Before you begin, get a notebook or create a file on another computer to make notes on your progress, your discoveries, and your questions.
If you haven't done this kind of exploration before, it will feel quite odd. There are sound reasons for this feeling, so don't worry about it, but do take note of it. In fact, take note of how you feel at every stage. Are you uncomfortable? Distressed, even? Make a note of such feelings, and press on. Are you getting excited and happy? Good. Make a note of that, too. You can compare notes with others later on, if you like. Is your brain turning to goop, and nothing makes any sense? Take a break. Don't push yourself. You are trying to unlearn bad habits from school, and you have to allow your brain time to process the changes.
Figure 1-1 Lolcat haz teh dumm.
Do you feel as though there will be an exam later, and that somebody is judging your performance? No problem. There is no exam, and we aren't hanging over your shoulder. In fact, you are giving us an exam. Did we explain enough, or too much? Are these explanations correct? We want you to grade us, and to send us a list of our mistakes, with better answers, if you find any. We promise to fix as many as possible.
In order to help us fix things, we ask that you think about how to write helpful questions. Where does the issue come up? Is it a grayed-out button that you can't test, or a button that you click but nothing seems to happen? Does something happen, but you don't understand it? In each of these cases, we need to know what part of Sugar you were looking at, whether an activity or some other part of the system, and how to get to the item in question.
We'll do a few explicitly as we work through various discoveries, and we'll talk about what to do with your questions.
Undiscoverable: As much as possible, this book aims to help you discover how the XO laptop and its Sugar software work, and then what you can do with them. Sometimes we don't know any way to do that, and we may have to give you a broad hint, or tell you something outright. If you can think of a way to make some such thing discoverable, or you think of a better hint, let us know.
What was undiscoverable in one age of human history, and in many countries, becomes obvious, what some call "intuitive" in others, as natural as the air we breathe. We'll take a look at some of these, too.
The idea of zero as a number has been discovered three times in known human history: in India, among the Olmec predecessors of the Maya in what is now Latin America, and in China. Mathematicians and Computer Scientists prefer to start counting at zero, while business programmers prefer to start counting at one, even though a newly opened bank or credit account necessarily has a zero balance, and similarly in double-entry bookkeeping every account begins at zero. The medieval Catholic church had an aversion to zero, introduced into Europe during the Crusades from Arab mathematics. It took nearly a thousand years to get to 24-hour clocks that start at 00:00, instead of 12-hour clocks where the initial hour of the day is 12:00.
Negative numbers and some of the other kinds we use these days were a lot harder, as was non-Euclidean geometry and a number of other ideas of importance. The big problem was not in discovering them, but in convincing others that they were not idle fancies or worse.
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