Friday, December 20, 2013

How climate change works

In honor of my friends Bailey and Stefan, I'm posting this video about how climate change works:



The site How Global Warming Works also has longer (and shorter) explanation videos. Compated to a bunch of glitter, the effects of climate change are really scary.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Happy birthday, Ms. Hopper

However evil Google might be, they do a few cool things. One of them is the periodic Google Doodle, which honors some notable person or event by changing the art on the Google search page.


Today's doodle honors the 107th birthday of computer pioneer Grace Murray Hopper. Among other things, Hopper is known for finding the first computer bug. (It was a moth, which accounts for the little thing that flies out of the animated doodle at the end.) More notably, Hopper was also one of the programmers of the Mark I computer, and the creator of the first computer code compiler.

The doodle also links to a set of search results about Hopper's life and career. My favorite of the things I found on this list was Hopper's appearance on Late Night with David Letterman just before her 80th birthday. Letterman is a bit patronizing, I think, but Hopper's wry sense of humor carries the evening:



Also -- apparently in Hopper's honor -- today's search page contains a link to another video about a project called Hour of Code. The idea is that everyone should learn simple computer programming skills. Here is the video and the page for the Hour of Code project.

Enjoy!