Lots of press about the “Hour of Code” campaign recently, which has the goal of briefly exposing children to computer programming. Money down the drain, since most school curriculums still don’t include Hour of Basic Logic, Hour of Problem-Solving, or Hour of You Are Not A Precious Snowflake.

[Update: a number of the discussions of this are linking to Jeff Atwood’s Please Don’t Learn to Code, and wow did that attract hundreds of comments from people who completely missed his point. I agree completely with Jeff, and a lot of the reason is that I remember exactly what it was like when we did this back in the Eighties: put a bunch of kids in a room and try to teach them to program, and 60% will pretend interest and parrot what they’re told, 30% will be too bored to pretend, 9% will be actively hostile, and 1% will be excited about the opportunity until the other kids bully them into doing all the work. Bottom line, if the school curriculum included critical thinking skills in all courses, an “hour of code” would be as necessary as giving floating lessons to ducks. No offense to any ducks among my readers…]

[12/13 Update: apparently the folks at code.org think being exposed to computer science is like being exposed to radiation: “More students have participated in computer science in U.S. schools in the last three days than in the last 100 years”. They are so completely full of shit that I’m surprised my browser didn’t turn brown.]

Waking up with frost on my lemons (not a euphemism), a warm breeze comes from Lion.

Volcano edition:

(via Volcano Discovery)

Lowell Observatory's Putnam wants to name asteroid for Trayvon Martin

The victims of media-instigated “justice for trayvon” attacks will be required to time-share a small rock tentatively named “Fuck You Whitey”.

Why make a big fuss about announcing what everyone knew well before the trial started? Because Leavenworth is an all-male prison. This makes it look less like a courageous stance by a transgender individual, and more like a cynical ploy to avoid spending the next 7-35 years in Leavenworth.

(cynical quotes around certain words in the previous paragraph have been omitted to avoid discussing the general issue of gender as a fluid concept disconnected from biology)

• George W. Bush was legitimately elected President. Twice.
• Vaccines save lives, and do not cause autism.
• There is no such thing as a "climate-change denier", just people who think that Global Warming is 99% social engineering and 1% climate science.
• George Zimmerman did not get away with murder, and the verdict, which did not depend on "standing his ground", would likely have been the same in 48 other states (and possibly even in Ohio).

…stay away from any unmoderated forums or comments for the next few days weeks.

I mean, damn.

[Update: also forums moderated by “diversity of everything except opinion” Leftists (redundant, I know); I’ve read several lengthy threads where not a single person participating has even a passing familiarity with what was presented in the courtroom. Their bigotry has left them filled with hatred over “facts” that the prosecution was unable to provide even a shred of evidence for.

Of course, these are the same folks still carrying a grudge over Bush “stealing two elections”, so law and reason were never their strengths…]

Via Althouse comes this Berkeley headline:

Firefighters use lid to put out kitchen pot fire in Berkeley