You can follow more of this report at The Philadephia Public School Notebook and take part in the comment thread there.

I read Tor.com’s wonderful blog almost once a day to check up posts on books, favorite sci-fi and fantasy TV Series, and more. Yesterday they had a post featuring a striking photograph by Cat Valente of some haunting graffiti with the title of of this post scrawled out. She had recognized the line from an earlier post in Tor.com’s Poetry Month series, “John M. Ford’s sonnet ‘Against Entropy’”. Reading the comments in that post led to the original source of the poem, where it was written and shared for the first time.

In 2003 Patrick Nielsen Hayden posted about how moved he was by Andrew Brown’s writing about the slow and terrible death of a friend’s wife. He lamented, If I were a better writer I’d conclude by yoking the trivial to the tragic, relating the twin inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms.. In the comments of that post, John M. Ford, the writer Neil Gaiman said of, my best critic … the best writer I knew, wrote the following:

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days –
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

A poem, written in a blog post comment in 2003, shows up on a physical wall in 2012.

The poem speaks loudly about the ends of things, our role, and even the work I do, which has everything to do with building systems that can adapt and grow in the face of bit rot and lack of attention.

Damn it, I don’t care if it isn’t hip, I still love the Web.

1. Fourth: The Brain of Morbius
   • Sheer Poetry (The Brain of Morbius)
   • DWRG: The Brain of Morbius
2. Fourth: The City of Death
   • Beaming With Vast Intelligence (City of Death)
   • DWRG: City of Death
3. Fourth: The Genesis of the Daleks
   • DWRG: The Genesis of the Daleks
4. Third: The Three Doctors
   • This Point of Singularity (The Three Doctors)
   • DWRG: The Three Doctors
5. Fifth: The Caves of Androzani
   • DWRG: The Caves of Androzani
6. Fourth: The Deadly Assassin
   • DWRG: The Deadly Assasin
7. Fourth: The Robots of Death
   • DWRG: The Robots of Death
8. Third: The Spearhead from Space
   • DWRG: The Spearhead from Space
9. Fourth: Pyramids of Mars
   • DWRG: Pyramids of Mars
10. Third: Planet of Spiders
    • Be Childish Sometimes (Planet of the Spiders)
    • DWRG: Planet of Spiders
11. Fourth: The Arc in Space
    • DWRG: The Arc in Space
12. Third: Inferno
    • DWRG: Inferno
13. Fourth: Planet of Evil
    • DWRG: Planet of Evil
14. First: The Unearthly Child
    • I Was a Dad Once: An Unearthly Child
    • DWRG: The Uneartly Child
15. First: The Daleks
    • DWRG: The Daleks
16. Second: The War Games
    • DWRG: War Games
17. Second: The Evil of the Daleks
    • DWRG: The Evil of the Daleks
18. Second: The Tomb of the Cybermen
    • DWRG: The Tomb of the Cybermen
19. Fourth: Logopolis
    • DWRG: Logopolis
20. Fifth: Castrovalva
    • DWRG: Castrovalva
21. Fifth: The Five Doctors
    • DWRG: The Five Doctors

Even better, check out The Guardian’s profile of 7 teenagers who code.

Related:

Metafilter: Guardian feature on the future of computing education in UK

Today, if you’re a teenager with a Mac (insert some other platform into this paragraph if you object to Apple on moral or financial grounds), you can download for free the same tools that professional developers use to write Mac, iPhone and iPad applications. You can read countless free tutorials on how to use them, download reams of sample code for free, and ask for help on forums full of people who may never know you’re a precocious kid.

YouTube: Thomas Zwijsen: Classical/Acoustic: Iron Maiden acoustic – Wasted Years:

YouTube: JonathanHarpa: Iron Maiden in harp and guitar – Hallowed be thy name:

YouTube: vkgoeswild: Iron Maiden – Run To The Hills – piano cover:

YouTube: WonkyFonk: Iron Maiden – Hallowed Be Thy Name (acoustic):

YouTube: ThomasZwijsen2007: Bruce Dickinson – Tears Of The Dragon (Acoustic):

YouTube: Jcronk: Folkified Hallowed Be Thy Name:

YouTube: hampusvh2: Iron Maiden – The Trooper (Piano):

Related:

Metafilter: “Thomas Zwijsen performs Nylon Maiden”

Related:

Twitter Engineering: “A Storm is coming: more details and plans for release”

GitHub: Storm

Duncan McGreggor, decided to contact Python’s Guido Van Rossum to interview him about his keynote talk at PyCon US 2012 (video), specifically his thoughts on callbacks.

“There’s this one side of the coin where people see just this disenchantment and negative view of government,” says Jay Nath, the Chief Innovation Officer for the city of San Francisco. “But there’s also this flip side where people actually believe that working with government, we can make a better solution and better improvements for our society.”

…There are, by our count, just two major cities in the U.S. that currently have someone sitting in this role, and they’ve both settled in within the past six months. Adel Ebeid stepped into the job in Philadelphia after working as the chief information officer for the state of New Jersey. Like Nath, he views his role largely as connecting city hall and all of its resources with a new generation of problem-solvers outside of it.

…The birth of the municipal chief innovation officer job is a response to these two trends: to fundamental changes in technology that are revolutionizing citizen engagement, and to a cultural movement that is turning the data-dense inner workings of city halls into public challenges that are actually kind of a kick to solve.

“There aren’t that many of us right now,” Ebeid says, “but I can tell you we’re certainly an early testbed for what will become mainstream by 2015.”

Related:

City of Philadelphia: Office of Innovation and Technology