ideonexus

interweaving ideas

  • The n Types of Programmers

    In the tradition of Matt Groening’s Life in Hell… Abstraction Guy “We really need a Factory Pattern for that Factory Pattern.” Pros: Produces really really really loosely-coupled systems. Cons: Output will never escape the layers of code. Buzzword Bumbler “This enterprise needs to move to a service-oriented paradigm in the cloudplex to encapsulate polydactylism!” Pros:…

  • Random Hacks of Kindness 1.0 (RHoK1)

    RHoK Project Submission Form Before various media dimbulbs perverted it to be synonymous with “criminal act,” the word “hack” was a geek term that meant “an appropriate application of ingenuity.” A “hacker” was someone particularly adept at pushing the limits of a system, finding the flaws in it to make it stronger, and discovering new…

  • Becoming a Science Hedgehog

    In his book The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, Stephen J. Gould talks about scientists falling into two categories, foxes and hedgehogs. I wrote the following summarizing Gould’s metaphor: There are two kinds of inquisitive minds, Hedgehogs and Foxes. In nature, Foxes rely on a wide range of crafty strategies to avoid prey.…

  • Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Anita Borg

    I almost missed it this year with so much else going on, but I wanted to take a moment to bring your attention this Ada Lovelace Day to Dr. Anita Borg, founder of the Institute for Women and Technology in 1997, renamed the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in 2003 after her death.…

  • What’s the Right JavaScript Framework, If Any?

    JavaScript Frameworks I recently checked out Google’s AJAX Libraries, which, aside from being inaccurately titled, provides a means for web developers to access functionality in a wide variety of popular JavaScript frameworks and toolkits without having to host the libraries themselves. Simply include the base Google library, and then use it to load whatever framework…

  • 2,000 Years of Artificial Life in Art

    In his book Chess Metaphors, about chess, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Diego Rasskin-Gutman devotes a short section to the popular myths, literature, and films dealing with characters creating artificial humans from motivations like desire, necessity, curiosity, and power. More fascinating than the motivations for producing AIs, is the evolving origins of where the artificial life…

  • Clarence Ellis’ “First” for African Americans in Computer Science

    One of the kids on our street, Khalif, surprised me when, in response to the 2008 Presidential election, he said, “I hate Barack Obama.” “What???” came my kneejerk reaction. Just a few weeks ago, I knew Khalif was rooting for Obama FTW! “Because,” Khalif explained, “my teachers were always saying I could grow up to…

  • Boolean Algebra and the I Ching (Yijing)

    Eight Trigrams of the Yijing In Sadie Plant’s book zeros + ones, she explores the duality of binary digits as fitting in with the human habit of dichotomizing concepts: The zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as a perfect symbols of the orders of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which…

  • Required Reading for Public Computer Science Teachers: Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

    Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms Dr. Seymour Papert is best known as the inventor of the Logo programming language, a tool for teaching children problem solving, but his influence in education goes much further than that. Papert has always been a visionary where computers and education intersect, and it is incredible how glacially society has moved to…

  • b00le0… bOOleO… Booleo… a Game of Boolean Logic Gates with an Ambiguous Spelling

    My Opponent Vicky I’ve got a folder of great ideas I will never get to, and one meme I’ve had in there for a long time, but never knew how to implement, was a card game involving programming logic, where two players construct applications out of conditional logic to defeat each other. Then I recently…

  • Star Trek Online: The Bait Ball Strategy

    Bait Ball Credit: Lara Sobel In the extraordinary documentary Blue Planet there were several examples of a school of fish forming a bait ball to defend against predators, where a school of fish swirls into itself, becoming a tightly-knit unit; however, what we see in the documentary is this school of fish becoming easy prey…

  • Delta Iota Phi Computer Literacy Program: An Experiment in Bringing Lower Income African American Students into Computer Science

    The Bit Computer Literacy through Incentivized Learning Communities in Northeastern Carolina still reflect the ethnic divisions created before the Civil Rights era. The schools, while no longer segregated by official policy, were never integrated, meaning there is a “Black School” and a “White School” as my conversations with locals have revealed, and attempts to force…