"I love recursion by Luke Francl "

2022-09-02 16:42:44

recursion Super Frustrated sticker, Noe Valley, August 2022 — August 14, 2022 # In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat # I wrote in my 2020 books post about Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg, which is harsly critical of how reading is taught in the US. He is quoted in this article about a revision towards phonics by Lucy Calkins, one of the main proponents of balanced literacy:For children stuck on a difficult word, Professor Calkins said little about sounding-out and recommended a word-guessing method, sometimes called three-cueing. This practice is one of the most controversial legacies of balanced literacy. It directs children’s attention away from the only reliable source of information for reading a word: letters.Three-cueing is embedded in schools. Online, novice teachers can view thousands of how-to guides. In a 2020 video, a teacher tells children to use a picture to guess the word “car,” even though simple phonics make it decodable.Professor Calkins said word-guessing would not be included in her revised curriculum. But in some ways, she is offering a hybrid of her old and new methods. In a sample of the new materials that she provided to The Times, teachers are told that students should first decode words using “slider power” — running their fingers under letters and sounding them out — but then check for mistakes using “picture power.”Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said that while he found some of the revisions “encouraging,” he was concerned that “objectionable” concepts remain….When Professor Calkins was asked what changed her mind about the science of reading, she cited, without defensiveness, several experts who have criticized her work: Professor Seidenberg, author of the influential book “Language at the Speed of Sight,” and Emily Hanford, a journalist who has investigated the shortcomings of reading instruction. — July 31, 2022 Almira Township Hall, Lake Ann, Michigan, June 2022 — July 30, 2022 # Number square template # We’ve been playing card games with our daughter lately (her current favorites are For Sale and Sushi Go), and she’s gotten a lot of practice adding up points (something I’m terrible at…having your six year old do mental arithmetic faster than you is rather humbling).I wanted to show her how a number square can be used to help learn addition, subtraction, and multiplication, so I searched for one online. After one too many ad-ridden sign-up-to-download site, I got frustrated and just made my own. I whipped up a quick grid in Omnigraffle in less time than it took to sort through the Pintrest spam in the search results. Here’s what it looks like for multiplication, including my daughter’s addition to the rules of multiplication: HAVE FUNWhen putting this post together, I realized I can’t spell “commutative” ?‍♂️The PDF is available for download. It includes three versions: a 0-11 grid, a 1-12 grid, and a blank grid. I hope someone else finds it useful. — July 25, 2022 Three interesting refrains of Coders at Work # Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming is one of my favorite books about programming as mentioned in my 2012 book list and my post insights from Coders at Work.Ben Kuhn, currently CTO of Wave, extracted three things that nearly every person interviewed agreed on:The importance of unpacking abstractionsCode is written to be readRewriting for simplicity — April 17, 2022 Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No # Use what you like, but I’ve never embraced the trend of programming font ligatures – they just look weird to me and I find them hard to read.You can make the same argument against the Markdown processing used by this website’s software. It makes mistakes, too, resulting in inappropriate quotation marks and apostrophes. — April 17, 2022 Do You Want a Boring Floor Lamp or an Ugly Floor Lamp? # Turns out floor lamps are a difficult engineering problem, and the top of the market (which the rest copies) doesn’t need good floor lamps, because the rich invest in hanging lamps and sconces. — April 17, 2022 Morro Bay smokestacks at night, July 2021 (see ’em while you still can) — February 13, 2022 # Request bodies in GET requests # When I started at Swiftype, I was surprised that our API allowed request bodies in GET requests. I didn’t realize you could do that. The HTTP RFC, however, says that a request body “might cause some existing implementations to reject the request”, so I figured it must be OK if our implementation didn’t. I even obliquely referred to the request body in a GET request in my article about implementing an HTTP server.Evert Pot, in honor of his most popular Stack Overflow question revisited this question, 12 years later, and provides a wealth of detail about what this really means, and why you shouldn’t include request bodies in your GET requests. — February 6, 2022 After years of doubts, hopes grow that nuclear fusion is finally for real and could help address climate change # It’s been compared to everything from a holy grail to fool’s gold: the ultimate solution to clean, readily available energy or an expensive delusion diverting scarce money and brainpower from the urgent needs of rapidly addressing climate change.For decades, scientists have been trying to harness the energy that powers stars, a complex, atomic-level process known as nuclear fusion, which requires heating a plasma fuel to more than 100 million degrees Celsius and finding a way to contain and sustain it. In theory, fusion could yield inexpensive and unlimited zero-emissions electricity, without producing any significant radioactive waste, as fission does in traditional nuclear power plants.A range of daunting scientific and engineering hurdles has long made that possibility, at best, a distant promise. But now, after breakthroughs this year at MIT and elsewhere, scientists — and a growing number of deep-pocketed investors — insist that fusion is for real and could start sending power to electricity grids in about a decade.Man, I hope this pans out. To actually make a dent in climate change, we need to not just replace carbon-producing energy sources with zero carbon, but we need to dramatically increase the amount of energy available.Related: Martin Kleppmann reviews The Future of Fusion Energy. — January 3, 2022 Recursion is the personal blog of Luke Francl, published sporadically but continuously since 2002. Learn more. 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