I *like* communicating with my distant relatives once a year. And besides, my wife comes from good Hobbit stock, so it's the only way I get my annual refresher course on whether Aunt Dierdre is three-cousins removed on her mother's side or twice removed on her father's side or both (after Uncle Peter remarried - if you see what I mean - and yes there is a quiz later).

Every day in the week before Christmas, my five-year old daughter was excited to look in the mail to open envelopes, see what pictures were on the cards, and hear the news about cousins etc. her age that she remembers meeting, and listened to us reading out their news. And she had a lot of fun sticking on all the stamps!

It directly and specifically emphasized the family-and-friends non-commercial size of Christmas. E-cards? Forget 'em.

There's no replacement for a good Christmas card. Or 90 of them. Ouch.

You jest, but (also in answer to other replies) I was more suggesting interesting parallel tracks rather than something proscriptive - a 12-year old can get it.
If your 12-year old likes learning things by reading, a really really good resource is A.K. Dewdney's Turing Omnibus - a non-major comp-101 level text that's really REALLY good at describing everything from electrons and bare metal to theory and practical coding. Puzzle-oriented and v. accessible to pre-high school nerds.

Followup to my last post: another suggestion in asm-type space (if you don't want to start with electronics) is to download a corewars emulator (or perhaps a similar Robowars type game) and beat each other up in core/logic space for a while. I remember a real "aha" when I learned about Imps, Dwarves, and self-modifying code in general that way.

You may think I'm crazy, but I'd go even more bare metal than that. Teach him resistors and capacitors (make weird noises through a speaker), then transistors and flip-flop logic with some projects that make LEDs blink.

Then jump asm (to learn to address the metal) to Basic/Python (to learn logic and structure and say Hello World) to C (put the two together). Use plug-together electronic kits (what radio shack used to make but is now rebranded as "Maker" type stuff or robots). The truly hands-on path worked wonders for me, kept me interested at all stages, and I tell you I was grateful to learn each new abstraction tool. My daughter is five and loves to fiddle with my scope/things on my bench; I can't wait.

The weakness in the teaching toolchain I see at the moment is the asm-teaching stage, at my young age it was the Apples and Commodores, nowdays I'm thinking microcontrollers but I haven't really looked for good intro projects yet, any particularly good specific suggestions?

Beware, though, that anything like this would likely have to be structured like (would actually be a) government contract with timelines, deliverables, and accountability. It would be difficult to get away with a mere "donate for a preferred direction." (If the developers are up for committing themselves to such a contract, no worries, but don't lead them to think there aren't necessary strings attached).

Lest some of these myths perpetuate, at the federal agency I work for, supervisors have an annual budget (say $10K over the year for supplies) and can indeed walk right down to the local Target or Office Depot for individual purchases up to $3,000 as long as it balances monthly. The limitation is that you have to take a training/ethics course to be authorized to make the purchases with a government credit card, but that's sensible. Above $3K, yes there's a bidding process.

So while it may vary from agency to agency, the myth of "no petty purchases" in in fact a myth.

Oh, excellent! As another fed in R&D, I was just starting to look for something like ELMER for a new project this week. (For those against "durn gummit wasting mah tax dollars" the above post just saved at least a couple hours of taxpayer-paid salary). thx!

And yeah, if a bit of Octave bugfixing saved us from buying another Matlab license, that's well-spend time and cost-effective.

I think this is one of those ideas that just sounds good on paper.

I mentioned electronica, but I wouldn't say that most of what I listen to is computer generated (plenty of straightforward musicians playing their instruments, including laid-back reggae and dub thrown in) but maybe it's a studio effect then that counteracts the "naturally" when they sit to record - I definitely notice most of the beats falling in the 130-140 range. But I'll check it out the next time I jam on my own and see if I hit the heartbeat.

Hmm, just sitting here now I tried tapping out a rhythm naturally without looking at a clock (hiding the timer and counting beats until it beeped) and it fell to 175 and my heartbeat's at 75. Not quite on but maybe I'm trying too hard or accenting the third measure or something.

I'm not sure I buy the heartbeat connection wholly.

I've done a whole lot of treadmill-exercise to music recently (lots of upbeat genres and electronica on random play). My strides tend to naturally fall into time with the music (of course they do, that's what dancing is) and my exercise machine records the stride rate... and the music varies all over between 130 and 180 beats/min, not in multiples of 60. My heartbeat meanwhile doesn't sync with music at all while stride rate does.

And I think variation in a band's beat in a live set follows those patterns. As I exercise and warm up, it becomes easier and easier to pick up the pace. I think bands are trying to match a natural range of dance/stride rhythms more than their heartbeat.

Perhaps you'd like me to... rephrase that, laddie?

We should re-task the Enterprise... it's nothing but a garbage scow anyway.

Not everything is subject to predator control. Jellies may be more limited (historically) by competition for food with small fishes. It's possible a combination of changing climate conditions favoring jellies over small fishes, and removal of competitors for zooplankton leads to these events rather than removing predators.