What is your name for the playground game in which one child chases the rest and anyone who is touched becomes the pursuer?
Pretty accurate for me, although my answers to some of the questions – representing the diversity of places around Great Britain that I’ve lived and some of the words I’ve picked up
along the way – clearly threw it off from time to time!
Exeter Gardens, 37A Oxford Rd, Kidlington OX5 2BP, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Moderately well-tended but short walk between Oxford Road and Exeter Park, squeezed between Exeter Hall and The Key doctors practice. Nice decking and benches, but otherwise nothing to
recommend it except as a route to the park itself.
Grovelands Play Area, Kidlington OX5 1AZ, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Small play area with the bare essentials for keeping a small child distracted: swingset, roundabout, small climbing frame with slide. All metal equipment, so gets cold in the winter!
Might as well make the extra walk to nearby Exeter Park!
Exeter Park Play Area, Exeter Close, Kidlington OX5 1AB, United Kingdom.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Since the 2018 renovation of the play area and the surrounding park, this has gone from being a good to a great place to take small children. Play equipment includes a well-equipped
sandpit, multiple climbing frames with monkey bars, firemans poles, and slides, “little ones” area with miniscule frames, musical instruments, see-saw, swings of various kinds including
a large tyre swing, rope climbing frames, and a “racing” pair of ziplines. Exercise equipment is also available nearby, as are plenty of benches including picnic benches and a
reasonable-sized (free) car park.
Excellent, conveniently central play area for Kidlington. Renovated in 2018 with new play and exercise equipment including trampolines, not one but two ziplines, and a wonderfully
imaginatively-imagined sandpit, it’s equipped to keep little ones entertained for hours. There’s also a large field for sports/dog-walking, a community space, and an adequate amount of
(free) car parking.
A surprisingly wide selection of goods available at just about any time you might need it, served by friendly staff. Plenty of parking if coming by car, conveniently just off the main
road through Grovelands estate.
If you google “learn to code,” the first result you see is a link to Codecademy’s website. If there is a modern equivalent to the Computer Literacy Project, something with
the same reach and similar aims, then it is Codecademy.
“Learn to code” is Codecademy’s tagline. I don’t think I’m the first person to point this out—in fact, I probably read this somewhere and I’m now ripping it off—but there’s something
revealing about using the word “code” instead of “program.” It suggests that the important thing you are learning is how to decode the code, how to look at a screen’s worth of Python
and not have your eyes glaze over. I can understand why to the average person this seems like the main hurdle to becoming a professional programmer. Professional programmers spend all
day looking at computer monitors covered in gobbledygook, so, if I want to become a professional programmer, I better make sure I can decipher the gobbledygook. But dealing with
syntax is not the most challenging part of being a programmer, and it quickly becomes almost irrelevant in the face of much bigger obstacles. Also, armed only with knowledge of a
programming language’s syntax, you may be able to read code but you won’t be able to write code to solve a novel problem.
…
So very much this! I’ve sung a song many times about teaching people (and especially children) to code and bemoaned the barriers in the way of the next (and current!) generation of programmers, but a large part of it – in this country at least – seems to come down to this
difference in attitude. Today, we’ve stopped encouraging people to try to learn to “use computers” (which was, for the microcomputer era, always semi-synonymous with programming owing
to the terminal interface) and to “program”, but we’ve instead started talking about “learning to code”. And that’s problematic, because programming != coding!
I’m a big fan of understanding the fundamentals, and sometimes that means playing with things that aren’t computers: looms, recipe cards, board games, pencils and paper,
algebra, envelopes… all of these things can be excellent tools for teaching programming but have nothing to do with learning coding.
Let’s stop teaching people to code and start teaching them to program, again, okay?
Mark Zuckerberg says regulators and governments should play a more active role in controlling internet content.
In an op-ed published
in the Washington Post, Facebook’s chief says the responsibility for monitoring harmful content is too great for firms alone.
He calls for new laws in four areas: “Harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.”
It comes two weeks after a gunman used the site to livestream his attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.
“Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree,” Mr Zuckerberg writes, adding that Facebook was “creating an independent body so people can appeal
our decisions” about what is posted and what is taken down.
…
An interesting move which puts Zuckerberg in a parallel position to Bruce Schneier, who’s recently (and especially in his latest book) stood in opposition to a significant number of computer security experts (many of whom are of the “crypto-anarchist”
school of thought) also pushed for greater regulation on the Internet. My concern with both figureheads’ proposals comes from the inevitable difficulty in enforcing Internet-wide laws:
given that many countries simply won’t enact, or won’t effectively enforce, legislation of the types that either Zuckerberg nor Schneier suggest, either (a) companies intending
to engage in unethical behaviour will move to – and profit in – those countries, as we already see with identity thieves in Nigeria, hackers in Russia, and patent infringers in China…
or else (b) countries that do agree on a common framework will be forced to curtail Internet communications with those countries, leading to a fragmented and ultimately
less-free Internet.
Neither option is good, but I still back these proposals in principle. After all: we don’t enact other internationally-relevant laws (like the GDPR, for example) because we expect to achieve 100% compliance across the globe – we do so because they’re the right thing to do to protect
individuals and economies from harm. Little by little, Internet legislation in general (possibly ignoring things like the frankly silly EU cookie regulation and parts of the
controversial new EU directives on copyright) makes the Internet a safer place for citizens of Western countries. There are still a huge number of foreign threats like scammers and
malware authors as as well as domestic lawbreakers, but increasing the accountability of large companies is, at this point, a far bigger concern.
“The three parents share incubation responsibilities for the eggs — three this year — as they have in previous years,” according to Out There With the
Birds, the blog of Bird Watcher’s Digest. “Like their relationship, their history is complicated.”
…
So… two eagles, Valor I (male) and Hope (female) raised some chicks in a nest. Then Valor II (another male) came along and tried to displace Valor I, but he wouldn’t go, so the pair of
them both ultimately cooperated in raising Hope’s chicks, even after Hope was driven away by some other eagles. Later, another female, Starr, turned up and Valor I and Valor II
are collectively incubating three eggs of hers in the nest.
I’ve known (human) polyamorous networks with origin stories less-complicated than this.
“aisatsana” is the final track off Aphex Twin’s 2012 release, Syro. A departure from the synthy dance tunes which make up the majority of
Aphex Twin’s catalog, aisatsana is quiet, calm, and perfect for listening to during activities which require concentration. But with a measly running time just shy of five and a half
minutes, the track isn’t nearly long enough to sustain a session of reading or coding. Playing the track on repeat isn’t satisfactory; exact repetition becomes monotonous quickly. I
wished there were an hour-long version of the track, or even better, some system which could generate an endless performance of the track without repetition. Since I build software
for a living, I decided to try creating such a system.
…
If you’d like to try the experience before you read this whole article (although you should read the article), listen here. I’m sure you’ll agree that it sounds like “more aistsana” without being aistsana.
Spoiler: the secret is Markov chains of musical phrases.
Revealed by Google in a submission to the Unicode Consortium last week, these changes signal a new
direction from Google which has in recent years played ball with other vendors in overlooking Unicode guidelines, in favor of cross platform compatibility.
Above: Google will introduce a distinct appearance for emojis which don’t specify any gender in 2019. Image: Google designs / Emojipedia composite.
In giving public notice via Unicode, Google hopes that other vendors will join them in this effort to standardize many of the emoji which don’t specify a gender.
few weeks back, we were chatting about the architecture of the Individual Electoral Registration web service. We started discussing the pros and cons of an approach that would provide a significantly different
interaction for any people not running JavaScript.
“What proportion of people is that?” an inquisitive mind asked.
Silence.
We didn’t really have any idea how many people are experiencing UK government web services without the enhancement of JavaScript. That’s a bad thing for a team that is evangelical
about data driven design, so I thought we should find out.
The answer is:
1.1% of people aren’t getting Javascript enhancements (1 in 93)
…
This article by the GDS is six years old now, but its fundamental point is still as valid as ever: a small proportion
(probably in the region of 1%) of your users won’t experience some or all of the whizzy Javascript stuff on your website, and it’s not because they’re a power user who disables
Javascript.
There are so many reasons a user won’t run your Javascript, including:
They’re using a browser that doesn’t support Javascript (or doesn’t support the version you’re using)
They, or somebody they share their device with, has consciously turned-off Javascript either wholesale or selectively, in order to for example save bandwidth, improve speed,
reinforce security, or improve compatibility with their accessibility technologies
They’re viewing a locally-saved, backed-up, or archived version of your page (possibly in the far future long after your site is gone)
Their virus scanner mis-classified your Javascript as potentially malicious
One or more of your Javascript files contains a bug which, on their environment, stops execution
One or more of your Javascript files failed to be delivered, for example owing to routing errors, CDN downtime,
censorship, cryptographic handshake failures, shaky connections, cross-domain issues, stale caches…
On their device, your Javascript takes too long to execute or consumes too many resources and is stopped by the browser
Fundamentally, you can’t depend on Javascript and so you shouldn’t depend on it being there, 100% of the time, when it’s possible not to. Luckily, the Web already
gives us all the tools we need to develop the vast, vast majority of web content in a way that doesn’t depend on Javascript. Back in the 1990s we just called it “web
development”, but nowadays Javascript (and other optional/under-continuous-development web technologies like your favourite so-very-2019 CSS hack) is so ubiquitous that we give it the special name “progressive enhancement” and make a whole practice out of it.
The Web was designed for forwards- and backwards-compatibility. When you break that, you betray your users and you make work for yourself.
(by the way: I know I plugged the unpoly framework already, the other day, but you should
really give it a look if you’re just learning how to pull off progressive enhancement)
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