Graham Lee’s “Why is programming so hard?” made me think about how I started programming and whether I’d be coding now if I was twelve.

When I began, I had a Sinclair Spectrum. Back then, home computers booted into a programming language (BASIC typically) and to do anything you needed to know at least one command. To be fair, even then many people didn’t get beyond J, Symbol Shift-P, Symbol Shift-P (‘LOAD “”‘, the command used to load a program from tape).

• Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant] – “Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year. Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.” Wholeheartedly agree with this post. Not knowing stuff is fine. Being proud of not knowing stuff? Not so much.
• Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market – “Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.”

• Ryanair’s New Emergency Instructions Could Be Real One Day – Funny. Though we probably shouldn’t give them ideas.
• Liberal Democrats – Freedom Bill 2009 – I didn’t hear about this first time around, but it sounds like a good idea. As one of the commenters noted, even if it doesn’t go anywhere it might make the Government justify why these laws are needed when there are perfectly good, less draconian one already in place.
• Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss – “People who do things badly … are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.” I can’t actually remember how I stumbled across this link any more, but it makes fascinating reading. Does kind of make you a little paranoid, though.
• 10 Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning – I should probably read this more closely when I’m properly awake. I’m getting worse and worse at getting up in the morning…

• Does University Challenge really test intelligence? – No. Knowing a bunch of obscure facts isn’t intelligence. If that’s the measure, then Wikipedia is way smarter than Einstein or Newton or Gauss or Darwin.
• Review: Canon EOS 5D Mark II – If anyone wants to buy 5000 copies of Yummy so that I can afford one of these I’d very much appreciate it.
• Creationists are still denying Darwin. Stephen Moss asks why – “What worries me about many of her fellow creationists is that they begin with the Bible and then start looking for scientific evidence to back up what their faith tells them is true.” That and the fact that they keep coming up with the same arguments.

• Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge – “A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.”
• The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life – All the glitz you see in the Pre demo and videos may come at a price.
• Tags: Database schemas – Interesting article on how sites like delicious might handle tagging. Yummy until v2.0 uses the “Scuttle” method. Subsequent versions modify this a little for performance reasons.