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tijl
·السنة الماضية·discuss
This reminds me of a Dutch song that was fairly popular in the '90s (loosely translated):

And a child prodigy at forty, That is a sorry case. Who could have been so much, yet Will never leave a trace.

(The song is based on the life of the poet Halbo C. Kool. Dutch lyrics here: https://genius.com/Boudewijn-de-groot-een-wonderkind-van-50-... )
tijl
·السنة الماضية·discuss
I tried Heddy with my children. It worked great at first. It's really easy to get started with. Every level, the language changes slightly to introduce more concepts. That worked great for my younger son, but it confused his brother. Code that was correct in one level, suddenly gives errors in the next. In the end, we stopped using Hedy. I now teach them Python instead. It's harder at first, but at leastthe things they learn, won't change.
tijl
·قبل سنتين·discuss
Looking at this from outside the US, it is quite bizarre to see how 2 extreme positions dominate the abortion debate there. Ultimately, the question is at which point the embryo should be considered a human being, who's life deserves some form of legal protection. One extreme position is that there should be no legal protection at all until birth. The other extreme would be granting full legal protection from conception. Both positions are fringe positions in Western Europe. The way the debate is radicalized in the US as a mater of fundamental human rights, feels like it leaves little space for the kind of compromise that most Europeans would accept as the only sensible position.
tijl
·قبل 3 سنوات·discuss
It's interesting to see how the perspective on this is shifting in Iran to the point that nowadays, it became controversial to call this a coup. In the royalist version of events, it is Mosaddegh who attempted a coup. Mosaddegh had lost is parliamentary majority, but was still very popular. A held a referendum to dissolve parliament and give himself as prime minister the power to make law. The Shah responded by dismissing Mosaddegh. The Shah had the constitutional right to do this, because Parliament was not in session.

That's of course only part of the story, and it completely ignores the role of Britain and the US. But what is interesting to me is not so much what exactly happened, but how peoples' view on history changes with shifting political moods. A generation ago in Iran, basically everyone agreed that this was a coup by Western imperialist powers. Today, with growing opposition to the political system, comes a questioning of the "official" history as thought in schools. Young people are today looking for different (but equally one-sided) versions of the story in which the roles of good and bad get reversed.