I have been asked by an old friend, who is now one of the curators of the Manchester Science Museum, to represent at the upcoming celebrations of the 60th anniversary of Alan Turing's greatest work: the invention of the modern computer. As a long term open source evangelist and lifelong computer addict, this is clearly not an opportunity I can turn down. The question is: what can I do (beyond flashing a desktop cube) to engage youngsters of all ages and hopefully at the same time pass on the free software message to an impressionable and important generation? I believe I can count on the support of my employer and thus I can summon a wealth of workstations if necessary.

This month, a teacher 'Wellington Grey' published an open letter published to the UK Department of Education and the AQA regarding the state of the current physics syllabus in the UK, and the way this subject has been (mis)guided recently. Coming from the country that most recently gave us Stephen Hawking and John Gribbin (amongst many others), the way the article paints the dumbing down of the subject to the point where it becomes little more than environmental propaganda seems disasterous!

From the article:
"I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn't cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with... something else, something nebulous and ill defined."