How sad is this?

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.”  If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired.

Whatever happened to the profession of computer programmer/analyst? The guy who understood enough about computers, computability and algorithms to actually save you money by suggesting a better solution (better being faster, cheaper, less consuming of whatever resources cost you a lot of money, etc)?

How many are rolling in their graves today?

Papert suggested, amongst other things, that many children are bored with school and bored with being talked down to by educators. Since this had been my experience through much of school up until university, the book struck a chord with me. It came out at a time when I was at a cross-roads in my life. I wasn’t very pleased with the formal education I had received and I spent a lot of time thinking about how we educate our children. Papert held out some hope that we might break a couple of important ruts I felt our education system had gotten into.

Papert also suggested that personal computers would become so inexpensive and ubuiquitous that little children would have them, and spend some time suggesting how we might best accomplish that. Personal computers were, at the time, only for geeks like me (I built one myself, from components) and were unknown by (and unusable for) the non-geek.

And then I heard nothing more about Papert, his LOGO turtles or any of that.  For years.

Until 2 Christmases ago … when I stumbled across a WiFi robotic toy with vision, touch and sound sensors. Made by Lego, it’s their “Mindstorms” line. It’s amazing (and quite expensive for a child, which kind of misses the point). You can see it here: http://www.legomindstorms.com/ I nearly bought myself one, until my wife pointed out that the dog would probably pick a fight with it, and the dog would likely win.

It turns out, Papert hasn’t been idle all this time, just moving in circles that don’t touch me. He wrote a book called The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. You can read about it here:  http://worldwideworkshop.org/programs/past-programs/connected-family/connected-family

When I went to kindergarden, I was 5. I could already read. My teachers were upset because they felt it was their place to teach me to read and my parents, not being trained educators, couldn’t do as good a job as they could. I can still read now, so my parents can’t have done all that bad a job.

My grandson is now 3 1/2. He uses a computer regularly to play various kinds of eye-hand co-ordination games. He can type on a special kids keyboard.He’s way more advanced than I was at 5 when I got to kindergarten and my parents received their reprimand.

My grandson will be 4 around next Christmas. Maybe he’ll be getting one of these under the tree. Or should I say “we”?

Some early clippings and pictures of the original LOGO turtles can be found here: http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=1711

It’s a nice feature, except for the small problem that pages it was offering to translate were already in English.

It seems Google had decided, somehow, that my native language was Spanish. I’m not sure where it got this from, but it’s wrong.

So I told it my native language was English, and it went away.

Until the next time I restarted the browser. At which point it started doing it again.

Once again my native language was Spanish. So I changed it back to English and, for good measure, told it never to translate pages that are already in English.

So we co-existed peacefully for an hour or so, until I closed my browser and reopened it. It again started offering to translate English pages for me. Sure enough, it thought I was a Spanish speaker again. I turned that back to English, told it never to translate from English again, and for good measure, turned the entire feature off.

Would you care to guess what happened next?

The next time I started my browser, it gratuitously offered to translate from English again. No amount of turning this feature off worked.

So I uninstalled it instead!

Google has more than 10,000 employees worldwide. A significant number of them are programmers and IT support staff. Impressive, isn’t it?