I am teaching my nephews how to program during their week off from school. I went with a platform that all households had readily available: Excel. Excel VBA is robust enough to create fun games from the Atari generation, forgiving enough to keep new programmers from being frustrated quickly, and the skills learned will carry my wards into many business environments for years to come. Even if Excel goes away, learning to manipulate data, graphics, and data in a spreadsheet program will be useful some day.

It is a good question. I would like to hear a good answer.

The data from the article leads to good questions.

Some Data

2009 U.S. demographic info:

        * Gender breakdown: 50.4% women, 49.6% men
        * Racial breakdown: 63% white, 15.8% Hispanic and Latino, 12.4% black or African American, 4.5% Asian, 4.3% “other” or people of mixed race (I dislike the term “race,” but it’s useful as shorthand. We’re all humans, part of the human race.)

In a fictional world where:

        * Everyone has an equal likelihood of enjoying gaming
        * Everyone’s on equal economic footing — IE, has time to worry THAC0 rather than putting food on the table
        * There are no factors to consider other than gender and race

and gaming groups always include a GM and five players, you’d expect those five people to break down like this:

        * Two or three would be women, the remaining two or three (depending) would be men
        * Three of them would be white, two of them would be people of color (most likely, one would be Hispanic or Latino and one would be black or African American

In that same fictional world, you’d expect GenCon 2010, which had roughly 30,000 attendees, to have looked like this:

        * 15,120 women, 14,880 men
        * 18,900 white people
        * 4,740 Hispanic and Latino people
        * 3,720 black or African American people
        * 1,350 Asian people
        * 1,290 “other” or mixed-race people

    The TSA has responded on the TSA blog. The response does not explain, IMHO, how the searches are legal under the 4th Amendment. From the blog...

Screening of Passengers at Savannah Amtrak Station

A video of Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) screening passengers at a Savannah, Georgia Amtrak station has been gaining quite a bit of attention and many are wondering why we were screening passengers who had just disembarked from a train.

We were wondering the same thing.

The screening shown in the video was done in conjunction with a VIPR operation. During VIPR operations, any person entering the impacted area has to be screened. In this case, the Amtrak station was the subject of the VIPR operation so people entering the station were being screened for items on the Amtrak prohibited items list as seen in the video.

It should be noted that disembarking passengers did not need to enter the station to claim luggage or get to their car.

Signs such as the one shown here are posted at the entrance to the impacted area. {image}

However, after looking into it further, we learned that this particular VIPR operation should have ended by the time these folks were coming through the station since no more trains were leaving the station. We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused for those passengers.

So by now, you're probably wondering what a VIPR is? Is it a type of snake that we misspelled? A really cool car... Nope. It's a team that's made up of Federal Air Marshals, Surface Transportation Security Inspectors, Transportation Security Officers, Behavior Detection Officers and Explosive Detection Canine teams. The teams provide a random high-visibility surge into a transit system and work with state and local security, and law enforcement officials to expand the unpredictability of security measures to detect, deter, disrupt or defeat potential criminal and/or terrorist operations.