Greetings from the Future [Stinque, 4/3/2010]

The part everyone’s reporting:

A co-founder for Invisible Children was detained in Pacific Beach Thursday for being drunk in public and masturbating, according to San Diego Police Department.

Invisible Children? Aren’t they the Kony 2012 crew? Yes. Yes, they are.

But wait — Sandy Eggo?

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Our guest columnist is casting a commercial in New Mexico, with the following selected requirements.

Project: New Mexico Tourism

Type: Regional COMMERCIAL. NON-Speaking Principal roles. NON-UNION.

Talent Specs:

FAMILY

REAL FAMILIES: Caucasian or light skinned Hispanics.

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“We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China — which we broadcast in January — contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth.” [This American Life]

“Women in Arizona trying to get reimbursed for birth control drugs through their employer-provided health plan could be required to prove that they are taking it for a medical reason such as acne, rather than to prevent pregnancy.” [Yahoo/AP, via Political Wire]

In our line of work — well, one of them — we build websites. The website we’re building right now uses HTML, CSS, jQuery, AJAX, PHP, MySQL, and—

Oh, we’re sorry. Did we lose you?

Back in the old days, you could hack your Commodore 64 without too much trouble. But just try to get a sense of the millions of lines of code controlling a Windows computer, or the Google search engine, or your Android or iPhone. For starters, the user interface and legally enforced sanctity of the code will prevent you from even seeing it. And even if you managed to take a look, the code would be so complex you would struggle to understand it, let alone manipulate it.

For that reason, [a legendary programmer named] _why explained in the “Little Coder’s Predicament” — and over and over again at conferences and panels — too few people were learning to code. The learning curve was too steep. There needed to be a simple, fun, awesome way to draw people in.

That’s Slate’s Annie Lowrey, who decided to pull a George Plimpton and get her head bashed in by a linebacker learn programming as a journalism project. She chose the Ruby language, because that’s what some of the Big Kids use (those who aren’t using Python), at least for websites — although if she really wanted to do Android or iPhone, she could have chosen Java or Objective-C instead, never mind that Objective-C gives us headaches so we’ve been cheating with Lua, and—

Oh, we’re sorry. Did we lose you again?

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