Fishdraw is a single JavaScript file that generates drawings of fish. There’s an option to slow the animation down so you can watch it draw the fish line-by-line.

I was wondering which Halloween candy would make the best laser, and came across reports that Jolly Ranchers are fluorescent. I got out my UV flashlight and am able to definitely confirm this is true.

The type of fluorescence varies by color, but blue raspberry has a particularly dramatic color change from deep blue to hot pink.

It's interesting to note that the green Jolly Rancher actually seems to be dimmer under UV light. My guess is that it's just absorbing UV light rather than turning it into fluorescence, and it might be more fluorescent under visible light.

The grape flavor Jolly Rancher is phosphorescent, meaning that it continues to give off fluorescent light after I turn off the UV light. In other words, it's glow-in-the-dark, though the light only lasts for a second or so. To see phosphorescence I had to switch out my big 395 nm flashlight for a shorter-wavelength 365 nanometer light.

What's causing this fluorescence? It's probably the dyes that give the candies their bright colors. The package lists some pretty standard food dyes, Blue 1, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, and Red 40. They're all fluorescent, especially in very viscous foods (hard candy nicely fits the bill). I couldn't find out for sure which one is phosphorescent, but Red 40 glows for longer in more viscous materials, so that would be my first guess.

(It's worth pointing out that just because they fluoresce doesn't mean the dyes are necessarily harmful - plenty of natural substances also fluoresce, such as olive oil, coumarin, and vitamin B2.)

The gummy Jolly Ranchers are also fluorescent (they have the same dyes) although the effect isn't as dramatic. The granular coating of the sour gummies makes it a bit easier to see. None of them seemed to be phosphorescent. I'm not sure why, but one hypothesis is that viscosity thing. Gummies are closer to flowing liquid than hard candies are.

On the other hand, blue raspberry airheads are really brightly fluorescent with a very satisfying blue-to-pink color change. It also has the same dyes as Jolly Ranchers. Maybe taffy format encourages fluorescence?

Bonus content for AI Weirdness supporters: my cat Neon photobombing the candy photoshoot. You are extremely awesome for helping me pay my blog hosting bill, and absolutely deserve to see this (or to read about this, in the extensive alt text).

Krill, writes Gordon Peake, are “the least zeitgeisty creatures imaginable”: small, shrimp-like crustaceans whose total population numbers in the hundreds of trillions. Until recently, krill has mostly served as a snack for whales. Now, however, krill is “the latest iteration of capitalism on the frozen frontier,” a health supplement whose market is valued at roughly a billion dollars. Peake spends weeks aboard the Allankay with a crew of vegan activists devoted to ending the krill trade. His dispatch is a brisk history of extractive capitalism in the Antarctic, a fascinating study of an utterly uncool creature, and an uproarious account of a reluctant sailor earning his sea legs. Take the journey with him.

I contemplated the fillets of pink salmon defrosting on my kitchen counter, not too far from the shelf where I keep my supplements, including krill oil, part of my long-established daily routine of taking elixirs with vague but impressive claims about “improved heart health” and “enhanced brain function.” Labels depicting regal seabirds and majestic trawlers and a barmy sense that the more expensive the supplement, the more potent it must be also guided my “decision-making.” I told Hammarstedt I was the sort of fellow who enabled such an industry to exist. He responded with an offer: I should go down to Antarctica to see the krill business for myself.

For today’s high schoolers, a typical school day from a decade ago must seem like something from the Dark Ages. These days, students are issued digital textbooks instead of physical ones, they learn how to conduct chemistry experiments through apps that simulate a science lab, and they take standardized tests on a Chromebook. All of this is the result of many years of frenzied investment in ed tech, capped by a pandemic that forced virtual learning. The overwhelming majority of schools nationwide provide each student with their own laptop or tablet.

All of these screens have changed the dynamic of the classroom. When a student is supposed to be using their school-issued iPad to diligently take notes during math class, they might instead be messaging a friend. Across the country, some parents and teachers are mounting a backlash against screens in the classroom. In April, the Los Angeles school board voted to stop giving devices to its youngest students and implemented screen-time limits for all grades.

But other schools are pulling back on ed tech for an entirely different reason. Chromebooks, like essentially all other consumer electronics, need RAM, or random-access memory. So do the data centers that power every conversation with a chatbot. The AI industry is using so many memory chips that it’s led to a global shortage, making gadgets much more expensive. For an individual consumer, the memory crunch—RAMaggedon, if you will—means having to spend a few hundred dollars more on a new computer. But school districts, many of which are already cash-strapped, buy hundreds or thousands of computers every year. The administrators I spoke with for this story told me that they have had to scramble to acquire all the electronics they now need. As RAMaggedon drags on, they said, something has got to give.

[Read: If you need a laptop, buy it now]

Schools started picking up on the memory shortage last winter, months before most of the country. They have to figure out bulk orders for laptops and tablets long before the academic year begins. Many of them turn to third-party vendors, which have typically provided quotes that are locked in for a month, giving technology directors time to secure the funds from their districts to make purchases that can run millions of dollars. As memory prices have soared, Mark Samberg, the chief technology officer of Chatham County Schools in North Carolina, is hearing a different message from his vendors. “Now quotes are going to be good for 48 hours, a week, or 14 days,” he told me.

Samberg scooped up the Chromebooks he could find. Other districts have been less lucky. In March, a Chromebook vendor warned Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Illinois that its prices would be going up soon. Steve Richardson, the district’s IT director, quickly placed an order, only to be eventually told it couldn’t be fulfilled because memory chips were on back order. “We were kind of in dire straits,” Richardson told me. In 2023, Chromebooks cost the school $353 a piece. The price rose to $400, then $412, and then $427. The most recent batch that Richardson purchased, in August, cost $508 each. But the district needed them to ensure that every student had a Chromebook ahead of the PSAT, which is now entirely digital.

So far, schools have been willing to stomach the costs to continue giving every student a device. Districts initially decided to implement “one to one” policies on the premise that technology can be an equalizing force in the classroom; many educators and administrators still believe that. Dorann Avey, the board chair of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, told me that she is concerned that RAMaggedon will widen the digital divide. Devices are not for “just writing papers,” she said. “We’re trying to prepare students to learn different software that is workplace- and workforce-appropriate.”

That has meant making difficult trade-offs. Because of the extra spending on laptops for students, Homewood-Flossmoor didn’t buy any new smart whiteboards or computers for teachers this year. In Texas, the Paradise Independent School District has considered asking students to bring in their own laptop or tablet, Director of Technology Doug Bryant told me.

A common solution has been to extend the lifetime of a laptop. Instead of replacing a device every four years, schools are opting for seven or eight to reduce how many units they need to purchase in a given year. But that introduces new problems: Older computers sometimes aren’t able to update to the latest operating system, which could create cybersecurity risks. Schools are already a top target for hackers, because they store lots of sensitive personal information but have limited resources. Plus, as a device gets older, its battery degrades and may ultimately need to be replaced. That costs “time and money,” Avey said. “But it’s still less money than buying brand-new devices.”

All of this may not be enough. Multiple administrators told me that they are already considering rolling back their one-to-one device policies because of RAMaggedon, and the challenges for schools are poised to mount. Heading into this school year, some districts were able to skirt the worst of the memory shortage by buying Chromebooks before prices really started to soar. Aaron Smith, the CTO of Loudoun County Public Schools, told me that he sought special permission from his school board to commit to purchasing nearly 24,400 Chromebooks in February instead of May. Memory prices jumped so quickly over that time span that the decision ultimately saved the district $1.66 million, he said. But Smith and other technology directors may not have the same luck as they begin looking to purchase gadgets for the next school year. An executive at Micron, one of the world’s largest RAM manufacturers, recently warned that there’s “no line of sight” to the end of the memory shortage. If schools wait to buy, prices could end up going up even more. But buying early might mean devices will languish in storage for months as the warranty clock ticks away.

RAMageddon will force schools to scrutinize which tech purchases actually improve learning, and which don’t. The fallout will reach far beyond Chromebooks. “We’re not going to be able to afford the servers that we thought we were,” said Samberg, the Chatham County Schools CTO. Those servers power functions such as security cameras, badge readers, and account logins—and every one of them needs RAM.

This article was my submission to the Fordham Institute’s 2026 Wonkathon contest, which asks what rules and regulations should govern the use of technology in the schools. You can read my article on their website here.

Charting the Course is a series from Education Progress featuring pro-excellence education commentary, news, and policy analysis.

1. Frictionless Surfaces

Much talk about how edtech can or should be used in the schools reminds me of a particular type of high school physics problem. They’re the ones that begin with “Assuming a frictionless surface…,” and they often describe a scenario where an object’s velocity stays constant because it isn’t encountering any resisting forces. Despite describing conditions that do not exist in the real world, these models still work — i.e., produce close-enough answers — because the effects of the friction that they assume away are usually small, and so can be factored in afterward.

Popular arguments and programs in favor of edtech adoption frequently make similar assumptions. The problem is that friction in the classroom, the home and the schools is of a different kind than the forces assumed away in those basic physics problems. An edtech product might show clear gains in a controlled setting: maybe it’s a supervised pilot, or a particularly motivated school or classroom adopting a device for a clear, limited purpose. Those results then get touted at trade shows or advertised to an Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum & Instruction, who usually exists in a procurement regime that incentivizes constantly adopting new technologies — mostly just software now — because the future of learning always had to be digital.

Yet all of these new software packages are getting loaded onto one-to-one laptops and tablets that students are now using in class and are expected to use at home. And neither in the classroom nor at home are those frictional forces as minimal as they are in the physics problems. Distractions, multitasking, and the glowing pull of machines that are literally built to do everything are the main forces acting on the object. They are the new learning environment we built.

2. Abstracting and Idealizing

All reasoning abstracts: it leaves things out, and research (especially education research) has to as well. One way it can go awry, though, is through idealization: reasoning about agents by attributing capacities that real humans lack, and then treating those capacities as the standard.1 Edtech’s evidentiary habits do both. They (and we) frequently reason about a kind of student that doesn’t really exist, and then appeal to implementation problems to explain why new learning software hasn’t worked. But the flaws are in the way we model edtech generally.

What education policymakers need is a revolution in the old sense of the word: a turning back. Instructional software should have to prove it beats analog materials under conditions students actually learn in. And the decision whether it has or has not must sit with individual districts; not with vendors, nor outsourced to some state agency list of products keyed to ESSA evidence tiers that don’t have enough to say about real classroom conditions. What states should do is establish a clear standard — like “Any instructional software purchase must carry the burden of proof against an analog comparator under deployment conditions” — and then ensure that district-level adoption decisions follow it.

3. Software and Noise

Why the special standard for edtech, i.e. new educational software, when hardly any educational product, analog or digital, has been subject to such a regime?

Because laptops and tablets are different from textbooks and worksheets. The latter are designed to do one thing, but laptops and tablets are designed to do… everything.2 The nature of the digital device is to not specialize for any particular task, but to maximize use cases across domains. So they’re good for answering emails, watching short-form videos, playing video games, browsing the web, and so on. Moreover, digital devices and the apps on them are designed to maximize how much each individual uses them. The essence of their design is to capture our attention, and so the frictions are latent in the products themselves. Attentional derailment devices, of a sort.

The field of education already struggles to get clean signals. Multiple large meta-analyses have shown that education research, broadly speaking, suffers from serious epistemological problems. This ranges from the methods it uses to produce knowledge to the standards it holds peer-reviewed research to. The latter is part of a larger replication crisis in the social sciences, and the former also directly impedes getting better, more efficient practices to teachers and schools.

Now, more and more learning is being done through broader and more “personalized” learning software packages. Whatever that will ultimately mean for education research, I suspect the end result will be more noise and more opaque signals. When we consider current research into edtech, however, the idealized student-user implicit in much of it frequently adds a layer of bias to the results. Where it might be possible to cut through noise with enough data, a bias resulting from an idealized model user will keep distorting results no matter how large the sample. All of this, to me, suggests the more reasonable attitude to take toward edtech adoption is a default skepticism of any software’s claims to improve learning.

4. District Decisions, State Standards

So what would carrying the burden of proof look like? State education agencies could supply a common protocol for carrying out on-site pilots under real conditions: some classrooms could use the new software program, while comparable classrooms would use the analog materials that the edtech claims to effectively replace. Every purchase request would have to name the analog comparator being replaced alongside the evidence that emerged from the classroom deployment trial. Lacking either, the request would be denied. A similar test could be required for any software contract renewal, too, which would prevent schools getting locked in to products that frequently get worse or bloated over time.

Districts could also start with weaker, more feasible versions of the analog standard by conducting the test during summer learning programs, or in supplemental instructional periods with students that are lagging or struggling more than their peers. (They could even start by comparing new edtech products to ones they already use.)

But because the standard would only apply to student-facing edtech, it would not prevent teachers and administrators from using cutting-edge technologies to improve everything happening around and behind instructional time. AI-powered software obviously has immense potential to streamline administrative processes, and teacher-facing diagnostics and planning tools are already starting to arrive. The risk will be that these products get bundled with less-effective, flashy student-facing ones, locking schools into entire “systems” that end up eating budgets and employee time with little benefits to show. Districts should thus require student-facing components to be priced and bundled separately.

5. Slow Progress is Good Progress

Maybe the country is already too far-down the edtech rabbit hole to make a strict “analog comparator standard” feasible. But there are nearly 14,000 districts that are at least able to try some version of it. While the standard won’t undo years of one-to-one rollouts overnight, perhaps it does not need to.

All that’s needed is to get the ball rolling in the right direction again, making sure to factor in the friction this time. That will be the first step toward restoring a healthy technological environment in the schools.