others from places like home depot, and spent a lot of time taking flak from my family (especially Faith) about what a lame hobby I have.
Since we moved to West Hartford a few months ago, I’ve gone to several events with the Greater Hartford Bonsai Society, and it’s been really great. They had their annual bonsai show recently, and I showed one of my plants, a sagebrush I dug up in Reno over Christmas. I also traded away the other two surviving sagebrush for plants from other people.
You can see some pictures from the show, and other excerpts from by adventures in bonsai, in my flickr set, Miscellaneous Lifeforms.
We got a new kitten, Halley, last week: And Melinda’s wedding was a great success; all the assorted parts of the family behaved and got along well, and it was beautiful. My dad let me use his camera for some shots; it has a great telephoto lens and made me want to get serious about photography. You can see some of the results on flickr. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be able to get a nice camera for a while, but it’s something to look forward to.
Reading: The System of the World
Watching: The Colbert Report
Listening: NPR, Blindside – Silence
UPDATE: This picture of Halley has been making the rounds on the internets; it even found its way, randomly, onto a video podcast called “Ask Mind Candy“.
But when many anecdotes complement each other, and editors pull that out, you get something cool that no current review database can match. - January 28th, 2012 at 8:46 PM
As I imagine it, wiki-like curation would be an important element. Amazon reviews are useful not just for ave. stars, but anecdotes. - January 28th, 2012 at 8:42 PM
RT@evan Someday knowing the ins and outs of copyright will be like knowing the intricate rules of internal passports in Communist East ... - January 28th, 2012 at 8:10 PM
Federation makes a lot of sense... pre-existing communities centered on X (e.g., Android devices) just set up an instance and federate in. - January 28th, 2012 at 8:06 PM
Cool! My development skills are minimal, but I'm trying to pick up Django by building a rudimentary review site. - January 28th, 2012 at 8:04 PM
Why we need a free culture, community-run review site, independent of any merchant: http://ur1.ca/7x7cn Anybody want to start one with me? - January 28th, 2012 at 12:39 PM
