The only thing I have to say about #GamerGate is: Felicia Day, who is a person you know of if you were a nerd who grew up with the internet, has a really nice post on her own blog entitled "The Only Thing I Have to Say about Gamer Gate". For those of you less plugged into the internet gaming community, #GamerGate is more or less a whole lot of uproar by some sexist gamers who are angry that it's not okay in this day and age to be a sexist gamer. Writes Day:

"I have not said many public things about Gamer Gate. I hav tried to leave it alone, aside from a few @ replies on Twitter that journalists have decided to use in their articles, siding me against the hashtag. Why have I remained mostly silent?

Self-protection and fear.

...

HOW SICK IS THAT?"

More at her blog; I'm not going to steal her thunder.

Epilogue: After some trolls, in response to her post, issued public threats against Day and published her address, phone number, and other personal information online, she wrote on Facebook:

I posted this essay yesterday afternoon on Tumblr. Yes, personal information was leaked shortly after, but the

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According to a Harvard FAS report (as reported in the Crimson), there are now more students at Harvard studying "Engineering and Applied Sciences" than "Arts and Humanities". But fear not that we're losing our liberal-arts soul; there are still half again as many students in NatSci than SEAS, and more students studying Social Sciences than SEAS and NatSci put together.

One of the awesome benefits of the House System at Harvard (think kind of like Hogwarts's house system, except the Sorting Hat is a random-number generator, and it happens after your freshman year, rather than on entry) is that I've gotten to eat dinner a few times with Doug Melton, of recent "giant leap foward in the quest to find a truly efective treatment for type 1 diabetes" fame, but who's also been in the TIME 100 two times. He's a fantastic guy, and Eliot House is lucky to have him as House Master. For that matter, the world is lucky to have him as scientist, as well.

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Relatedly, there's not enough research funding to go around. The Director of the National Institutes of Health went

For reasons which are pretty opaque to me, apparently today has been designated Ada Lovelace Day? Which is kinda weird, since "October 14" appears nowhere on her Wikipedia page, but well, okay. At least it makes a convenient excuse to write a blog post, since she was a pretty damn cool person.

If you've never heard of Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace before, there are much better places to read about her life than on my blog. (Like what, Ross? Well, uh, this piece on The Mary Sue? Is kinda over-excited, or maybe just adequately excited. In any case, probably go read it and come back.)

So yesterday, when a friend asked me the other day what exactly "theoretical computer science" was, if not programming, I thought a little bit and said something like:

Well, imagine that, instead of actually sitting down and telling a computer to do something, you wanted to think about what sort of things a computer could do, if you instructed it right. If you think about computation as a process, as a structural description of arithmetic, and ask what you can do with that...

I mean, look at Ada Lovelace. She wrote a lot about what you could do with a computing machine, if you had one, but she didn't, so it was a century before the things she wrote down were ever ran through an automatic computer. She wasn't a programmer--she was a mathematician. And, really, a good one, too.

And then, surprise! Today is Ada Day! That's weird.

But really, if there was someone who understood what Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" actually was (even better than he

Today, former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis has a piece on Bits and Pieces proposing a characteristically Lewisian crazy idea modest proposal to reform higher ed:

"[W]hat if there were ONLY [minors]? Get rid of [majors]. Have departments, and interdepartmental committees, offer '[minors],' and require students to earn at least two, but allow students to earn several. (Of course '[minor]' is no longer the right term if there are no [majors]. I'll use it just to convey the idea of a small cluster of courses with some disciplinary coherence and a bit of depth.)"

(some translation from "concentration"/"secondary" Harvardese for my non-Harvard readers) And, heading off the inevitable question before it asks itself:

"So how do we incentivize a deeper education, and the engagement of students in advanced scholarship and research, while not requiring every graduate to have a concentration?

"Well, first of all, having two or three secondaries, say in CS and biochemistry, might be more of an intellectual investment in the future than having a concentration in one or the other. Lots of fields are evolving out of the friction between existing disciplines. A few courses in each of CS and sociology might have been perfect for Zuckerberg."

And so, at risk of bringing my quoted-words ratio above 60%, "Now I'd love to know what's wrong with this idea!" (If you have immediate problems jumping to mind, go read his post, come back here, and then we can talk -- the most obvious objections are addressed there.)

I, for one, would enjoy getting a minor each in CS, poetry, and

To quote another another commentator today:

The Crimson has an op-ed on simultaneous enrollment that I agree with.

(That's Michael Mitzenmacher, blogging at his own My Biased Coin, whose own op-ed in response is also worth reading.)

I'll let Prof. Mitz do the explaining-of-background:

Harvard does not like simultaneous enrollment, which means a student taking two classes that meet at the same time -- any time overlap counts (whether the whole class or half an hour once a week). If you want to take a class via simultaneous enrollment, you have to petition the Administrative Board, and your professor is supposed to provide direct hour-per-hour instruction for the class you can't intend. As a previous Crimson article states:

The Faculty Handbook requires that "direct and personal compensatory instruction" for simultaneous enrollment, but only recently has the Ad Board refused to recognize videotaped lectures as a stand-in for class time.

The article references that for the past several years the Ad Board has accepted recorded lectures, under some additional conditions, as a suitable proxy for the direct and personal compensatory instruction. This apparently represented a change from their past position, and this last year, while I was on sabbatical, some Standing Committee on Education Policy decided to push back and say no more recorded substitutions.

Okay, so now it's a College requirement for every course that students pretend to be busy for three fixed hours every week, whether or not they choose to be physically in class. Never mind that students at the Extension School can earn credit towards their degrees for doing literally the same thing College students are now not allowed to do.

And if professors want

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It's shopping week at Harvard. Study cards aren't due until next week, so students have a week free to test-drive classes, skip class entirely, or just mess around.

Wednesday, I was just messing around. Finding myself with no afternoon classes to shop, I instead dropped into the first lecture of Computer Science 50.

CS50 is...well, it's difficult to explain. Any year now, it's going to pass Economics 10 as the largest class at Harvard. It's almost singlehandedly responsible for a tripling in the size of the CS department in the last five years. It's what happens when you give one of the best lecturers in the world a multi-million dollar operating budget and the mission to teach a class, not just for Harvard students, but for anyone in the world who wants to learn. CS50 is an experience. CS50 is what the future of what internet-age education will (or at least should) look like.

The course comes with its own dance-beat-fueled teaser-trailer:

and all of last year's lectures are online for free, if that's a thing you think is cool.

Speaking of legendary lecturers and things online for free, I hadn't realized that The Feynman Lectures on Physics were offered free-to-read online. Speaking as someone who once studied the subject, but gave up when I found more interesting things to do, I still think that figuring out how everything works is really, jaw-droppingly cool, and Dick Feynman is, by all accounts, a wonderful teacher.

Certainly, from what of his I've read, I've found he

In what I promise is the last Excellent Sheep-related thing I'll link to this month, here's an excellent two-sided discussion between Harry Lewis and Bill Deresiewicz on excellence, souls, sheep, and related things in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Both sides make excellent points, though perhaps it's no surprise which I think comes out on top. Excerpt from Lewis:

"'Excellence' appears, in different forms, in the titles of both our books. I meant it in a positive sense; I think American universities produce excellent results, in both people and ideas. On the human side it’s an incomplete form of excellence -- not enough arete -- but the research university is the greatest structure ever created for free thought, discovery, and creation. The competition for excellence drives that engine, for all the pathological side effects we both describe. Undergraduates can and do join that process at a high level while they are still young enough to have their eyes opened.

But you write to college students: 'You want