[Edu-sig] Videos of edu-sig talks at PyCon

[kirby urner]

>
> Then I should have linked to this OpenGL stuff, which is kinda like
> what I've been doing in VPython.
>
> http://blip.tv/file/4882916
>
> But as of tonight, that talk in particular is down (not available).  I
> hope this is a temporary situation.
>

Yep, definitely broken for others as well.  We've made our comments on Disqus.

Sigh:  Python doing dancing polyhedrons has been so much what it's about for me.

Trajectory:

I came from Visual FoxPro (VFP), nowadays a sinking ship, looking for
ways to write Scene Description Language to POV-Ray, the then
free-on-CompuServ ray tracer (povray.org).

Rendering Waterman Polyhedrons (named by me, invented by Steve
Waterman) was one of my motivations back then, also explorations with
"quadray coordinates"):

http://dogfeathers.com/java/ccppoly.html  (Java applet, not by me)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadray_coordinates

I journaled my journey, which took me through Java, and Bruce Eckel's
famous writings, to like Python 1.6 I think it was:

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/oop.html (starting in VFP around 1998)

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/oop5.html (traversing through Java)

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/oop7.html  (ending in Python)

http://www.mindviewinc.com/Index.php (good mentor along the way)

POV-Ray, VRML, LiveGraphics3D... all fill-in-the-blank type
applications (for the views), drawing from computed data (the model).

string.Template made sense, or nowadays just use the new formatting method.

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/numeracy0.html (POV-Ray etc.)

Bridging Geometry and Geography then became the project, starting with
bridging the lexical / graphical.

Talk in Vilnius, Lithuania, giving some ideas.

http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/connectingthedots.pdf
(geography makes a splash towards the end -- "hexapent" refers to
tiling a sphere with hexagons and pentagons).

Getting our "education center" on Google Earth then became a job for
property management clerk (recent):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/5382897441/  (screen shot,
Google Earth)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4083452440/ (FP at Laughing
Horse Books)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/3292180674/in/photostream/
(FP at Cleveland High School)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/4674039162/in/photostream/
(FP in a Quaker classroom)

Background:

I hail from an esoteric school of thought (not necessarily always by
choice) that features both a novel approach to polyhedrons, and an
alternative world map projection.

Having free and open source tools has meant staying in the game, at
least a little, though we're still out-manned and out-gunned by the
normals, not a new situation (standard Church of Subgenius talk).

Anyway, I hope the OpenGL talk at Pycon 2011 comes back eventually.
Why, of all the talks, would this one go away?  Or maybe more did.

Kirby

> Been watching some of the panel on IDEs, need to get to the one about
> Python in teaching.
>
> Still lots to catch up on.  Even if you got to go, there's a lotta
> rings in the circus.  Asynch is the way to go.
>
> Kirby