Hi folks, Am 15.03.2008 um 21:13 schrieb John Gilmore:
>> In other words, I think that in terms of third party content and >> activities, we want to be "culturally neutral" by supporting all >> types, cultures, religions, and ideals, rather than by ignoring all >> of >> them. > > +1. > > It did seem odd to me that a whole application would be dedicated to > reading (various translations of) exactly one book. That's exactly what I would agree on; even if it was The Cathedral and the Bazaar we'd be talking about ;-) > Perhaps this > (GPL) application can be improved by volunteers to work with two > books. > Or more! (As every computer science student knows, the interesting > numbers are 0, 1, and more than 1. Once your code handles 2, > getting to 3 > or 3000 is usually really easy.) Yes, right. I'd prefer a lot more books than only two. And let me state some kind of -let's call it- insight. I see some parallels between the manner one reads religious texts like the Bible or the Koran and the reading of code (at least in object-oriented languages, especially like in Smalltlalk/Squeak but also in Java if possible). Earlier in this disussion, GnomeSword was mentioned and its ability to allow parallel reading in different parts of the book. When I browse through Squeak code I do quite a similar thing. When I do research in scientific texts I sometimes do the same (though not as often as in code work). Do you have similar experiences? Me as a linguist, I find this phenomenon quite interesting. What about an activity that may enable users this kind of text work? We'd need a common standard, maybe like the format coming with bible read (and maybe in some sort of application like the System Browser in Squeak provides). > > > We've also seen people working on making it easy to read the Koran on > the OLPC. Perhaps the two efforts can be merged ;-\ Yeah, see above. I guess according to what was mentioned before in this list discussion we could guarantee to be culturally neutral without ignoring to enable a specific meta-cultural skill, namely parallel reading which can be seen as an important learning phenomenon when dealing with complex texts like religious texts, scientific work or code scripts. > > > John (an atheist myself) May someone/thing be with you, always, ±Micha (having nothing to say bout myself, just trying to be neutral) P.S.: Please share your reading manners with the list, I guess we really could miss something when "kicking" (socially not technically nor physically) a good activity out due to pseudo-neutral resentments against differing motivations of writing code ;-) > > > PS: Some countries have an official religion; their educational > department is probably going to put religious education in every XO > they use, as it already is in their schoolbooks. Get used to it. > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
