This is interesting: in the future, the batteries for our tablets, cellphones, netbooks, and cameras (assuming we’ll still have them in those forms) will be built directly into the casing of the devices themselves.

Lithium-ion batteries are made by tightly rolling up the various battery components in layers before encasing them in rectangular or cylindrical packaging. The engineers, from Rice University in Texas, devised their own unique version of a multilayer battery by painting these individual battery components (two current collectors, a cathode, an anode and a polymer separator) on to select surfaces in layers. These layers included paints made from lithium cobalt oxide (a positive electrode), lithium titanium oxide (a negative electrode) and conductive single-walled nanotubes (a current collector). The special polymer paint blend helped achieve superior conductivity by forming the micro-porous layer required in a lithium battery.

via Spray-on Rechargeable Batteries Could Store Energy Anywhere | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Here’s a somewhat controversial article from ReadWriteWeb: a proposal to make computer literacy as important as basic literacy. From the article:

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society.

via Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy.

My take on this: yes, but…it can’t (and probably shouldn’t) be done with programming languages as they exist today. The state of the art presents too many non-programming-related cruft in front of the user, whereas the actual meat — the algorithms, the analysis — gets lost and diluted.