andrewducker | Interesting Links for 20-06-2017

Chicago goes high-tech in search of answers to gun crime surge: (tags: Technology guns crime usa )
I believe Bill Cosby: (tags: assault drugs rape men )
Educators replace "MS Office training course" with proper GCSE computer course. Are astounded when numbers drop.: Seems obvious we need to educate people both how to use computers, and how to fully understand them. Plenty of space for both types of course.
(tags: computers Education school uk )
M&S says labelling avocados with lasers is more sustainable: From now on I'm going to refuse to eat any food that isn't somehow associated with lasers. I shall call this The Laser Diet. And my book will make a fortune.
(tags: lasers food )
Why is cycling so popular in the Netherlands?: (tags: netherlands bicycles )
How Ancient Egypt's beloved cats helped our feline friends colonise the planet: (tags: cats Egypt history prehistory )
Cats are an extreme outlier among domestic animals: (tags: cats humans history )
Cells are very fast and crowded places: (tags: biology cell speed time )

There is an interesting piece here about the differences between Users and Programmers in how they interact with computers. It's written by a Programmer who teaches programming but it's less contemptuous of Users than those articles generally are.

http://www.pgbovine.net/two-cultures-of-computing.htm

I studied computing at school to the Scottish equivalent of A Level (two years post GCSE equivalent) and I did a bit of programming in versions of BASIC as part of that but never got into any compiled languages. So I have computing knowledge beyond the MS Office Training derided in the article but I am not a programmer.

I identify FIRMLY as a User and I remain unconvinced that it is worth the investment of *my* time to learn to program to achieve flexibility when the packages I use do 95% of what I need. This appalled the programmers I know who resent the restrictions of packages and are prepared to wrestle with minimal, antique UIs to achieve the results they need.

Yeah, programming isn't for everyone, and there's no reason people should be forced into it.

Interesting article. And yeah, I get frustrated by people who want to teach programming but can't explain why. And I'm not on either side of the fence in that article, because I'm one of the people in his postscript who uses nice visual tools most of the time.

That's a wonderful article. And the programming culture described there is ripe for disruption.

I'm an amateur programmer, but I remember and was slightly involved with a professional who had set up a beginners' class for kids to learn programming. It was all CLI based, but could've had a graphic component (in the output) if he'd wanted it to have it, but he didn't. I though this was daft, (no rewards at all for the kids' efforts), but he was the professional and so I didn't press the matter. The class failed dismally.

Yeah.

Some people seem to think that you need to leap into hardcore text-editing command line unpleasantness. Which, yeah, is going to put a lot of people off.

Interesting Links for 20-06-2017

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