In the first half of the book, you’ll learn about basic programming concepts, such as lists, dictionaries, classes, and loops, and practice writing clean and readable code with exercises for each topic. You’ll also learn how to make your programs interactive and how to test your code safely before adding it to a project. In the second half of the book, you’ll put your new knowledge into practice with three substantial projects: a Space Invaders-inspired arcade game, data visualizations with Python’s super-handy libraries, and a simple web app you can deploy online.
Scratch, the colorful drag-and-drop programming language, is used by millions of first-time learners, and in Scratch Programming Playground, you’ll learn to program by making cool games. Get ready to destroy asteroids, shoot hoops, and slice and dice fruit!
Each game includes easy-to-follow instructions, review questions, and creative coding challenges to make the game your own. Want to add more levels or a cheat code? No problem, just write some code.
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python will teach you how to make computer games using the popular Python programming language–even if you’ve never programmed before!
Begin by building classic games like Hangman, Guess the Number, and Tic-Tac-Toe, and then work your way up to more advanced games, like a text-based treasure hunting game and an animated collision-dodging game with sound effects. Along the way, you’ll learn key programming and math concepts that will help you take your game programming to the next level.
Want to introduce kids to coding in a fun and creative way?
With the Scratch Coding Cards, kids learn to code as they create interactive games, stories, music, and animations. The short-and-simple activities provide an inviting entry point into Scratch, the graphical programming language used by millions of kids around the world.
Kids can use this colorful 75-card deck to create a variety of interactive programming projects. They’ll create their own version of Pong, Write an Interactive Story, Create a Virtual Pet, Play Hide and Seek, and more!
Each card features step-by-step instructions for beginners to start coding with Scratch. The front of the card shows an activity kids can do with Scratch–like animating a character or keeping score in a game. The back shows how to put together code blocks to make the projects come to life! Along the way, kids learn key coding concepts, such as sequencing, conditionals, and variables.
This collection of coding activity cards is perfect for sharing among small groups in homes and schools.
Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, the once funny but now highly repetitive cartoon about a nerd who has a job in an office.
Dr. Gavin Schmidt is high up in the top ten list of world class climate scientists. He is Director of the currently under siege GISS Unit of NASA, where much of the climate science done by that agency is carried out. If you read my blog, you’ve read his work, because you also read RealClimate, where GS writes about climate science in a manner designed to be understandable to the intelligent, honestly interested, thoughtful individual.
Adams has a history of going after core science concepts, often substituting scientific reality with his own. He has done so with climate science.
And, he’s done it again. In a recent blog post (of yesterday) Adams tries to “convince skeptics that climate change is a problem”
This is a re-hash of earlier posts he’s written, in which he does the old denial two step. Of course climate change is real, he says. I’m not a scientist, he says. I don’t know jack about climate science in particular, he says. Then, he uses up piles of ink telling climate scientists how they’ve got all the science wrong.
His objective, I assume, is to spread and nurture doubt about climate science and science in general.
Dr Schmidt caught a tweet of Adams’, pointing to his absurd blog post, and responded with a series of tweets addressing all the things.
I wanted to preserve this excellent, well documented and richly illustrated TweetTextBook, and it occurred to me that you might want to see it too. So, here are the tweets.
Feel free to add additional relevant tweets to the comments, if you like. I hope this doesn’t break the Internet.
But since I'm in the mood for a totally futile exercise, here's why his points are disingenuous at best. Let's start with models… 1/n
of ice age cycles & that greenhouse gas+dust changes amplified them. We have good evidence Cenozoic cooling was due to decreases in CO2…17/n pic.twitter.com/4CoV133af3
In Health Care Insurance Reform We See The History of the Republican Party
Very few American policy initiatives have been as popular as Obamacare. The fact that several years of Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act did not result in any alternative policies or specific revisions to the law suggest that Republicans were aware of that. Touting opposition and threatening to repeal worked with their base, but actually doing something would lead to widespread outrage and loss of votes, possibly loss of actual elections.
The worst nightmare of Republican members of the House and Senate is that they get the bone they have been groveling for and have to explain to the American people exactly how they are going to dismantle and destroy this popular government program.
Do you remember ClintonCare? Back when Bill Clinton was President, his wife, Hillary was her name, headed a project to develop a major overhaul of the American health care insurance system. Unfortunately, the Gingrich Republicans took over the government at that time. The Republicans had no reason to be against a fair health care system, other than the requirement to implement the new Gingrich Doctrine: Destroy the democrats at all costs, make them the minority party, then start to govern.
(By the way, one could argue that Republicans could be against reform because they are against big and complex governmetnal structures and such. But health care reform that leads in the direction of a single payer system is less complicated, less of a requirement for complex regulation, and generally, much simpler.)
Hillary Clinton’s health care reform plan was an early and major victim of this new anti-D/democratic plan (small and large “d”) initiated by the Republican Party. And, at that time, Hillary Clinton herself became the perennial punching bag of the Republican Party.
That punching bag effect, the decades of hate and rage against Hillary Clinton, certainly contributed to her loss in the last election. And, part of that hate came in the form of the Benghazi investigations.
Benghazi refers to a terrible event in which bad guys attacked the US embassy in Libya, with Ambassador J. Chrisopher Stevens, a friend and colleague of then Secretary of State Clinton, was killed, along with three other Americans.
Chaffetz TownHall in February
Jason Chaffetz: Foot Meet Mouth
A congressman named Jason Chaffetz, Republican from Utah, was a vocal member of the committee that carried out a long investigation that tried very hard to lay blame for this attack on Clinton. It was a mean spirited and horrific misuse of governmental power that members of the committee, at various times and places, admitted openly to have been a political fraud. But, this effort was key, recent, and probably determinative of the degree of anti-Clinton feelings across the right wing and centrist parts of the political spectrum, and materially contributed to Donald Trump becoming president. The absurdity of this dirty and embarrassing chapter in American Political history is painfully underscored by the fact that Chaffetz himself voted to reduce the funding for security at embassies, which is the real reason this attack cost American lives.
Chaffetz is now intensely engaged, as are many other Republican members of Congress, in repealing and replacing Obamacare. And, his constituents are not having it. Chaffetz is one of those congresscritters who was screamed at by the outraged members of their districts. Outraged about his desire to nix Obamacare, outraged about his general support of Donald Trump, all that.
Buk buk buk buk! A chicken. Coming home to roost.Then, Chaffetz made the fatal error, placed the nearly weightless but final straw upon the camel’s back, and he is the camel. He ended his political career by focusing too much on the smart phone and not enough on what people around him were saying. Sort of.
He did that thing Republicans do when they talk about poor people. It comes in a lot of forms, but it is, at the root of it, disdain cloaked in a deep layer of mushy ignorance. Chaffetz told poor people that they needed to make a basic choice in life. Get a phone, or get health insurance.
This is wrong on so many levels that I can’t even … But just so certain points are not lost, let’s covers some of them.
1) A cell phone and a cell phone plan cost a fraction of health care plans under the proposed Republican program.
2) Rich people, under TrumpCare, will get a tax break, in a single year, sufficient to cover their cell phone costs until they die, while lower income folks will get nothing more than a new Canadian Province. Nunavut.
3) I say poor people, and he meant poor people, but really, this problem applies to most people.
4) You need a phone TO MAKE A DOCTOR’S APPOINTMENT YOU IDIOT!!!
Sorry for shouting. But I think you get the point. Jason Chaffetz stuck his rhetorical foot fatally in his political mouth.
Introducing Kathryn Allen
Kathryn Allen is a Utah based physician, a Democrat, who is one of those constituents of the hapless Congressman Chaffetz who rose in outrage against him. But Dr. Allen is taking this one step farther. She made a proposal, on an internet crowdfunding site, that she could run against him in the upcoming midterm election, if people wanted her to. She described herself and her potential candidacy, and asked for financial support from those who might prefer her over that other guy, the Benghazi guy, the anti-Healthcare reform guy, the Pro-Trump guy.
Kathryn Allen, Candidate for Utah’s 3rd Congressional District.And they did. Especially after the Chaffetz iPhone remark. Right after he made that remark, her crowdfunding site went from near zero to over $80,000 in a Utah Minute. Today, as I write this, it is at $256.495, up from the $253,455 when I captured the image for the graphic at the top of this post, about three minutes ago. And continuing to rise (check here for the latest number).
I think Dr Allen’s candidacy is amazing, hopeful a sign of our times, and a harbinger for the future. If you are in her district, go work for her, if not, send her some buks!
Oh look, she’s up another thousand in another two minutes…..
Here is Rachel Maddow’s coverage of this amazing story:
UPDATE: Apple Responds with the Apple Health Care Plan:
There is some interesting new research out on the Asian Fruit Fly, Drosophila suzukii.
The short version: This sort of fruit fly ruins fruit crops because it prefers to, and is able to, lay its eggs on harder, firmer, unrotten, and, essentially, ripe fruit, thus ruining it. Regular fruit flies focus on rotten fruit such as groundfall.
The Asian fruit fly manages this because of slightly different fruit detection mechanisms, though some of the details of this are not yet known. In the future, it is hoped that the exact chemical used by this fly to find its target ripe fruit can be reproduced and used in the manufacture of a bait, to reduce crop damage.
The Asian fruit fly Drosophila suzukii reached Europe and the US about a decade ago. This invasive species ravages fruit crops, including strawberries and cherries, and there is currently no effective means of staving it off. Unlike other drosophilae, which lay eggs on rotting fruits, D. suzukii chooses ripe fruits, thereby accelerating their decomposition. Researchers from the Developmental Biology Institute of Marseille (CNRS / AMU) and LMU Munich recently discovered that D. suzukii has developed greater sensitivity to the smell and taste of ripe fruit, in comparison to fermented fruit, and the ability to lay eggs in relatively firm fruit. By selectively inactivating the fly’s neurons and olfactory receptors, they demonstrated that the smell of fresh fruit enhanced D. suzukii egg laying. The scientists are now trying to identify the molecule or molecules that elicit this response. This would then make it possible to develop bait or design molecules that could inhibit egg laying. The results of their work also offer insight into how instinctive behaviors like egg laying are altered in the course of evolution.
It is now verified that the earliest 2017 tornados — first tornados of the season — struck several communities in east-central Minnesota (a few miles north and south of me). So what you say? Especially because it was a mere F1 and didn’t hurt anyone!
This is an important event because the earliest recorded tornado of the year in Minnesota was previously March 18th, and that was in 1968. This tornado, striking on March 6th (confirmed yesterday by the NWS) is way earlier than that!
One tornado, near Zimmerman went for nine miles.
A second tornado appears to have passed through the community of Clark’s Grove as well. That one may have been on the ground for over 12 miles.
Neither tornado was large, but there was a lot of damage to property and trees.
Needless to say, the frequency of storms in general, and their severity, are expected to rise with climate change. Part of that seems to be the lengthening of the storm seasons. More time, more storms.
The human brain has the ability to recognise and process a very wide range of sensory stimuli, from which it builds a mental representation. But do these representations change over time? Can we learn to classify and interpret stimuli more e ectively? Neuroscientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have been trying to answer these questions by studying the olfactory system of mammals. They have succeeded in identifying the complementary role played by two dis- tinct kinds of neurons in processing olfactory information and the different brain reorganisation that occurs depending on the context. After having previously demonstrated the possibility to boost the capacity to distinguish similar smells by regulating the inhibition of certain neural networks, the scientists now explain why the brain has to make use of di erent sorts of cells to form, maintain and res- hape the representations of odours. In fact, it is their very combination that enables us to recognise and distinguish similar smells. Find out more about the research outcomes in the journal Neuron.
I have not read the paper, but this looks seriously interesting. It addresses, among other things, the question of how much olfactory sense (sens-ability?) is built in (genetic) vs. learned, and how that learning happens.
The exact way the Trump presidency ends is not clear. Anything could happen.
Trump had zero idea of what he was getting into with this president thing, and the stresses must be amazing. Clearly, he is being driven over the edge by relatively minor day to day events. Nothing has yet actually happened in this administration. If you ignore self inflicted wounds and self generated drama, and all the protesting against Trump, the world has been pretty quiet. It is as though all the bad guys, all the individuals who do the things that become major international issues or domestic crises, have stocked up on popcorn and are just watching Donald Trump in awe. Normally, things happen now and then that become major issues that need to be addressed by the President of the United States. For the last six weeks, since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the Republican President, we’ve seen nothing.
Remember this scene? Everything is fine in the beginning. Then, “Let her roll!!!”Here is a list I compiled, with help from my Facebook friends, of exemplars of things past, and ideas for things future, that could happen and that did or would demand attention and proper response from a United States president.
911
a military coup takes over a neighboring or allied government
a smaller country such as Iraq invades another country such as Kuwait
arkstorm hits western states
attack on the US power grid
collapse of a major fishery
crop failure; multiple simultaneous crop failurs
debilitating cyber attack
Deepwater Horizon explosion
dirty bomb goes off somewhere
embassy attack
global financial crisis
hostage taking at a US embassy
India and Pakistan have a military confongration
Iran: US embassy hostage taking
Israel and Iran exchange missles
Katrina
large earthquake or tsunami in the United states
major river flooding
major spill
major tropical storm strikes major metropolitan area
major volcanic event
massive earthquake or tsunami somewhere
North Korea actually attacks someone
possible epidemic threat
Russia invades another country
Sandy
solar flare damaged US power grid
terrorist attack, large
terrorist attack, small
terroristic disease or chemical attack
unprecedented killer heat wave
Death of a world leader in a sensitive region
Crash of a US airliner
Korea or Iran takes a US naval ship
Outbreak of a major famine
The point of this list, to which any student of American History can add many more items, is to make clear that crises are sufficiently numerous that large ones are bound to happen in any given span of a few months time.
Something is going to happen soon, and when it does, how will Trump react, what will he do? What will he tweet? Will the chaos that ensues, the pressure that mounts, the overall intensity of of the situation, put him over the edge?
He doesn’t know what to do, no one around him really knows what to do. He will be exploited and the will of the United States twisted and used, if possible. We will lose in any confrontation or competition that arises as the result of any crisis, and that will compound the badness.
All that has to happen is for history as it is being born to run its normal course, for Trump and his presidency to collapse under the weight of reality.
Ultimately, this may kill him. He may simply die of a heart attack or stroke because of the stress. Or, he may take steps that are so outrageous that someone else kills him. In fact, he is currently courting that sort of attack every day, as his immigration policies ruin the lives of thousands of people. Listen to the weeping of innocent children as their parents, also innocent, are being taken away by the ICE jack-booted thugs. Then put yourself in the position of a father or grandfather who happens to be mentally and emotionally capable, and physically ready, to act in an entirely inappropriate, violent way. That small list of crazy people that seemed to follow around Gerald Ford, or that supplies the assassins of the like that shot at Reagan or killed Lennon, has got to be very small indeed compared to the number of people who wish to end the life of a despot like Trump. It may only be a matter of time before someone on that list gets through.
Or, there is the 25th Amendment. It is possible for various government officials to simply remove an off the rails president from office. Such a thing could happen if anything like the above list of crises starts to materialize, as it will, and Trump’s reactions are so dangerous that even the selfish, politics-only, non-governing yahoos who reside in the Executive Branch actually do something to preserve our democracy.
Or it could be impeachment. Impeachment requires that the Know Nothing and Do Nothing Republican Congress grows a spine and learns something and does something. That is very unlikely to happen, but around the country right now, people are showing up by the thousands, daily, demanding that they do something, so … maybe.
A Congressional turnover, followed by impeachment, is a possibility. Maybe the American Citizenry, who usually vote against their own self interest, will grow a brain and throw the actual bums out, and a new Democratic House will impeach and a Democratic Senate will hold a trial, and Trump will be ended that way.
But none of that matters until this other thing happens, which maybe, or maybe not, is currently underway.
How Trump Can Stay In Power Forever
Donald trump is likely to stay in power as long as he wants to, even after his presidency ends, because Chuck Todd will make sure it happens. Andrea Mitchel will work to keep Trump in the White House. All the CNN reporters, and all the TV reporters in general, will work on this on a daily basis, tweaking the news, affecting public perception, in such a way as to make sure Trump is not removed by virtue of the 25th, or impeached, or even stressed out too much.
Why? This is why and how that happens. Go read that post if you want to understand how the news media fails us all, every day, and why they may not be able to stop themselves.
There is another possibility, though.
Last Tuesday, Trump gave his “joint address” (a form of State of the Union with a different name). During the address, he said all the things we expect if we assume he is not changing his policies. He also introduced an alarming new thing, a fund to increase the level of national hate against immigrants. All in all, any intelligent watcher of politics would have come away from that address knowing that Trump is still Trump, and nothing has changed.
The astute observer would also note this: Trump’s address was a carefully written speech that Trump clearly did not compose, but that he did work hard to read correctly off the teleprompter. That is actually bad news. It means that Trump’s handlers are on board with keeping him in the groove he is already in, and are helping him do that by constructing a speech with no change in direction, but that is less shocking in its messaging qualities.
Soon after Trump’s speech, I pulled the shotgun I keep under the couch out, pumped five rounds into the TV, and threw the smoldering wreckage right through the big glass window onto the street.
OK, I didn’t really do that. I don’t actually have a shot gun under the couch. But if I did…..
What actually happened was this: Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchel and the talking heads on PBS, and all the other reporters got all titilated about how Trump finally sounded presidential, about how everything would be fine now, about how the “presidential pivot” had finally happened.
They failed to notice that all that really happened was that Trump read the speech off the teleprompter and that the speech was a little more carefully written than usual — well, not for an address to the joint session, but for a Trump speech. They failed to notice that nothing had changed except a couple of things that went bad. They went on and on about how great the speech was and failed to mention the 18 or so bald faced lies, or the exploitation of a war widow to justify a failed military action, or, once again, the initiation of a hate-the-immigrant program.
They failed to save Democracy from Trump. For that, they should all be fired. For that, I get the shotgun out from under the couch and blast the TV to smithereens. Or, really, imagine myself doing it.
100% certain to end Trump: Reinforcements are always welcome!
But then something else happened. Trump did two things over the following few days, neither unexpected but both critically important.
1) He kept being Donald Trump; and
2) He actually got worse.
Believe it or not, and I’m still not quite believing it, this may have caused the press that fall in love with him on Tuesday to step back and realize they had been duped. They will never admit this because, frankly, only a stupid child could have been duped this way. But Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchel and the rest of them are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. They were all fooled, badly fooled, on Tuesday, then later in the week, made to appear as the embodiment of foolishness itself as the reality of Trump re-tweeted, er, re-emerged.
I was mulling this over this morning while checking over some of the previous day’s news reports and commentaries, when I came across this piece by Lawrence O’Donnell on his show “The Last Word.”
Watch it. Then, for fun, and a good cry, watch the next piece as well.
O’Donnell seems to believe that the press can snap itself out of its own stupidity if Trump is so blatantly bad as he was last weekend. I don’t. But it is quite possible that I am wrong and O’Donnell is right. And in hopes that this is the case, I’m going to unload the shells from my imaginary shotgun. For now.
So, yes. Trump’s presidency ends when Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell say it ends.
Now, watch this to the end. THE END. Just do it.
The end end, not the part you will think is the end. Just wait until the “tape” runs out. Past 4:20
Imagine that child crying is your own.
To hell with it, I’m putting the imaginary shells back in the damn gun.
PS, I know someone is going to complain about the shotgun, because some people are just that way and can’t help themselves. The shotgun is to shoot the TV because the news, and the way it is handled, and reported, is so frustrating. It is not to shoot a person. I would never do that, you should never do that.
When I was a little, there was this older kid that lived down the street, and he was shunned by all the other kids.
He was shunned because he went to a special school for smart kids. Most everyone else went to either the local Catholic school (as did I) or the public school several blocks away. The school for smart kids was in the public school. A disproportionate number of kids who went to the regular public school were in one of two groups. They were either Catholics from my neighborhood who had been thrown out of Catholic school for being ruffians, or they were local protestants. I would later learn that most of the kids in the smart kids school were the offspring of the mostly Jewish mostly Professional families from the Jewish enclave, which started about two blocks from my house and was served by the same public school, and a very small number of other kids, like the kid down the block.
So this kid had to walk to the public school building amid the stream of bad kids, and of course, they would bully him constantly. By and by, I ended up with two kids who were my main best friends in that neighborhood. One was the Japanese kid who lived over the back fence. He was the only kid for several block in any direction who was different (not white, not Christian, etc.) and since all of our parents fought the “Japs” in World War II, he got to be the bad guys when we played “war” and he was also always bullied. But I never bullied him and we were friends. Also, I knew, and the other kids either didn’t know or forgot, that while he was seen as “Japanese” and he lived with his Japanese mother, and he certainly looked Japanese, his father was an Anglo-American who was a war hero, but dead. So much for that.
My other friend was the kid who went to smart kids school. I was reminded of him just now listening to the West Wing Weekly Podcast, when the hosts made a reference to Toby and Sam talking about which one of the two was Batman and Robin.
My friend and I were Batman and Robin, but since he was older, he was Batman. We were seriously interested in growing up to be crime fighters. We were smart enough to know that we couldn’t be Batman and Robin, but we figured we could be lawyers, so we got all the law books we could find out of the local public library and read them. Since we were kids, we had to steal the books as the librarians would not even let us into the adult section. But we figured that out, got the books, read them, and returned them. We easily went through all of the law books in one summer, as this was a very small local public library, there were only about three or four of them, and they were books written for the general public, not actual law books.
One day my parents had a conference with my third grade teacher, and came home, and brought me somewhere to take a test. It was an IQ test, and I got all the answer correct. An appointment was made, and I was brought in for another test, but this one was a bit harder, and I passed that one with what I’m pretty sure was also 100%. This happened a few times, until finally they brought me, no kidding, to a campus of big old red brick buildings, covered with ivy (to this day I have no idea where this was, but it was probably the “old campus” of the university, where I later would go to High School, but in these early days I had little clue of the geography of the area). This time the test was administered to me in a dark wood paneled room, at a giant wood table, with this man in a suit and me, no one else, and it was done verbally. He asked me many questions, and I don’t remember there being any questions without obvious answers.
So, after all this, my mother told me, “Guess what, you’re going to go to the special school for smart kids!”
Of course, I was horrified, in part, because I knew that the next several years of my life would be filled with terror, as I was now going to get harassed every day, just like my best friend down the street was, on the way to and from the school. But then, I realized, that he and I could walk to school together, and maybe there would be safety in numbers! So I ran down the street to tell him the news, but it turned out that he had some news to tell me.
His family was going to move to East Greenbush. That was across the river, a different county, different town, and clearly, in a day and in a culture where people did not drive around everywhere, I was never going to see him again, after the summer ended. Besides, he told me, if he was staying in the city, he’d be going next year to a different school anyway, the Middle School equivalent of the school for smart kids, while I was going to be stuck in the grade school version for three years.
The next part of the story went like this: I went to the smart kids school, and that is where I discovered that so many of the Jewish kids were smart. I did get bullied now and then. Going from smart kids school to religious class once a week (required of Catholics) was even worse than just normal going and coming, because it was just me and about five kids who had been banished to the public school for being violent, and we were expected to walk the five or six blocks as a group. What did instead was to learn how to traverse several city blocks without being seen, that was useful. And, smart kids school wasn’t anything special, just more work, higher expectations, and learning to deal with bullies.
So, why am I relating this now? Because, as one does, I thought I’d look up my old friend to see what he was doing these days, if anything. Maybe he’d be on Facebook or something!
It didn’t take long to find his obituary.
He died in 2007 after bing in a coma for seven weeks, following a car crash. His mother was still alive at that time (she died in 2011), but his father, and his son, had died already. It says he grew up in East Greenbush but was born in Albany, but really, he did part of his growing up in Albany. I was there, I saw it (though oddly I was not mentioned!).
He was in the Navy in Viet Nam. He later became an actor and director of local note, and owned a theater for a while.
He had moved to Denver, and started a company that appears to still exist, which produces prodcuts related to home improvements. He had grown a big beard and was an Evangelical Christian who did a lot of Jesus stuff. His sister, younger, whom I remember very well, was alive at the time of his death.
So, that’s what happened to my best friend. I guess we will not be reconnecting on Facebook.
Python Crash Course: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming
is a fast-paced, thorough introduction to programming with Python that will have you writing programs, solving problems, and making things that work in no time.
is a fast-paced, thorough introduction to programming with Python that will have you writing programs, solving problems, and making things that work in no time.
is now available as an audio book: 
.