Perhaps you can cultivate a sense of DIY by showing how you can make a microscope using an optical mouse.

I agree with this. Schaum's Outlines are surprisingly comprehensive, easy to follow, and well-written. They are meant to complement textbooks, but given the low priority on conceptual organisation found in many textbooks, these can often be used alone if you do the problems.

From TFA, he actually worked on both a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and cell biology as well as an M.D., so it is likely he will be working on research as well.

Jay Lee also hosts a technology radio show out of Houston called Technology Bytes.

As far as the matching capabilities of Perl 6, I think they're trying to do something that will advance the state-of-the-art in terms of programming langauge integration in the same way that Perl 5's regex did. The Perl 6 rules are similar to the tricks and hacks that people do with regular expressions to build up full grammars. By separating out the parts into logical components, you will get better readability and reusability. Not only will we get cleaner text processing, but this (along with the VM architecture) will aid the development of DSLs that will extend the language into an exciting future.

Yeah, it's some good Kool-Aid and the Perl community been waiting for a while, but bringing these ideas into a production-ready language isn't trivial. I'm still using Perl 5 because of CPAN, but I feel that Perl 6 will eventually get to the same level especially with a source-to-source compiler. The hardest part would be dealing with native-code bindings.

Which is precisely what TFA is addressing.

My initial motivation was learning about fractals, so, in a way, it was about building a graphics demo. However, I soon got into figuring out how to get my computer and graphing calculator to do my mathematics homework. That was where I learnt about breaking things down into fundamental abstractions.

For the discerning measurement enthusiast, the first ever atomic wristwatch!

I've looked at Lush and I like the fact you can embed C code straight in the Lisp. And it's fast. Though it concentrates on the numerical computing, rather than symbolic computing. It could do with more clean and easily installable library bindings, which is where MATLAB and Octave shine in terms of the breadth of functions available.

Neat! I would say you should look into the NYC Resistor hackerspace, General Assembly, and the people behind different hack days like Music Hack Day and Photo Hack Day.

I don't know how many people you could get that would be interested in something like this since it probably doesn't have enough of a cool factor to draw people in. Maybe look at Code for America for some inspiration?

Heh, I'm not even from NY.

For GUI, I've had a great experience using Tkx. That is just a lightweight wrapper around the Tcl interpreter and there are nice tutorials for it at TkDocs.

For something to make bindings easier, there is work on a ctypes for Perl. And there's also the Inline namespace on CPAN, but that makes your code a bit difficult to distribute.

I took a course in American political thought and I would say the best source of information on the Constitution would be the writings of James Madison followed by The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist papers. Reading those gives a deep insight into the reasoning behind the U.S. Constitution.

There is DBMail.

Here you go. Now use pdftotext and read it however you like.

I've been on /. for nearly half my life (I finally registered only 8 years later). While I was growing up, I read Slashdot almost daily and every time I would learn something interesting from either the FA or the comments. It is the variety of stories, diversity of opinions, and the signal-to-noise ratio that keeps me coming back here as opposed to than any other discussion site.

I can truly say that this site has changed my life. Thank you, Rob and Jeff. And thanks to all the other editors and users that have made this a positive experience and hopefully will continue to do so.

- Zaki

P.S.: Great timing with the 20th anniversary of Linux. Now I have two things to think about as my own 21st birthday approaches. :-)