industrial water filters from Orival.

I really like using (and making!) programming playgrounds, and I got thinking the other day about how I didn’t have a great list of playgrounds to refer to. So I asked on Mastodon for links to cool playgrounds.

Here’s what I came up with. I’d love to know what I missed.

In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco.

The long rap sheet only tells part of the tale.
By Martha Lunken

I recently wrote about an extraordinarily misleading Kaiser Family study that claimed “1 in 5” Americans have a family member who has been killed by a gun. Kaiser’s inflated findings were based on a small sample size of self-reported answers to questions that offered no useful limiting parameters.

In many ways, another endlessly repeated contention of gun controllers suffers from the same problem: Gun violence is the number one cause of death of children in America. Virtually every media outlet and Democrat repeats this contention — including, recently, the vice president. The claim is meant to conjure up distressing images of frolicking kids in parks and schools being gunned down by assault weapons. //

According to the CDC, the number one killer of children between 1-14 are accidents — vehicular, suffocation, and drowning. Twice as many kids under 12 died in cars than from guns. Also, if these studies began at birth rather than starting at one, the leading killer of all children would be diseases and genetic abnormalities. Surely a one-year-old is as much a “kid” as a 19-year-old. (And if you begin at fetal viability, by far the leading killer of young people would be late-term abortions — more than 8,000 viable unborn, and probably more than 50,000 performed after 15 weeks.)

Truth remains true no matter the length of time that has transpired since it was initially spoken. There is no expiration date for it. What is true today was also true yesterday and will still be true tomorrow.

Despite this obvious fact, many in our society have begun to reject anything that predates our times. We view ourselves as better and more intelligent than every generation that came before us. There is an inherent danger in presupposing our “modern” values to be superior in every way to those held by previous generations.

C.S. Lewis calls this “chronological snobbery,” which he defines as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.”

His words still ring true today, though I hasten to add that those who subscribe to this philosophy would no doubt discount his words on the same grounds — they were, after all, penned in the mid-20th century. Antiquated indeed.

Most recently, I have seen this in action through the attempted rewriting of children’s classics like “The Secret Garden” to be less “problematic.” And don’t forget the great cancellation era of 2020 in which classic novels such as “Gone With the Wind” found themselves on the chopping block.

Removing classic literature from shelves only serves to harm us as a society. Readers can engage with such material and determine for themselves what is true and worth emulating and what is not. And, quite frankly, how demeaning is it to presume we are incapable of a feat that is hardly an exercise in cognitive gymnastics? No one in his right mind reading “Gone with the Wind” thinks that the way slaves are treated or discussed within the pages of the novel or in the film is acceptable. It makes you uncomfortable — and it should.

Growth stems from discomfort. If such books and ideas are removed from public consumption and discourse, then personal growth will stagnate, and we will have no concept of the thoughts and values of another era.