Everyone does NOT need to learn to code [Article]

Programmer Chase Felker disagrees with the flavour of our times – the need for everyone to learn to code. He thinks that there is a different, and more pertinent need – the need to think.

 I wonder why people are comfortable with thinking of computers as a scary black box in the first place. Computers do only what people tell them to do, and yet it is absurdly common to hear, “Windows crashed again! Call over the IT guy—it’s so complicated!” So many users do not feel empowered to understand how to use computers well, and I think that the urgency to spread programming is a symptom of this feeling. Perhaps if everyone had some practice telling computers what to do, tech intimidation wouldn’t be so prevalent.

How weird is the English language, really? [Article]

English is terribly confusing to a lot of non-native speakers but how hard is it really? Is the world’s most difficult language to learn? For example, guess how “Ghoti” is pronounced? The Economist weighs in and comes up none the wiser:

That doesn’t settle a bar bet along the lines of “Is English hard to learn?” But any topic worthy of a good long argument—”Who’s the greatest boxer of all time?” “‘Dark Side of the Moon’ or ‘The Wall’?”—should have that element of taste and subjectivity to keep it fun.

Human Dreamcatcher – An inspirational story [Link, Video]

Watch this video first:

What would become the Dream Model Street School began in 2001, with one blackboard, at home. Humaira taught ten friends of her age, seven of them girls. She started with the alphabet, in Urdu and English, and proceeded to the names of things. She supplied blank pages from her own notebooks, until it got her into trouble with her teachers. Then the friends went round asking people to donate paper, or bought scrap.

Humaira Bachal is in a class of her own

How to delete your web-service accounts, in one place [Link]

http://justdelete.me/ is a great site, in progress, of links to help you delete all those web-services you no longer need, along with the related difficulty level.

Many companies use dark pattern techniques to make it difficult to find how to delete your account. JustDelete.me aims to be a directory of urls to enable you to easily delete your account from web services.

How to tell love from passion – a timeless litmus test [Article]

Maria Popova pulls out this timeless classic by James Thurber & EB White:

“By and large, love is easier to experience before it has been explained — easier and cleaner.”

and another excerpt:

Let us say you have sat down to write a letter to your lady. There has been a normal amount of preparation for the ordeal, such as clearing a space on the desk … and the normal amount of false alarms, such as sitting down and discovering that you have no cigarettes. (Note: if you think you can write the letter without cigarettes, it is not love, it is passion.) Finally you get settled and you write the words; “Anne darling.” If you like commas, you put a comma after “darling”; if you like colons, a colon; if dashes, a dash. If you don’t care what punctuation mark you put after “darling,” the chances are you are in love — although you may just be uneducated, who knows?