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

1

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

First, to wrap up our interlude of other people's insights, a zinger from one of my favorite professors ever, Dr. Margo Seltzer:

If I had as much disdain for my students as Deresiewicz appears to have for his, I'd get a new job. Seriously -- I view my students so differently from the way he does that it's hard to imagine we teach at similar institutions, and yet we do.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled...

Dear brother,

I haven't said much about my actual experience here, have I? Most of it's been the sort of broad descriptions you could have gleaned by just looking in from the outside; what's it like to actually live there, you ask? I'm glad you did.

Let's start with the people. Here are a few snapshots of my friends, in no particular order:

Sorry, friends; my jet lag (from returning from Hong Kong on Saturday), seems to have finally caught up with me. Part 3 proper is probably going to have to wait a day, since I went to sleep last night instead of writing it. To tide you over, here are a few excerpts from around the internet:

I'm a Laborer's Son. I Went to Yale. I Am Not "Trapped in a Bubble of Privilege." by Andrew Giambrone, Yale grad now writing for The Atlantic, on the New Republic:

First, his argument effaces important economic, social, and personal differences among students, conveniently neglecting the fact that elite colleges allow athletes and engineers to sit around the same seminar tables as sons of farmers and daughters of CEOs. Second, his turgid derision of elite schools risks dissuading lower- and middle-class kids like myself from applying to those very same institutions.

The Ivy League Is Not the Problem by Osita Nwanevu, U. Chicago student, on Slate:

Deresiewicz says that a campus environment is a rare venue where people from different social strata can interact “on an equal footing.” But having them eat the same processed cafeteria foods and doze off in the same introductory lectures will not put the privileged and the underprivileged on an equal footing. Whether they’re under a publicly financed roof or not, these sorts of interactions are shaped by our past experiences. There will always be a divide between the upper-middle-class student who chooses to attend a public college and the poor student who must. There will