Oliver Steele

I used to be an unrepetant nineteenth century grammarian. I never used a preposition to end a sentence; I took care to never never to split an infinitive; I knew “who” from “whom”; and I never, ever, used “they” for “he or she”.
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I recently wrote a pretty-printer for LZX, in XSLT. Here is the source code to the Laszlo Weather application; click on “View Source” on the Laszlo Demos page for other examples.

I had been expecting baby talk versions of complex XML formats to emerge for sometime now. It hasn’t happened yet so I am left with scratching my head. The idea is simple enough, take a complex format and create a user-friendly version that maps to the more complex version via an XSLT file.

if the problem is authoring a target format with redundant structure, where the extra structure makes the format more complex than it needs to be, then XSLT is a good solution. (If the extra structure weren’t redundant, an XSLT file couldn’t add it.) If the problem is the general verbosity of XML at representing any particular vocabulary, because of its impoverished grammar and punctuation, then you need another solution.
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The first third-party Laszlo application is available on the web! The Behr ColorSmart color selector is available at http://www.behr.com (as well as kiosks in Home Depots around the country, where it’s been available for several months now). It’s unreal seeing this finally go live after seeing it from the inside last year and after all the work to build the initial version of the product while this was in development — at times I felt like we were running ahead of the train, trying to lay new track before it reached the end.

I just finished moving some heavy furniture around within my apartment. This was harder than it sounds, because I’m not allowed to put a heavy load through my spine. I had to come up with ways of lifting and moving furniture that transmitted the forces across different parts of my body instead. I ended up sliding around on my back on a towel on the floor, and pushing the furniture above me, so that I could use my arm and chest strength instead of my back.

If you’d asked me beforehand, back surgery and the following limitations would have sounded like a terrible burden to live with. Actually, it’s been a lot of fun to evaluate my body for the first time as a complex system, and try to hack it — to figure out what it can do. I realize this is part of being a jock, which I missed out on in adolescence. I had never realized that the things I’m good at — understanding complex systems, building things with them, and looking for loopholes — were good for what I thought of as the opposite of an analytical activity as well.

Marvin tells a story of a friend of his who had a stroke. For more than a year, he couldn’t walk. But a year after that, he walked into Marvin’s office. Marvin asked him how he did it. “One day I was just thinking of a piece of music”, he said, “and I noticed that my toe twitched. I tried to think of the same music again, and it twitched again. So I tried thinking of different things, to see what would make different parts move. It took me about a year.” “That sounds excruciating,” Marvin told him. “On the contrary. It was the most fun I’ve ever had.”

I just got back from a week with the family at Disney World. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The surface part of my mind was completely taken in by the sensation of being in the jungle (at Animal Kingdom) and in a variety of countries (Epcot), while my analytic self was taken with admiration at how well run it was: the depth of architecture, landscaping, design, marketing, and business operations. Like looking at an Impressionist painting from far enough to see the light, and then close enough to apprehend its construction.

The behavior of a capitalist engine when exposed to a huge revenue flux, like the behavior of various geometries in a high-speed wind tunnel, is awe-inspiring in its use of these forces to compute optimal solutions to complex problems, and in the energies it directs against them. When we walked into Typhoon Lagoon, a cheerful employee asked us our zip code, and afterwards, my son asked me why. I explained to him my guess that it was so that they could calculate the sensitivity of regional turnout to marketing dollars. “But that’s an experiment”, he said, “that would take years!” Exactly.

Seymour Papert used to tell a story contrasting the practices of medicine and education, in order to illustrate how little the latter has improved. Place a physician from the previous century in a modern operating room and he¹ won’t have a clue about what to do. Transport a teacher forward in time and they’ll fit right in. The moral is that the practice of medicine has made great strides during the last century; the practice of education hasn’t progressed at all.

I used to believe this story, and maybe it was true in the sixties. But in 1998, when I was looking for school for my rising kindergartner, I sat in on a number of elementary school curriculum nights. Among them was a presentation by the math teacher Bob Lawler² at Shady Hill School. This was the first time I’d set foot in an elementary school in 25 years, and things had changed. Math today, at least in the better schools, is taught nothing the way it was when I was a child.

Since then, I’ve had four years of indirect experience with the math curriculum at the Milton Academy Lower School). At these schools, math facts (addition, multiplication tables) are taught in second and third grade, but prior to that and continuing through it there are open-ended group projects, grounded both in other subject areas and in fun problems — the types of problems that mathematicians I know like to attack.

Grade Two for Gauss

One question from my son’s second grade was how many candles are needed for all the nights of Hanukkah. This is the same question Gauss answered when he was seven. Given the question in a context for creativity and with group collaboration, several of the second-graders came up with similar closed-form solutions.

Fibs for Small Fries

Another question was how many ways there are to roof a row of houses. The houses are connected, like brownstones in the city. There’s two styles of roof: a narrow roof covers one house; a wide roof covers two. There’s two ways to roof a row of houses.

How many ways are there to roof a row of five houses?

I believe this question was for fifth graders.

Getting Over Mr. Right

Sarah Allen writes about a story from John Holt’s book How Children Fail. The story itself is fascinating. (Read Sarah’s blog entry for more.) The larger context is the point that children are taught to play the “right answer game” instead of to learn how to learn.

Although I’m sure this is true in many classrooms, it’s no longer the state of the art in teaching methodologies. (It was never the state of the art among individual excellent teachers.) I think many parents, like myself five years ago, are limited to what they know from decades-old books and experiences or exposure to mediocre schools, and don’t have any idea of how far educational best practices have come.

Footnotes

¹ “He” is a safe, although not universal, bet for a nineteenth century physician.

² Not to be confused with Marvin Minsky’s student Bob Lawler, who also studies the epistemology of math.