My neighborhood school issues Chromebooks to all kids starting in sixth grade.

It's been an interesting, um, pedagogical experiment.

In my kid's friend group (now 7th grade), the usage is all over the map. Some kids write C++ code or do Tinkercad. Others watch YouTube from 8am to the closing bell, during class and lunch. Still more spend their lesson time on Minecraft Educational edition.

(YouTube is a bit of a loophole... Since some teachers use it for lesson material, the school's WiFi leaves it unblocked. So YouTube Shorts stands in for IG Reels and TikTok, which are blocked.)

I planted asclepias incarnata here in my south bay garden and orange aphids killed it within a month. Maybe not a great choice anyways, since it requires a lot of water.

I planted some in my yard up in New England, where it’s native. It’s spread nicely, and seems to act as a “sink” for aphids, keeping them away from other plants. They flock to it but don’t appear to seriously damage the plant’s ability to do its thing.

I run the standalone Scratch program on an offline raspberry PI. My kids enjoy it. The best thing about offline is that they have to create something to play a game.

We formerly used Scratch online, starting in 2nd grade at school. It had good and bad aspects. It was great to follow griffpatch, who has really sophisticated coding tutorials. On the downside, they got creepy comments on their Scratch projects. There were also various ruses to get the kids to upvote projects, typical social media crap.

Also, being on the Scratch community means my kids could just search for someone else's clone of (insert game here). So Scratch can turn into just another way to play video games. With offline, that's not an option.

If your kids are good at self-regulation, online can be fine, though.

I'm in the same boat with Google Play Music and Youtube Music.

I switched to AIMP and have been gradually moving files over.

> The other grant will examine how the protein lactoferrin – a novel protein found in human and cow’s milk – may help improve the intestinal absorption of iron

That's interesting that a milk ingredient boosts iron absorption.

A dietitian recently suggested I serve iron-rich and calcium-rich foods at separate meals. They said that calcium in milk can inhibit iron absorption.

> This map shows a slice of our Universe. It was created from astronomical data taken night after night over a period of 15 years using a telescope in New Mexico, USA.

So, this is the slice that the telescope was observing.

+1

Sequence diagrams force you to think about the flow of control in a system.

When reviewing draft designs, I sometimes ask the author to convert a simple boxes-and-lines architecture diagram to a sequence diagram. It can be revealing.

I can relate. It's an essential communication tool. When discussing asynchronous events with a colleague, there is a point in the discussion when it becomes almost impossible to explain it in words and you really need something like a sequence diagram to communicate accurately.

> Why does youtube want to copy tiktok when it clearly has already lost before it begun.

It's no sure thing for youtube, but it's worth trying. Clearly there is a demand.

Also, TikTok can't stay on cruise control. As they inevitably push to monetize, their UX will undoubtedly take a hit. A larger audience means more adversarial actors and trolls which could drive away creators. This has happened to nearly every social network.

> shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly

Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.

While FB always focused on their vaunted friends graph, there was an entirely separate graph waiting to be discovered which had nothing to do with friendship:

i.e. A graph of people worldwide who have lipsynced (or danced) to the same tune. It's a clever way to inject novelty (and dopamine) into the system!

Seems obvious in retrospect, of course.

> Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.

Also, shared sounds and music cross languages and boundaries more smoothly than hashtags.

So a Spanish song can suddenly become viral in Eastern Europe, or a Thai song become viral in Latin America.

Zeynep Tufekci's book Twitter and Tear Gas talks about this.

In Tunisia circa 2010, Twitter was part of the new tactics used by social movements and enabled their early success. Establishment groups weren't ready for it and in some ways ignorant of the new technology.

She argues that those in power have since evolved their tactics to counteract these innovations so they're no longer as effective.

For example, in countries where mass censorship is not possible, establishments have adopted techniques of information overload and discrediting/questioning everything to reduce the effectiveness of social movements.

This, "we don't have to be right, just loud". Personally I feel like this is the environment that spawned the tea party. I recall McCain saying if Obama was elected then we would certainly see another 9/11 attack. I think this is where the discourse is poisoned. Nobody has to ever say they were wrong anymore #lookSquirrel & retweet

> She argues that those in power have since evolved their tactics to counteract these innovations so they're no longer as effective.

Not only governments have caught up but they successfully cracked down on these protesters using their Twitter user history against them, especially in Turkey during the great political purge after the failed (fake) coup attempt.