[Edu-sig] (egyptian fractions...) the turtle part: chaos.py

[Kirby Urner]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Baseball stats and turtles? That's something I have been wishing for.
> I think that the best way to interest children in probability and
> statistics is sports, including published data and the book Money
> Ball. Also Nate Silver of the New York Times Five Thirty Eight blog,
> one of the best analysts of political races (though not of policy),
> started out in poker and sports.
>

Yes, I remember your interest.

Several of our courses touch on SQL here and there, and when it comes
to having some canned, pre-existing tables on the back end, I can
think of fewer richer data mines that the aggregating pool of
baseball stats.  I've floated this by other staff and know I have an
ally in one of the editors.  Question is:  are baseball stats available
for MySQL in some open source format, or locked up under lock
and key by proprietary dot com pay-per-view services?

In a Norman Rockwell future where America gives lip service to
appreciating education, there'd be no problem freely accessing all
these numbers, copying them to the home hard drive.  Maybe
this already exists.  I'm in the beginning stages.


>
> I would like to see your work, and discuss with you and various other
> people creating an OER with it in the Sugar Labs Replacing Textbooks
> project.
>
>
I'm trying to condense a lot of concepts into a dense compacted
set of modules that aren't too daunting to read, and that don't hide
a lot of functionality.  The metaphor of a Turtle has been replaced
with a Tractor in a field (ascii 2d matrix / array).  This isn't about
displacing turtle graphics, it's about creating an analogy that's
even simpler (more primitive).

Kirby
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