How a sad robot on the streets of Oakland led me to the Stupid Fun Club

This article was originally published in Software Development (Dr. Dobb's Journal). 2015 UPDATE: A phone call today to the Stupid Fun Club revealed that the robots had been mothballed since 2009 or so, according to Becky Winter, whose husband Mike Winter participated in the interview below. A related article from Don Hopkins, who programmed the robots, explains …

Excerpt from ‘Practice Secrets of the Pros’: Research Explains Why Your Beliefs About Blocked Practice Are Wrong

Our intuitions about how we acquire knowledge and retain it are wrong -- yet we're still seduced by the simplicity of organized, "blocked" repetition. Randomized practice sessions not only form more solid skills by maximizing retrieval strategies and mental frameworks, they also keep you engaged and conscious.    One year after publication, my book on mastering music …

2015 UPDATE: Perforce Sponsors Web Video Show That Does What Even NASA Can’t

[Originally published on Perforce.com] "I was at the STS 130 launch, standing there at 4 AM in Florida in the cold. The thing launches, and you go from darkest night to daylight. No camera can iris down fast enough to capture how it splits the sky," recalls Zig Zichterman, a lifelong space buff and a …