teaching machines

Madeup Workshop

Biography It all started with the school bus. I lived twelve miles from town, and every morning I got on the bus at 7 AM. I watched every other kid get picked up. In the afternoon, I watched every other kid get dropped off. At 4 PM, I was home. School started at 8 AM […]

Rejection from Future Programming Workshop

The Future Programming Workshop solicited demos of tools that I understood would produce the next generation of screencasts. Here’s the solicitation from Jonathan Edwards: The revolution will be screencast Richard Gabriel and I are planning a workshop at SPLASH focused on screencast demos: The Future Programming Workshop. This will be a workshop in the sense of a […]

Professor vs. NDA

Once I signed an non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Someone in my community was looking for a student to work on a mobile app and wanted to describe the project to me. To be friendly, I signed. Afterward, I felt inauthentic. I never wish to sign another. My reasons are several: NDAs with faculty are one-way. I’m […]

Mathematician Grapples

Laurent Schwartz was a French mathematician and human rights activist. He’s not the Schwarz of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. In fact, I don’t know if I’m familiar with any of his math work, which was way over my head. Nevertheless, I just finished his biography, A Mathematician Grapples with His Century. His life was fascinating. He was […]