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To someone who’s not familiar with the concept of open-source development, it can be a difficult one to get their head around. “You mean people do this for *free*? And give their code *away*?” “Well, yes, they do.” If your default frame of reference is copyright and closed-source, this can be something of a head-spinner.

This video visualises the “many hands make light work” paradigm at the heart of open source. It’s a visual representation of contributions to the Ruby on Rails project, from the inception back in 2004 through to the end of last year. It doesn’t seem too significant until about 5 minutes in, when the activity explodes as Rails really takes off. As individuals contribute more code, they gravitate towards the centre of the mesh, so you can track the magnitude of people’s involvement as they fly in and out.

Ruby on Rails from Ilya Grigorik on Vimeo.

The underlying point is that Rails – like many, many other open-source projects – isn’t a commercial undertaking, yet it has a community of active developers which would be almost impossible to replicate in a commercially-oriented environment. And sometimes you need a picture or two to bring the point home.

• Probability lessons may teach children how to weigh life’s odds and be winners – Times Online
  "Pupils in every secondary school should be taught the statistical skills they need to make sensible life decisions, one of Britain’s leading mathematicians says.

  A basic grasp of statistics and probability — “risk literacy” – is critical to making choices about health, money and even education, yet it is largely ignored by the national curriculum, according to the UK’s only Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk." Bloody marvellous idea, when will it start?

  (tags: probability education teaching schools risk riskanalysis riskmanagement pedagogy)
• The Knit Kit
  (tags: gadgets knitting)
• DCblog: On Obama's victory style – via Twadl.com
  "Speaking as a stylistician – as opposed to a human being (if you'll allow me the distinction), as excited as anyone about this event – it blew me away. As the speech started, I turned to my wife and said, 'He'll never do it!' What was I noticing? It was the opening if-clause, a 41-word cliff-hanger with three who-clause embeddings. Starting a major speech with a subordinate clause? And one of such length and syntactic complexity? I thought he would be lucky if he was able to round it off neatly after the first comma. Try it for yourself: get a sense of the strain on your memory by starting a sentence with a 19-word if-clause, and see what it feels like. But he didn't stop at 19 words. The first who-clause is followed by a second. Then a third. It was real daring. It's difficult for listeners to hold all that in mind. But it worked. And then the short 4-word punch-clause. And deserved applause."
  (tags: obama publicspeaking rhetoric presentation presentationskills)