Hah! You might as well hope for better content.

Ain't we all!

Most soccer coaches at the middle school and high school level aren't actually qualified to *teach* soccer. It would be more accurate to say that they run a soccer program: choosing players, arranging a schedule, and running the team during games. The players learn to play soccer in other programs.

Similarly, a teacher with some interest in computers and a basic familiarity with programming can organize and run a set of programming activities. But he or she wouldn't be able to actually *teach* programming at anything more than the most basic level. For the students to get a real education in computer programming you need someone who has a greater depth of knowledge and experience.

With that said, we live in the real world and sometimes we have to take what we can get. It's better to have inexperienced but enthusiastic soccer coaches than shut down the program because more knowledgeable coaches aren't available. And better to give interested kids some exposure to computer programming, even if they have to do most of the real learning on their own.

But if your goal is something greater than that, to really be teaching computer programming in middle and high school, then you're going to have to recruit teachers who know what they're doing--and that includes both the technical material as well as the teaching aspect.

Drifting seriously off-topic... But you really don't want to sit at a red light with the clutch in. This will put extra wear and tear on your throw-out bearing and can necessitate an expensive clutch replacement earlier than would otherwise be required.

I seem to hit it all the time when scrolling with the mouse wheel. If I push a little too hard while scrolling through code, it silently pastes into my source. I've learned to be more careful while scrolling with the wheel. And I know I can remove the capability with a cryptic xinput command. But it would be really nice to just be able to disable it from the GUI.

I'm still looking for a good humanitarian cook book.

If Justin Carter was really arrested and held for four months on the basis of a stupid joke on Facebook, then there's plenty of reason to be outraged. But I've got a feeling that we're not getting the facts. If you Google this story, you'll see that all of the articles are traced back to one short, badly sourced article by KHOU in Houston. There isn't a single independent source for this article that I could find. And nothing from a news organization that might be considered reliable. So maybe Justin Carter is really getting a raw deal and we should be storming the castle. Or maybe the facts are different. Who knows, I'm not even sure that Justin Carter even exists.

It's a risk management question. What is the risk of some behavior and what is the cost of mitigating that risk?

My 13 year-old daughter likes to climb trees. I'll admit to being a bit unnerved seeing her 40 feet up in a tree. But she's cautious, which reduces the risk. And successfully taking on the the challenge adds to her sense of self-confidence and accomplishment, important qualities for a 13 year-old. On balance I find it to be an acceptable risk.

On the other hand, she wears her seat belt each and every time she gets into a car. No exceptions. The benefits of not wearing a seat belt strike me as being minimal. And a failure to wear a seat belt in a crash dramatically increases the risk of serious injury or death. When I do the analysis, skipping the seat belt is not an acceptable risk.

Smartphones provide a more difficult case though, largely because of the wide range of behaviors that they enable. Texting while driving? High risk. Using a navigation app? Modest risk. Listening to music? Low risk, unless you need to interact with the music app in some way, in which case the risk increases-- maybe a little, maybe a lot, depending on the quality of the user interface and what you're trying to do.

And that's just from the driver's perspective. A passenger can do almost anything with a smartphone, short of hitting the driver in the head with it, and not increase the risk of a dangerous crash. All in all, it makes it very difficult to make blanket statements about the risk from smartphones in an automobile. And therefore very difficult to regulate in a reasonable way.

Assad: Legitimate Dictator of Syria.

I haven't read the actual paper yet, but we can draw a few tidbits from the news article and the abstract...

It's not that the results were unexpected or overturn long held theories about ant behavior. But the work produced a couple of interesting and valuable outcomes. First, they demonstrated that they could effectively tag and track ants in an experimental setting. That by itself is notable--it opens up a lot of interesting research opportunities. Second, they analyzed the tracking data to quantify the spatial and temporal interactions of the ants, and in particular, between functional groups of ants. They were able to determine that there were significant cleaner-nurse and cleaner-forager interactions but limited nurse-forager interactions. Not just in a general kind of way, but with real measurements.

By being better at it than anyone else?

Well then, we'd better get started right away!

You know the Goths have nothing whatsoever to do with the modern German state, right? The whole France-Germany thing is really more like western Franks vs. eastern Franks. The Goths (or at least some people who called themselves Goths) had a lot more impact on Spain. Better just to blame it all on the Romans.

The methodology of comparing this year's 3rd graders vs. last year's 3rd graders has always struck me as badly flawed. I've never understood why progress isn't measured for individual students, year-over-year, and then aggregated. That actually gives you an accurate measure of student progress. And it removes any need for demographic grouping of students--if a group of students (regardless of race) have a lower starting point (in the aggregate), then that's baked in to the measurement process.

The Constitution doesn't explicity require that there be only two parties. But the mechanisms that are explicitly required will almost inevitably lead to a two party system. The founding fathers failed to achieve their objective on that.