Things I Didn't Tweet This Month

• Classifying Data

• Libraries Tell It Like It Is

• Late Binding

• Is Code-Along Formative Assessment?

• Making It Work in Practice

• Launched instructor training at RStudio

• Greenspun’s Eleventh Rule: any sufficiently complicated text formatting system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementation of half of LaTeX.

• I can’t stop wondering what phones and tablets and laptops would look like if Ikea had swooped in and scooped up Nokia and was now in the electronics business. They have the design skills, the supply chains, the distribution, and the marketing, and personally, I’d be very happy to buy a phone with a polished pine case.

• Open source and its commercial users summarized in one short video.

• I really enjoyed Understanding How We Learn; I hope that one day we’ll know enough about the psychology of programming that someone will be able to write Understanding How We Code.

• We’re not going to get “CS for All” unless we get a decent education for all; since I want the first, I’m working on the second. (See also Pasi Sahlberg’s essay explaining why the US can’t replicate the successes of Finland’s educational system.)

• Of the 53 names on the February 1 list of instructors and helpers for upcoming Carpentry workshops, I only knew 8.

• Saying, “If you need to comment your code, you should write clearer code,” is like saying, “If you need to use words in your proof, you should write clearer formulas.”

• These women are braver than I’ve ever had to be, and I am ashamed that my country is still happy to do business with their oppressors.

• I would really like tech book publishers to release stats on the proportion of male and female authors they’ve published.

• “I have a love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

• “When people talk about traveling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks that they can radically change the future by doing something small.” – http://just-shower-thoughts.tumblr.com/

• “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” – Stephen Jay Gould

• I’m no good at writing villains.

• Rebel Against the Kings of Babylon

• The truth (still) points to itself.

• You can run JavaScript code using Node from inside RMarkdown documents by using a {node} language specifier.

• Libraries are cool.

• Some day there’s going to be an even grittier reboot of Battlestar Galactica.

• Classic.

• I met a guy a couple of years ago who had “Stay Hungry” tattooed on his arm, and it’s bothered me ever since. The United States is the richest country in human history, but more than 15 million of its children are malnourished. I think it’s something to be ashamed of, not something to cling to as proof of sincerity and dedication. If you’re going to get a tattoo, I think “End Hunger” is a better motto, because that’s worth fighting for.

• “You have the kind of terror you get when you drop your computer and you think it’s broken forever.” (My daughter describing the appearance of a tentacled monster while DM’ing her first game of Dungeons & Dragons.)