About design patterns: In my own experience, I learned about design patterns only after many years of programming experience. I had already encountered and/or invented all the patterns I later read about. But reading about them was good because it allowed for a common language to communicate with other programmers as well as a kind of self-reflection and ability to think about design patterns more conscientiously and methodically. I'm glad to have learned about these when I did, and not sooner.

It's just fine, IMO, to teach programming as a self-discovery, unguided hacking, kind of thing. This is a "constructivist education" approach, and works extremely well in many cases.

The same comments apply to a lesser degree about teaching multiple languages and general programming language concepts. I would not teach a second programming language before a young student had the chance to explore and get comfortable with their first. That may or may not take long.

I need to disagree with your referring to the Bible as a "history book." Even though it contains a lot of historical narratives (combined with folklore), the purpose of the authors never (?) seems to be to document some piece of history but rather to highlight some moral idea, to explore our relationship to God, to help a nation have hope and stay together in times of exile, to stir up questions and provoke thought, etc. The stories told are never recent events at the time of writing, but reflect strongly and relate to the political landscape of the times they were written in. Also the style of writing is generally distinct from the style of other ancient-contemporary documents that were written to preserve history.

What I feel is a more helpful approach to the Bible is to read it like it were poetry. What analogies are being used? What is this really about? How does this change my ideas or motives? I know this conflicts with a "literal" interpretation, so I know many will violently disagree with this idea, but I can't fathom why. The Bible contains a wide range of conflicting theological opinions. We don't read cookbooks like they are philosophical treatises, and we don't read science fiction like a newspaper. Why do so many people ... Okay I'll stop. No, I won't. Consider for example the book Job, a non-historical narrative, that challenges the theology of divine retributive justice, and how that relates to the new-vs-old thought in the New Testament. Then think about the two creation myths in Genesis not as right-or-wrong histories but as stories that provide windows into human nature and the human condition.

I like the rest of your ideas. It's important to keep an open mind. Just make sure you're equally open to conflicting ideas and avoid falling into the trap that because something's possible, or because you believe it for some reason, it's true. Every good theorist hopes for the day their theory gets taken seriously enough to be experimentally proven false. Maybe in religion we should all hope for a time when we understand things well enough to realize our former beliefs were all poppycock. It's hard to find a higher (philosophical) aspiration than that.

I've been running Gentoo on a few boxes at home for many years. Very often I need to restart a service. It often goes along these lines:

# /etc/init.d/someservice restart
Stopping ... error.
# /etc/init.d/someservice start
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid someservice is already running.
# /etc/init.d/someservice stop
Fail
# /etc/init.d/someservice zap
Well okay then. Whatever.
# /etc/init.d/someservice start
Success

I like this advice, but in the case at hand -- it's been two years! -- I doubt it's worth wasting any more time trying to get your issues resolved by that vendor. You'll have to eat some costs one way or another.

This is probably a textbook case for promoting free software. That has to be said. And since you'll need a replacement VPN solution, it's not just a pedantic argument.

I like that quote, even though it was a bit difficult to digest. The English language has evolved in the past century in a way that demands much less of the reader and conveys much less complexity and accuracy.

I wanted to add, somewhere, my $.02 about "faith." I'm told that early (1st century) Christians used what-we-translate-as-faith to be a kind of radical trust. More verb than noun. A trust in an idea, not fully understood or rationalized, that allowed them to lead lives that were unselfish, bold/foolhardy, non-violent extremists, anti-establishment, share-the-wealth sorts of people. The idea is that for them, faith was incompatible with certainty. Conviction deletes the possibility of faith. They did not have proof of deity, a consistent doctrine, etc. Reason was encouraged and appealed to, but knowledge was known to be incomplete.

What most people think about religion is that it is a doctrine (teaching or authority-based knowledge) that requires unwavering belief without question or reason. (My perspective here is Christianity rather than all religion, but I suspect that most major world religions are similar in this way.) Yet this is probably not a genuine or original form of any given religion but instead what human nature and politics have deformed religions into over time. People want to be told what to believe, and people who desire power cannot help but use fear and shame to great effect. I think modern-day Christianity is more about manipulating people and in most respects is the exact opposite of its earliest incarnations.

Science today has some of the same struggles. Science itself is an art, since the more precisely one tries to define it, the more inaccurate that definition becomes. Scientific knowledge is a little bit of an oxymoron since science can be described as a tool for disproving what is not true more than it is a means of proving what is true. This is true on all scales of complexity, but it's most evident at the reductionist frontier of particle physics and cosmology. The standard model is not logically consistent with general relativity, yet both theories are spectacularly successful. And there are problems of naturalness, etc. It is not tenable, not reasonable or scientific, to think that our most successful scientific theories are set to last. Modifications need to be made, and probably in big, fundamental, philosophically-challenging ways. The history of the development of physics is full of cases like this and physics is by no means "done." But people are eager to philosophize based on "what scientists know", and they are eager for answers from authority.

Authentic science, like authentic religion, is not authority-based. I'm not saying anything negative about consensus, just that there is always room for new theories and new experiments regardless of credentials. Data does not respect authority. And I don't believe there needs to be any contradiction between the two approaches of religion and science, as long as we are referring to religion as a searching process not a placating drug. Both science and religion address the basic problem of doing the best we can today with what little we know. Good scientists know that good questions are better than "right" answers, and good ... what, "religious" folk ??? (atheists included) ... know that it's better to be loving than right.

I suppose most of these ideas come from two books that might seem diametrically-opposed: The Underground Church, and Dreams of a Final Theory.

A program like the grandparent's "Hello World" is meant as a starting point and not a demonstration of how small a nearly-useless program can be. A GUI program necessarily aims to do more than just print a message, and this example gives you a small glimpse at how you the language could look and feel, and how you might go about doing something more practical. A MessageBox popup is not a good starting point since about all you can change is the text itself.

But ... We ASKED him!

Do you have personal experience with this? Are there any data on that? How many lives are saved per year by the threat of gun violence?

In the absence of a study, imagine a world in which every citizen (maybe older than, say, the legal driving age) is carrying a firearm. Imagine the major population centers like NYC where the statistics would matter. Would there be fewer gun-related deaths in that world than in ours? I can't see it that way. I would feel safer in a world where people are more encouraged to deal with conflict in a nonviolent way.

Yeah, even the term "disproves" is not exactly correct. Newtonian gravity has a very hard time explaining Mercury's precession and is completely untenable with today's observational evidence. General relativity explains Mercury's orbit without having to invent new invisible planets & stuff. And today General relativity is still doing spectacularly well with many careful neutron star observations as well as experiments closer to home, like Gravity Probe B's measurements of frame dragging and more.

Oh, what I do remember from Bairn Greene's The Elegant Universe was his analogy for Bell's Inequality. Looks like that has been put up on Wikipedia.

Funny, I read that book (which is excellent) but don't remember that analogy. But I think you're talking about special relativity, not general relativity. The best GR explanation I've seen is an article Lost in Hyperbolia. For me that explanation worked perfectly.

Now I remember reading in various places that the solar eclipse data on GR was not actually conclusive. Bad science. The earlier work Einstein did that explained the precession of mercury's orbit was actually the first confirmation of GR. Also, of course, confirmation is not a word that is ever used correctly in science. The precession of mercury's orbit disproved Newtonian gravity but failed to disprove GR. The bending of starlight by the Sun would have been an even more impressive failure-to-disprove GR if the data were actually conclusive.

I guess I need to read through the studies some more, but I believe that most/many indicators of education show that lecturing is poor (relative to other methods) regardless of the particular talents of the students. Yes, I have felt that I've gotten a lot out of certain lectures. Some lecturers are definitely better than others. Certainly both student and professor abilities can make a huge difference, but on top of that a professor can still do better by adopting a hybrid approach.

Lecture for a bit (less than 10 minutes, maybe 15 tops), then switch it up. Have students work a problem (maybe in pairs) and vote on a solution. With smallish classes you can use simple voting methods, and with 100+ groups you can use electronic voting. Have short, focused discussions. Do a demonstration that includes volunteers. Have students research related topics and present their own mini-lecture (small classes only). And so on. Even if the professor is a great lecturer and the students are all highly disciplined and auditory-sequential learners (almost never true for an entire class), they would *still* benefit more from this kind of approach. It certainly takes more work on the part of the professor and involves some retraining, but students are paying a lot of money for their education and they ought to be treated as valued customers a little bit more. I've tried these approaches myself in undergraduate physics classes of various levels from gen-ed courses to the introductory sequence and up to the jr/sr level. I won't claim to have mastered anything but it quickly became obvious to me that lecturing for an hour is never the best way to teach. There are alternatives and a conscientious professor owes it to their students to pay some heed to the learning sciences and experiment with different approaches. It's not a one-technique-fits-all kind of thing, but anyone can improve upon pure lecturing.

I heard of one professor that met a student wandering the halls at the end of the semester, looking for their professor. He asked him where this certain professor's office was -- they were preparing for the final exam and had some questions. He said "I'm your professor. Have you seen me before?" Obviously this student didn't feel that the lectures were an efficient way for them to learn.

My thoughts exactly. This is apparently a new study, however. It's not clear to me what is new about it other than, perhaps, translating the results into letter-grade equivalents. I like the quote: "it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data."

And yet, as you point out, this kind of data has been around for decades at least. I think they knew in the 80's if not earlier that knowledge retention is terrible for students listening to lectures compared to other methods (reading, group activities, teaching, etc). But how many professors took that data to heart? Is it a matter of couching it in different terms like letter grades? Probably not because those professors who lecture today either don't know or don't care. In either case they are immune to new studies like this.

One problem is that folks have to pay Comcast for decent internet service, and also they have to pay Netflix for a subscription. Fine of course, but if Netflix has to pony up extra fast-lane and direct-lane fees, ultimately their subscription prices increase. So Comcast+Netflix customers essentially get a hidden charge for their video streaming, one directly to Comcast and the other indirectly to Comcast (through Netflix). The real problem is that the indirect fee also applies to DSL and satellite customers, so you can't even avoid this fee by choosing a Comcast competitor.

I can understand wanting a free market system to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons types of issues with Netflix customers causing other non-streaming subscribers to get worse performance, but this present "solution" is clearly broken and gives Comcast and other last-mile providers a significant economic influence over other companies like Netflix that does not derive from consumer choice.

I think there are at least two underlying problems here. You point out one: corruption in the form of campaign finances and lobbyists. The other is the outrageous effectiveness of propaganda. I don't hear much about potential solutions to this second problem, and it's perhaps more difficult to solve. It might help to have some kind of propaganda analysis/deconstruction as part of a standard curriculum in high school, but that wouldn't be enough. We also need some watchdog-type media coverage that picks apart and shames people using such blatant propaganda techniques. Obviously TFA is just such a thing, as are programs like The Daily Show etc. These are good but not yet spread widely enough across the political spectrum.

Ideally a large fraction of voters need to be able to identify propaganda whenever they see it. And they need to react negatively to it, more than logic demands, overcompensating for the rest who get suckered by it all. Unfortunately, nearly all political campaigning is so densely infused with propaganda that we get accustomed to it. If all advertisers and all politicians do this all the time, there's no person more shamed than any other.