No. 110 — Papert’s Principle ⫶ Computers got weird ⫶ Calder Gardens

large, uncompromising feeling

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

From Tour Montparnasse, one of the most controversial buildings in Paris. For many years, Paris banned building over seven storeys in the city centre.

France runs on eight-week school cycles: six to study, two to rest. As the first break nears, I am surprised by how reassuring the rhythm is.

I spent last week in Tampere leading a full-day AI workshop for educators from across Europe. These sessions let us move past inspiration into practice, and I always learn from the realities of the classroom. If your school, municipality, or organization wants something similar, send me a note. And you can still tune in for my Wednesday talk AI as our multiple-choice test.

1.

I joined Samuel Arbesman on Orthogonal Bet podcast to talk about how children, educators, and cities can relate to computing. I also made a case for reconnecting computing with early-childhood traditions like Piaget, Papert, and Reggio Emilia, and for restoring a bit of historical memory to a tech culture that forgets its own origins.

If you enjoy smart, cross-disciplinary discussions, this podcast is for you. Some of my favorite episodes: Nadia Asparouhova, Chaim Gingold, Ben Reinhardt, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Omar Rizwan.

2.

Speaking of Piaget: I finished The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick a few days back (thank you, Diana, for the recommendation!). Benoit Mandelbrot’s story was marvellous (“Woe to the poet born in an interesting piece of geography in a violent time”), and to my surprise he also spent 1955–1957 in Geneva to collaborating with Piaget at the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology.

3.

We finally read Margaret Wise Brown’s classic The Dead Bird (with tender illustrations by Christian Robinson). It was moving to watch my three-year-old encounter death for the first time. After we finished, he wanted to replay the burial and the singing, again and again. This is a new kind of reading joy for me too: it reminds me of large, uncompromising feelings of my own from when I was his age

4.

History rides again. I love this credo from Robin Sloan: “One really must not become insensate to the fact that computers got super weird, super fast.” Whenever I work with educators, I try to explain this gargantuan shift.

5.

Calder Gardens looks amazing: Philadelphia, Alexander Calder’s work, nature, art, and architecture. From The New Yorker: “In Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens, a Dynasty Comes Home.”

6.

Marvin Minsky came up with the term “Papert’s Principle” to describe how some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows. It reminds me of the discussion around LLM agents and makes me hope we will one day have tiny Papert controls built into our models..

7.

Alison Gopnik is giving a talk at the Santa Fe Institute on October 21, 2025 7:30 PM (also streaming on YouTube). I think Gopnik is such an interesting thinker and I like how she jumps between computer science and early childhood in such a seamless way.

The extended human childhood allows a period of protected broad-ranging exploration and truth-seeking, adulthood allows exploitation and resource gathering, and post-menopausal elderhood allows caregiving and cultural transmission. Each period involves motivations and computational capacities that are in tension with those of other periods, but the full suite of development allows for maximal adaptation to changing and variable environments. The human life history offers lessons for AI, suggests Gopnik. Different types of AI enable different capacities: intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning can help enable exploration and truth-finding, while Large Language Models are means of cultural transmission.

8.

My reader notes are the best. This is such an interesting observation:

I’m interested in childhood-based approaches to learning for adults, myself included. I learned in Gabriel Winer’s book Fluent Forever that each language has an order in which all students learn its verb tenses—both native child speakers and second-language-learning adults. Nobody who learns english understands “she dances” before “she IS dancING.” I want to understand coding like a kid does.

No. 109 — Paris fall exhibitions ⫶ Pots, pans, and stoves ⫶ What’s in Jane’s bag?

Running back to a former self

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

Last week I was in New York, feeling what I felt some thirteen years ago when I first lived there. In many ways it was like running back to a former self. The Flatiron area, the gossiping Stumptown baristas and Y7 yoga studios take me straight to 2012. (What is that version of me doing now? What is she thinking?)

My main reason for visiting was an honorary mention on urban design that the Ruoholahti playground received from Fast Company’s Design Awards. It was also a wonderful chance to see old friends, discover new playgrounds, and gather ideas from a city that keeps changing.

1.

Here are some Paris exhibitions I’m excited for in the fall (a checklist for myself!):

• Pekka Halonen: Un hymne à la Finlande — Petit Palais (4 November 2025 to 22 February 2026). Painting snow is a Finnish specialty, much like Gallen-Kallela showed at the Musée Jacquemart-André a few years back. The exhibition also includes kids’ workshops.

• Exposition Générale — Fondation Cartier (25 October 2025 to 23 August 2026).
  Mostly for the brand-new-location energy; I have been watching this space while in 1st arrondissemen.

• La licorne, l’étoile et la lune — Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (14 October 2025 to 8 March 2026). One of my favorite museums in the city, with a great shop.

• Gerhard Richter — Fondation Louis Vuitton (17 October 2025 to 2 March 2026).
  Pair with a make-your-own-paintbrush workshop.

• Paris 1925 : L’Art déco et ses architectes — Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine (22 October 2025 to 29 March 2026). Paris gave Art Deco to the world! Musée Zadkine also has a Zadkine + Art Déco companion show coming up.

• L’Empire du Sommeil — Musée Marmottan Monet (9 October 2025 to 1 March 2026). Marmottan is my contender for the best one-stop museum in Paris: interesting temporary shows, breathtaking Monets, and even a house-museum.

• Berthe Weil: Galeriste d’avant-garde a— Musée de l’Orangerie (8 October 2025 to 26 January 2026). I loved Heinz Berggruen, un marchand et sa collection and the permanent Collection Walter-Guillaume : le parcours - there is something about the eye of a collector that makes for a great exhibition theme.

• John Singer Sargent: Éblouir Paris — Musée d’Orsay (23 September 2025 to 11 January 2026). “Madame X” is on loan from the Met, which is reason enough to visit.

• Minimal — Bourse de Commerce (8 October 2025 to 19 January 2026). The Bourse is the perfect size: always something interesting, never too exhausting.

• Anything at Grand Palais. In the past year we have skated, browsed books, and gotten lost in a children’s museum here. It has quietly become our town square... The Pompidou is staging many exhibitions there while under renovation.

• Les illusions retrouvées. Nouvelles utopies à l’ère numérique — CENTQUATRE-PARIS (11 October 2025 to 11 January 2026). Technology meets art, and the center has a lovely children’s space. There are almost always people dancing in the corridors.

2.

A conversation with a reader last week reminded me how much I enjoy serendipity. So I opened a handful of free 30-minute calls over the next three weeks. If you want to talk about what you’re working on, trying to work on or thinking about working on and think I might be able to help, schedule a time.

3.

On a fall Sunday with dinner guests, everyone will love ragù (beef / porcini) and spaghetti shared from a platter, a sharp green salad, and cold champagne. Period.

4.

Why is it a bumper year for acorns?

I learned this from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: every few years, some trees produce an overwhelming crop of seeds. The collective term is mast, so we call it a mast year, when trees make more food than animals can possibly eat. It is an old survival strategy for oaks and their companions.

So this year I plan on scattering acorns with abandon.

5.

AI is our multiple-choice test. AI gives us speed and scale, and it’s tempting to use it in education, but much like the multiple-choice test AI can flatten our creativity. Come think with me about classrooms that keep room for ambiguity and wonder. This is the third webinar I’m doing with EU CodeWeek, and the details to join (for free!) are below:

When: October 15, 15:00–16:30 CET
Where: Online (Zoom) — Registration link
Format: Talk + discussion

6.

Two recommendations:

I just finished Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It is a model of a good framing: a big geopolitical question (what might an engineering society like China and a lawyerly society like the US learn from one another?), grounded in lived experience, told with narrative momentum.

The idea that stayed with me comes from an earlier Wang blog post: “Technology should be understood in three distinct forms: as processes embedded into tools (like pots, pans, and stoves); explicit instructions (like recipes); and as process knowledge, or what we can also refer to as tacit knowledge, know-how, and technical experience.” Read the book to see which country excels at which.

Looking ahead, Joe Studwell’s How Africa Works arrives in February 2026. I loved How Asia Works, so I am eager for this one.

7.

What’s in Jane’s bag?

From Jane B. par Agnès V, a film from 1988. This would be me with a Birkin. (Also, the clothes..)

No. 108 — Reading brain ⫶ Rebuilding something new ⫶ The State of the Braid

now with more bird facts!

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

Your resident playground designer observing playgrounds in Kyiv.

Every once in a while I find myself in the most surprising places. I spent last week in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Amid the ongoing war and blaring air alerts there was also a hopeful message of Ukrainian resilience, of beauty and of rebuilding something new. The train ride back to Poland took over twelve hours, plenty of time to think about how “Education Shaping the World” means investing in curiosity, care, and play already now. That’s work I want to be part of.

Slava Ukraini 💙💛

1.

I finished Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. Her argument is that over centuries, reading rewired the brain into a “reading brain,” letting us enter the thoughts of others, absorb consciousnesses far from our own, and develop new cognitive capacities. At the end she turns to Socrates, who feared that reading only mimics knowledge.

Ultimately, the questions Socrates raised for Athenian youth apply equally to our own. Will unguided information lead to an illusion of knowledge, and thus curtail the more difficult, time-consuming, critical thought processes that lead to knowledge itself? Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another’s inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?

Socrates’ questions linger. I wonder what he would have said about the speed and ease of AI.

2.

A reader asked me, a bit paraphrased: If you were traveling through Scandinavia, looking at how technology, crafts, and childhood go hand in hand, what should you pay attention to?

So I made a small itinerary of museums, libraries and workshops. For each visit, I’d carry a handful of questions, like a lens for seeing Scandinavian culture.

• Do the spaces want us to move together, or wander alone? How do they make belonging visible?

• When technology appears, is it tool, toy, or companion? And how does it sit beside wood, clay, fabric, paper?

• Who decides what happens: the grown-ups, the designers, or the children? How much can a child bend the rules, or write their own?

• What is the shape of safety, and where does risk begin? Where are the pauses: the coffee, the fika, the pancakes waiting at the end?

• How are the things children make treated? Are they hidden away, or displayed with the same dignity as adult work?

• And can you feel the old Nordic promise, that everyone is welcome, that all can take part?

Finland

• Käsityökoulu Robotti. After-school arts-and-tech craft school.

• Arkki. Architecture lessons scaled to children’s bodies.

• Annantalo. A house for children’s art and culture.

• Oodi Urban Workshop. A library filled with tools (and seeing all the dads on paternity leave in Playground Loru!)

Sweden

• Junibacken. A Story Train through Astrid Lindgren’s worlds.

• Tom Tits Experiment. Machines that need many hands.

Denmark

• H.C. Andersen’s House. Light, sound, fairy tales in motion. I love especially Ville Vau.

• KU.BE. A building for movement! Love love this.

• Dokk1. A library as public square, with a Monstrum playground.

Norway

• Bitraf. A community makerspace.

• Deichman Bjørvika. A glass library full of ramps.
  

What should I add?

3.

How big are our embeddings? I love Vicki Boykis’ clear way of writing about embeddings and dimensionality. (Dimensionality is a topic I keep circling back to. I remember when a few hundred dimensions felt sufficient. Now 768 is standard, and many models stretch to 4,096 and beyond.)

4.

The State of the Braid. This made me laugh: the wandering essay format that blends personal material with other themes: hawks, stars, water/swimming, Greek mythology. Or, like the article puts it: “the story of my breakup, now with more bird facts!”.

Braided non-fiction remains still my favorite genre.

5.

Internet phone book is in reprint. An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, now in collaboration with Metalabel. I wish I still had the little notebook where I wrote down the websites I liked, kept beside my childhood computer. It felt like a spell book.

6.

One of the little internet pockets I like checking from time to time: Scratch projects that use Hello Ruby sprites, stories or characters as inspiration. They are small, glitchy, and full of charm.

No. 107 — La rentrée rush ⫶ 3books ⫶ the McPhee method.

build your volitional muscles

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

From Musée Albert Kahn, just outside of Paris, which I warmly recommend.

The rentrée rush has begun! I’m back at my desk, mirabelle plums are in season and the Parisians are as busy as ever. I find this new rhythm of vacationing in August very interesting as it makes the rest of the year even shorter.

Anyways. My early fall took a surprising turn and I’ll be in New York on September 14-17 for a fun project. Who should I meet while there, working on play in public space / city scale learning? Looking for city folk, foundations, developers, communities to swap notes.

1.

What is color space? A gorgeous, interactive and visual explainer for digital color.

2.

You learn best and most effectively when you are learning something that you care about. Your work becomes meaningful and something you can be proud of only when you have chosen it for yourself. This is why our second self-directive is to build your volitional muscles. Your volition is your ability to make decisions and act on them. To set your own goals, choose your own path, and decide what matters to you. Like physical muscles, you build your volitional muscles by exercising them, and in doing so you can increase your sense of what’s possible.

LLMs are good at giving fast answers. They’re not good at knowing what questions you care about, or which answers are meaningful. Only you can do that. You should use AI-powered tools to complement or increase your agency, not replace it.

Recurse center: Developing our position on AI

Love this: volitional muscle. Agency, imagination and curiosity feel too gauzy. A more muscular word suits our times. I wrote about this need for better words a few months ago.

3.

We had a few sick days in Helsinki. Stuck in a small apartment, the surprise hero was my ten-year-old inkjet. We printed paper toys, coloring pages, weather charts, paper cities and ice cream stalls. Greatest hits: Mr Printables, Sago Mini Printables, Canon Creative Park and Made by Joel.

For older kids Offline.kids seems promising! I’m jealous of the filterable index of screen-free activities, I should do something with the play section of Hello Ruby..

4.

I’m very big on John McPhee (I’ve written about his diagrams and Oranges before). If you like “structure as craft,” this short piece by James Somners is a lovely doorway into the McPhee method.

5.

3books is a browsable, searchable archive of books recommended at the end of The Ezra Klein Show. My favorite question on the podcast, the books are always interesting.

I’d love to build a similar public index forHelsingin Sanomat “Luen Tässä” series (people talk about a book that’s moved them). If you’re a tinkerer who wants to help with scraping / light curation / hosting, reply!

6.

A few random books from the pile that had arrived while I was on summer vacation.

Share your rentrée books, please! Best time of the year for reading.

No. 106 — Proust and the Squid ⫶ Memory and monuments ⫶ Counting spaces

time goes porous

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

August holidays brought an unplanned pause. I’ve been mostly off the computer, so just a short list of links this time. La rentrée is around the corner, and regular programming returns soon.

Some selected summer in Finland 2025 recommendations: Söderlångvik manor and Kim Simonsson giant moss statues. Klaava winebar. Helsinki Biennial, if only for Vallisaari. Shii. Naantalin kirjajuhlat. Day screening of Phoenician Scheme. Olafur Eliasson’s Long Daylight Pavilion in Kruunuvuorenranta. The sea, everywhere.

1.

I’ve been wrapped up in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, a tour of how reading was invented and how it rewires us. It is neuroscience told with a novelist’s brain.

An example. Wolf walks you through a 233 word Proust passage at speed and explains what happens in our brains:

Let’s go back to what you did when I asked you to switch your attention from this book to Proust’s passage and to read as fast as you could without losing Proust’s meaning. In response to this request, you engaged an array of mental or cognitive processes: attention; memory; and visual, auditory, and linguistic processes. Promptly, your brain’s attentional and executive systems began to plan how to read Proust speedily and still understand it.

Next, your visual system raced into action, swooping quickly across the page, forwarding its gleanings about letter shapes, word forms, and common phrases to linguistic systems awaiting the information. These systems rapidly connected subtly differentiated visual symbols with essential information about the sounds contained in words. Without a single moment of conscious awareness, you applied highly automatic rules about the sounds of letters in the English writing system, and used a great many linguistic processes to do so. This is the essence of what is called the alphabetic principle, and it depends on your brain’s uncanny ability to learn to connect and integrate at rapid-fire speeds what it sees and what it hears to what it knows.

Then, after you integrated all this visual, conceptual, and linguistic information with your background knowledge and inferences, you arrived at an understanding of what Proust was describing: a glorious day in childhood made timeless through the “divine pleasure” that is reading!

That’s the everyday miracle of reading. I knew all of this, but still the wonder of it had been lost on me.

Now for the part that made me grin:

Years ago, the cognitive scientist David Swinney helped uncover the fact that when we read a simple word like “bug,” we activate not only the more common meaning (a crawling, six-legged creature), but also the bug’s less frequent associations—spies, Volkswagens, and glitches in software.

Swinney discovered that the brain doesn’t find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it. The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children. Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts

Words are vectors; read a lot early and the model sharpens. We bring our entire store of meanings to whatever we read.

2.

The spacing fin.

When Robin Sloan’s latest landed in my inbox I delayed reading it until evening. And I’m glad I did, because when I ran into the section called Dragon Science, my scalp started to tingle.

Mathematician and AI researcher Daniel Murfet traces the embryology of language models during training, showing how structure buds into tissues, organs, and new anatomies. My favorite: a spacing fin, a whole sub-system specialized for counting spaces.

See Murfet’s thread for the “baby serpents” and training maps, and the full paper for the technical story.

3.

The Palindrome is one of those “how is this free?” publications.

Their mathematics for machine learning reads like a roadmap to the core tools you need to poke and prod models. I’d love to hear from a high-school math teacher: how does this arc (linear algebra, calculus, and probability) line up with what’s taught today? We talk a lot about reading and writing in the age of generative AI; how should math change too?

4.

Outdoor physical activity is more beneficial than indoor physical activity for cognition in young people.

During the summer I’ve been visiting the computer playground. I keep seeing graceful wear and new features ship themselves. The cat sculpture’s tail, not its back, turned out to be the ride; a kid once lay flat and ran the carousel like a hamster wheel.

5.

Claire L. Evans: “There’s no distinction between memory, the memorizer and the act of remembering.” from What can a cell remember?

Maria Stepanova: “Rancière’s most important point is this: in his writing about history, he contrasts ‘document’ and ‘monument’. A ‘document,’ for him, is any record of an event that aims to be exhaustive, to tell history, to make ‘a memory official’. A ‘monument’ is the opposite of ‘document’, in ‘the primary sense of the term’: that which preserves memory through its very being, that which speaks directly, through the fact that it was not intended to speak – the layout of a territory that testifies to the past activity of human beings better than any chronicle of their endeavours; a household object, a piece of fabric, a piece of pottery, a stele, a pattern painted on a chest or a contract between two people we know nothing about…” from Memory of memory.

I love when fiction and non-fiction I’m reading start to rhyme.

6.

On my fall list: Brian Potter’s The Origins of Efficiency. I read with delight his Construction Physics newsletter and the recurring question, where do efficiency gains really come from, works for book lenght work so well. I’m also eyeing Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle, a near-future fiction (with a great website!); and Sophia Jansson’s Kolme saarta – isä, äiti ja minä (out in Finnish and Swedish and no doubt soon in English too).

7.

What makes summer for me is how time goes porous. I’m never more than an eyeblink from being both very young and very old. Great-grandparents, aunts, and cousins collapse into small, sticky summer souls. Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book catches this perfectly. I reread it every year (and read it aloud for the Finnish listeners too!). And this year, there’s the film, too.

8.

Carrying this little printout everywhere. I understand research better when I print it.

• Thoughts About Biology — James Bonner

• Perspectives on Theory at the Interface of Physics and Biology — William Bialek

• A Mathematician’s View of the Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in Biology — Alexandre Borovik

• Is the Cell Really a Machine? — Daniel J. Nicholson

• Biology Is More Theoretical Than Physics — Jeremy Gunawardena

• A systems biology timeline — Gunawardena Lab

• On Being the Right Size — J. B. S. Haldane

• Theory in Biology: Figure 1 or Figure 7? — Rob Phillips

• Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?” at 75 — Rob Phillips

• Molecular “Vitalism” — Marc W. Kirschner; John Gerhart; Timothy J. Mitchison

• Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?—Or, What I Learned While Studying Apoptosis — Yuri Lazebnik

• Life at low Reynolds number — E. M. Purcell