I haven't used this, but I talked briefly with the Code Bubbles developers about 18 months ago and thought that debugging would be the perfect fit. Seems like someone at MSR agreed:

Debugger Canvas - Microsoft Research.

Taking my own 15 Exercises to Know A Programming Language as a starting point for my exploration of Scala...

The first set of exercises are right up the alley of a language with pattern-matching and list-processing:

Write a program that takes as its first argument one of the words ‘sum …

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="422" caption="Photo: US Fish & Wildlife Service"][/caption]

Raising Islands--Hawai'i science and environment: First Hawaiian "golden gooney" chick to fly soon.

How often do you get good environmental news?

I'm a bird geek. Or actually more of a romantic -- I  shed a tear when I …

Clever

Robot with corkscrew legs travels over rough terrain

Australia is considering a plan to make all cigarette packaging generic -- no branding or design on the cigarettes or packages, just the name in a generic font. The cigarette companies are freaking out, obviously.

Interesting

A study seems to show "we …

HMS Friday – The Most Valuable Ballast : The Scuttlefish.

I wonder if Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon was partially influenced by this true story...

Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from a Single Depth Image - Microsoft Research.

Whether this is in the Kinect software API being released imminently, it's not clear, but it will certainly become available over time, presumably giving 2012-era Kinect games higher-quality recognition

The very valuable Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress causes conflicts with Google's recently introduced +1 button. The fix is very simple.

Symptoms: When you attempt to "+1" on a Word Press site that is using the Bad Behavior plugin, the +1 icon appears for a few seconds and then is …

I don't think literate programming is something that will ever enjoy widespread popularity, but for those who write about programming, it's something devoutly to be wished. It might be a good match for Python, which is a nice language for data exploration and demonstrating algorithms and techniques. This tool: pyreport …