Why Kindergarten in Finland Is All About Playtime (and Why That Could Be More Stimulating Than the Common Core) – The Atlantic
“[Children] learn so well through play. They don’t even realize that they are learning because they’re so interested.” When children play, Osei Ntiamoah continued, they’re developing their language, math, and social-interaction skills. A recent research summary “The Power of Play” supports her findings: “In the short and long term, play benefits cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development…When play is fun and child-directed, children are motivated to engage in opportunities to learn,” the researcher concluded.
Surprisingly Turing-Complete – Gwern.net
Turing-completeness (TC) is the property of a system being able to, under some simple representation of input & output, compute any program. TC, besides being foundational to computer science and understanding many key issues like “why a perfect antivirus program is impossible”, is also weirdly common: one might think that such universality as a system being smart enough to be able to run any program might be difficult or hard to achieve, but it turns out to be the opposite and it is difficult to write a useful system which does not immediately tip over into TC. It turns out that given even a little control over input into something which transforms input to output, one can typically leverage that control into full-blown TC.
What Old Age Is Really Like – The New Yorker
What does it feel like to be old? Not middle-aged, or late-middle-aged, but one of the members of the fastest-growing demographic: the “oldest old,” those aged eighty-five and above? This has been the question animating me for a couple of years, as I’ve tried to write a novel from the perspective of a man in his late eighties.
The Pointless Cowardice of John Boehner – The New Yorker
The mainstream reaction to the forced resignation of John Boehner as the Speaker of the House has been a kind of weary admiration. He fought the good fight against the extremists in his Republican caucus, the narrative goes, but his solid Midwestern virtues (he’s from Ohio) were ultimately no contest for the extremism of the Tea Party. This interpretation is far too generous to Boehner, whose failures, political and substantive, were due mostly to cowardice. The tragedy of Boehner is that he could have been a great Speaker, even on his own terms, but instead his legacy is one of almost complete failure.