That acupuncture appointment seemed to do me some good -- my arms are feeling the best they've been in about two weeks. They're still a little sore, but I think there's some improvement which is particular easy to notice. I'm going back on Thursday, and I have to try to find some insurance papers, because treatment over there might be covered by insurance.
Our Consensus At Lawyerpoint BPDG web log has been a big hit, with regular articles; there is RSS for syndication if you want Consensus At Lawyerpoint to appear on your own web diary or wherever you tend to collect RSS. Of course, we need all the publicity help we can get.
We're trying to get ahold of Valenti's 1982 testimony (the "Boston strangler" bit) and publish it on the web. Amazingly, it's nowhere to be found, unless you happen to have the Congressional Record around. Our law library is not quite there yet.
I had lunch with Danny O'Brien on Wednesday and talked about the prospect of a "computer literacy" in which most everyone is taught to program a computer (as most everyone is taught to read and write, and to do arithmetic and algebra). I talked a lot about how I came to be a programmer, and what programming meant to me, and how I thought other people thought about programming, and what might be some of the political implications resulting from the relatively obscure place of programming in our culture. Also, what would be different if programming ability were widespread. Also, what kinds of "digital divides" exist, and why the percentage of students who have an opportunity to use computers in schools may be a red herring.
I'm getting increasingly sympathetic to Cliff Stoll's ideas about computers in education. Or maybe I'm not particularly sympathetic to them, if I can wish that every student might be taught to program. Maybe I'm just unhappy with the status quo and with the fixed-function device and the compromises which have made a computer into a fixed-function device in so many lives and so many classrooms.
(A thought now races through my mind of a January morning and a sermon I seem to have preached. She was wearing blue jeans, if I remember anything at such a distance, and I know I had on slacks with funny pockets, that some people might keep tools inside of. In the morning, putting off what I really had to say, postponing it, fearing it, I preached about tinkering, technology, community, generality, the long-lost ideals of scientists and hobbyists, about what we had to lose if we lost generality. I preached about the end-to-end model and, as Alan Perlis said, "the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more". I preached about what the advance of technology meant to me as a person and where it touched me and who wanted to threaten it, and the wickedness, the spiritual deadness which was prepared to stand up against that light, to obstruct it... O techne, o techne! And that was self-expression, so that she might see me properly for a moment.)
Later on, Peter talked to me about explicit and implicit curricula. The explicit curriculum is what's being taught -- what subjects -- and the implicit curriculum is how, and what associated skills and attitudes and behaviors are being taught along with it, and through it. It seems to be a kind of meta-curriculum. This is an interesting idea. To compare one implicit curriculum with another, I guess you'd need (SICP joke coming up!) a metacurricular evaluator.
All this reminds me that Doctor Dobbs Journal has printed my letter to the editor in the most current print edition. Good news! Now I must be a real programmer, or something.
My letter contemplates the impossibility of doing DRM in software on a general-purpose computer. This is such a frequent topic that maybe it should be a button: "Ask Me About the Impossibility of Digital Rights Management in Software on a General-Purpose Computer!"
Wired still hasn't printed my DRM-related letter to the editors. Maybe they were scared off by the shrink-wrap contract on the envelope it was mailed in.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
