(If you are too young to remember the song, “Money for nothing and your chicks for free”, I guess the title of this post is not nearly as amusing to you as it was to me, as my lovely daughter so unhelpfully pointed out.) Since I whined yesterday about Codecademy not providing much explanation of…
Seriously, someone has to say something about Codecademy ‘s courses. I feel like the little kid in the story The Emperor’s New Clothes. You know, the one where supposedly the clothes are made from cloth only really intelligent people can see, so no one wants to point out the emperor is actually naked. With a…
The downward mobility of Ph.D. students is like domestic violence in many ways. That is, the people in the “family” all know it is a fact of life, but they don’t talk about it among themselves, and to outsiders they pretend it doesn’t exist. The fact is, far more people will graduate from Harvard than…
I have been doing the Codecademy javascript lessons, along with 200,000 other people who joined up for Codeyear , resolving to complete a lesson a week and learn to code javascript better. So far, the lessons have been pretty easy. Inspired by Sheila Tobias’ research (see her book, They’re not dumb, they’re different ) suggesting…
I am pissed. As a small business owner, I am feeling very, very disappointed that there is certainly some law out there that would impose penalties if I drove on over to Riverside County and bitch-slapped Darrell Issa. I’ve grown cynical enough in my old age and after having run a small business since 1985…
As I mentioned previously, this week’s posts have been inspired by John D. Cook who generously does ELEVEN twitter tip accounts, Monday through Friday. Don’t get used to it, but since this is the beginning of the year, I thought I would start out all saintly and enthusiastic with some basic tips for people new…
I’ve spent about 35 years messing around with computers based on the assumption that most discoveries are not preceded by “Eureka!” but rather, “What the hell! May as well try it.” Having my new computer pretty much dissolve in smoke (less than a month after I bought it!), I decided to continue my analyses of…
I have been inspired by John D. Cook who does 11 tip accounts on twitter, each updated with a new tip, Monday through Friday. There is a Unix tool tip, an Algebra fact account, and nine others. How cool is that? Not being nearly as cool as him, I decided I’d just throw out a…
When I met my second husband, the entire contents of his kitchen cupboards was a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a loaded Magnum revolver. Despite that, he was extremely healthy. His reasoning was that he was a big, tough guy while viruses and bacteria were little bitty things, so…
The third of my four daughters was being questioned about her training before the last Olympics, and answered; My mother was the first American to win the world championships, so I called her for advice, and believe me, Mom is always brimming with advice, whether you want it or not … In fact,…