Meet Margaret Hamilton, the badass ’60s programmer who saved the moon landing

How have I never heard of her?  Oh yeah, “just a girl”.  Female programmers hold 10% of programming jobs, but at least when they do they change the world.  (I know one who put a go-kart on Mars.)  Read More…

ISU professor says Facebook not to blame for negative impact on grades

No, that isn’t giving you free reign to screw around all of the time.  This is a counter-study that shows that Facebook isn’t specifically to blame.  Any regular distraction can hurt your grades.  Imagine that while you are studying and doing homework, a mosquito bites you on the ear every 24 minutes.  That would suck.  The anticipation of the next one would suck.  You’d be unable to get deep enough in to your work to do anything productive.  That’s what having a tab open to Facebook or your phone next to you with a chat open does to you.  Your brain is a diver and the treasure of awesome smartness is on the bottom of the ocean.  If you keep breaking concentration to come back up, you’ll never get to the bottom.  Read More…

Scientists ‘freeze’ light for an entire minute

Slowing down light in Jello?  Old news.  Slowing down light in a vacuum?  So what.  Stopping light?  Stopping.  Light?  Read more…

How Are Student Loans Affecting the Well-Being of Young Adults?

Santiago Canyon College rules!  Community colleges are the best!  Everyone should go here and figure out what they want to do before they put themselves in debt pursuing a boondoggle degree at a fancy-pants university.  Read More…

How to interest girls in computer science and engineering? Shift the stereotypes

I thought The Big Bang Theory was a bad show because it makes fun of the geek culture it professes to represent.  I didn’t realize it was also actively hurting America by being such a prominent example of the forces that keep women out of STEM careers though.  The nerd stereotype of the 80’s needs to be put down.  Read More…

Improvements in Transistors Will Make Flexible Plastic Computers a Reality

… what more can I add to that?  I don’t care if it does anything useful.  That is just so cool.  Read More…

Massive chip design savings to be realized

This is a perfect example for my point that knowing how to learn is more important than what you learn.  Specifically in my class, I point out that students might not get a Java job, or a C++ job – they might have to wing it.  Here is a brand new… everything that could revolutionize… everything.  But to get in on it you’d have to show how well you picked up new languages, not how well you’ve picked up one language.  Or this language might be hooey and go nowhere.  Still neat.  Read More…

Scientists slow down the speed of light travelling in free space

I read long ago that we could measurably slow down the speed of light by beaming it through jell-o, and it makes a kind of common sense.  Not that anybody ever believed me.  But here scientists have slowed down the speed of light in a vacuum.  When you read E = mc^2, “c” is always read as “speed of light in a vacuum”.  Make sure you correct people and say “MAX speed of light in a vacuum” at your next science party.  Read More…

Control on shape of light particles opens the way to ‘quantum internet’

Communicating with electrons over copper wire?  Ancient.  Light through fiber optic cable?  Maybe that was good enough for your mom.  In quantum computing there is no transmission or wires at all.  If I set a bit here, it is already set over there.  And “over there” keeps getting “over there-ier”.  And by “bit” I mean “hella qubit”.  Instead of 0 or 1, a qubit is an analog bit anywhere on the surface of a radius 1 sphere.  Read More…

Gamification for behavior change: What is it and how is it useful?

I’ve always considered programming job categories to be Scientific, Productive, Entertainment, Zynga (bam!).  Educational games have been an outlier – they’d be neat to do, but they don’t make money so there aren’t any jobs.  But what about Socially Productive games?  Training life skills rather than math or spelling.  Read More…