David Warlick – Page 2

Website Excavations 1

I’ve been working on some web building that, if successful, I’ll share later. But part of the process has been conducting some excavation or digital archeology. I’ve been mining through my original Landmarks for Schools website, looking for old files that, when updated, were merely renamed instead of replaced or deleted. These reveal images of what the pages looked like 10, 15 or 20 years ago.

With special chisels and brushes and even some dental tools, I’ve been thrilled to see those old pages again. Today, I want to share, with any of you web nerds and code geeks, the about page of Landmarks for Schools. Here is an image and here is a link to the page where you can load it into your browser and read it.

Learning Doesn’t Ever Slow Down

I had a conversation yesterday with my neighbor, Paul Gilster, of Centauri Dreams. He comes over about every other week and we talk about our histories, families, space and tech stuff, and it often erupts into some pretty insightful observations – if only to us.

But we both agreed that as we are getting older, our learning has actually increasing rather dramatically. Of course, we are also forgetting a lot more as well.

But one of the truisms I’ve concluded from a career of learning and teaching is that something learned and used once, can easily be relearned, growing our life long toolset.

Numbers don’t Lie! But…

I follow a subreddit called “DataIsBeautiful.” It’s about data visualization, which I love because it helps numbers to tell their story, and numbers don’t lie.

People can use them to distort truth by the data they leave out, the scales they use or their statistical methods (I think it might be smarter for us to teach more statistics and less algebra). The editorial notes (in blue & red) indicate an obvious agenda behind this display, which, in itself would not disqualify it. But this author committed the deadly sin. He didn’t include the source for his data.

YouTube Channels about History

Here are several YouTube channels that tell stories about our history. There were compiled by Reddit user, Texas_Rockets.

The Viking Warrior

In 1878, archaeologists excavating the Viking town in current day Sweden, uncovered an ornate 10th-century burial tomb. Containing a full set of weaponry, including a sword, spear, armor piercing arrows and shield, as well as the skeletons of two horses and a game board, archeologists excitedly announced that they had discovered the tomb of a great Viking warrior.

Of course, being the Victorian Era, it was assumed that the warrior was a man.

That story persisted until 2017, when The American Journal of Physical Antropology announced that comprehensive genomic sequencing had revealed that the warrior was, instead, a woman.

Even then, there was a backlash, suggesting mistakes in the sampling and sequencing. A second report, published in Antiquity, confirmed the 2017 conclusion. The author acknowledged that it was extremely difficult to assess aspects such as gender roles and identity from cultures that existed so long ago.

MARS

2016 TV Series produced by National Geographic

I finished a two-season TV show last night, “MARS.” What’s most interesting about the program is its play between documentary and drama, separated by 17 years. The drama is a mission to the red planet, the intent of which is starting a colony. There are no return tickets. They will either find water and protection from solar radiation or they won’t, and will perish. With two seasons, the outcome of is apparent.

Season one is on Netflix and season two on the National Geographic Channel

The documentary part is mostly interviews with persons involved in planning, designing and testing for future exploration and colonization of Mars. They include Elon Musk, Andy Weir, Robert Zubrin, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Eventually the science colony, which is supported by the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF), a multinational funding and governing organization, is joined by a second colony, Lukrum. A resource extraction corporation, Lukrum has powerful interests in nearly every country represented in IMSF, and they use that leverage to promote and prioritize their mining activities on Mars.

The miners are all likable characters as are the scientists (with one exception) and they get along together gangbusters, as one would expect for people who are ultimately isolated from Earth for years. It’s only when commercial activities collide with scientific discovery that things break down. Even at that, the personal fondness and even trust between the commanders and their crews mostly continue.

Of course, the 2016 interviews and documentary footage shifts its focus to our planet’s ongoing competition between corporate interests and the common good, and that there is little reason to believe that the same will not happen as we become an interplanetary race. These points may be handled a bit heavy-handedly by the show, though I don’t dispute the sentiments, especially considering how much space exploration is being promoted today by commercial organizations.

The show ends on a positive note, especially as one of my favorite characters survives, a short-tempered Spaniard who leaves every conflict spouting rapid Spanish exclamation, Ricky Ricardo style.

Computing: 1980 Style

Small Book Image — Click to visit the book’s web site.

I saw my first personal computer in 1981. At that time, the closest you could come to a computer store (where I lived) was a back corner of the local Radio Shack store. There you found models of their TRS-80 computers, offering all manner of unimagined possibilities – but almost no software. Ready to buy and load (via audio cassettes) were a basic word processor (Scriptsit), a spreadsheet program (Visicalc) and a handful of games, including Galxian, Asteroids, Targ and Zork.

But we didn’t buy computers because we wanted to play games or even to word process. Have you ever seen the print from the early dot-matrix printers? We bought computers because we wanted to learn about this new thing that was “going to change everything.”

Unsurprisingly, we had to go to print in order to learn and a few early magazines was the bast place to go. Even then, the gestation time of new books was way to long to be reliably up-to-date. New issues of zines were frequent and regular, and among them were BYTE, PC, Compute and even Family Computing.

We learned the latest that was known about these early TRS-80, Atari, Apple and Commodore computers. But better, was the programming tips we could learn by typing code that was included on the zines’ pages.

A Home Accounting program for the Commodore Pet computer
Submitted by Robert Baker of Atco, NJ
January 1980

Of course, the programs never worked the first time. It was impossible to key the code in without mistakes. So we spent as much time going back and decoding the programs, OR we taught ourselves how to write our own programs.

😉

Twice Exceptional

Attending a meeting yesterday, regarding Western Carolina University’s College of Education and Allied Professions, I learned a new term, twice-exceptional.

In education’ese, “exceptional” children are usually students with some learning difficulty, such as A.D.D., dyslexia, hearing impairment, emotional disturbance – or are academically talented in some way.

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When I asked, the speak explained that a “Twice-Exceptional” student is one who has some learning disability but is also academically and/or intellectually gifted.

I suspect that this describes a lot of extraordinarily accomplished individuals, who later admit to being poor performers in their school experience, i.e. Richard Branson, Charles Schwab and Steve Jobs. Sadly, this also, more than likely describes a lot of wasted talent caused by our assigning opportunity-limiting labels to children who are simply divergent learners, children who are not suited to regimented learning environments.