

 How My Little Pony turned a little girl into a computer scientist - araneae
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/10/how-my-little-pony-t.html

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frossie
Well, I read that as "If you have that kind of sciencey/geeky mind, you'll see
math everywhere - even in some dumb plastic pony".

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sumeeta
Yeah, I don't know. I feel like we all had something like this when we were
tiny.

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endtime
This is entirely about a very bright little girl and not at all about My
Little Pony.

If you have the right mind, you'll see the math in whatever you're focused on
- radios, Legos, or dolls.

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blahedo
yyyes, sort of---but when someone says that their, I dunno, Erector set taught
them about careful engineering and design, we don't tend to say "this is
entirely about a very bright little boy (or girl) and not at all about Erector
sets". Is that because construction sets tend to be more associated with boys?
Almost any time I see a comment of the form "X taught me about Y when I was
little", it usually really means "I was inspired to discover Y by some feature
of X", not so much that X was an edutainment toy designed to teach Y.

So why not X=My Little Pony?

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endtime
I don't think recursive braiding of hair is ever something that's been
suggested by My Little Pony toys in the same way construction is encouraged by
Lego.

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camccann
Drifting slightly off-topic--the self-similar structure of cauliflower is
neat, but is put to shame by a closely related plant. Behold, the king of
recursive food, the ultimate fractal vegetable: Romanesco Broccoli.
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Fractal_B...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Fractal_Broccoli.jpg)

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gcheong
Sounds like she was close to rediscovering the Mandelbrot set.

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johnl
Sure does. Boys could do that to but are too busy demonstrating that Force =
Mass * Acceleration.

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yagibear
A diamond in the rough! (in the literal sense)

Great to see the spirit of curiosity and intellect alive in the most unlikely
of circumstances.

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ars
Hu?

You make it seem like she grew up in a 3rd world country sorting garbage for a
living, and found a pony which changed her life.

What's unlikely about her life? And why's she a diamond in the rough?

She probably when to school like everyone else, and the pony had nothing to do
with it. It was just a prop.

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cynicalkane
A diamond "in the rough" is not a diamond surrounded by roughness, but rather
an unpolished diamond. Or at least that's how gemcutters use the term. The
idea that a "diamond in the rough" is related to sorting diamonds from junk is
probably a folk etymology.

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roundsquare
So you are saying she is an unpolished diamond? Or was? Perhaps, but no more
than any other budding mathematician/computer scientist.

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admanrs
really thought this was going to be a Fake Steve Jobs post about Jonathan
Schwartz: [http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/02/my-little-pony-a-look-
back....](http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/02/my-little-pony-a-look-back.html)

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sukuriant
Personally, I find it interesting to see this young person's mathematical mind
manifest itself in such a way. She apparently adored her My Little Pony, and
became consumed in pushing division into her braiding experience with it. Sure
it was a prop, and she would have likely started doing the same thing
elsewhere; but, it's engaging to see such an origin.

