Dave Kellam

I haven’t really been up to a whole lot lately. We’ve been doing planning and whatnot for camp, that’s where the day goes. The night goes to me sleeping, watching movies and touring around town. I’ve been trying to do some more reading lately; been through You Shall Know Our Velocity (it had me laughing out loud) and the first Harry Potter book, i figure that i should be done the first three in a couple of days. Go summer!

Some schools have decided that a D is no longer a passing grade. Apparently, the schools are sick of students just barely scraping by and wanted to raise the standards. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I can’t see it making a whole lot of difference. On the other hand at Queen’s they don’t even bother giving us D’s. The reality is, you’re taking an arbitrary system of judgment along a scale and shifting that scale in one direction. So, all you’ve done is change the arbitrary values that are being awarded. You’re still going to have students that are only doing enough to get by, you’ve just changed how your school is perceived against other arbitrary numerical scales. It makes those schools look worse, but not many schools have a tendency of showing off their mediocre students anyway.

The Incas appear to used a form of binary as their primary form of non-verbal communication. It also appears to be the first three dimensional language. It used a series of knotted ropes that had over 1500 possible permutations.

I’ve been doing workshops all day for the last few days, early ones too. Teaching kids all day wears you out, so I haven’t really been browsing the internet and finding interesting shit to talk about. Here’s a new comprehensive computer programming textbook that you can download as a pdf. It’s a heft nine hundred page read, but it seems to cover a lot of language styles and concepts. I’ve read a little ways into the preface but that’s about it for now.

I’ve finally taken the time to collate all of the old stuff that I’ve done. There’s a bunch of it missing from various hard drive failures over the years, but there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. I designed a front page for it but from there on out I went lazy with directory listings. Without further ado, I present Box.