“What is so interesting about death? Is it the science? Is it like a ‘forbidden fruit’ that you want to know about, but are too afraid to touch? Is it because it is such a taboo subject in our society? Why is it such a taboo subject? Are we afraid of it or are we…
“Mr. Berk has become higher education’s humor guru, a title for which, admittedly, there wasn’t much competition. Along the way, he has racked up a shelf full of teaching awards, a cadre of wisecracking disciples, and stacks of gushing student evaluations.” Thomas Bartlett —Did You Hear the One About the Professor? (Chronicle)
“‘There is no more feminism,’ I explain. Game Over. But it took me a day or two to name the new game. It’s ‘girlism’ — women want to be sexy girls and use all the tricks girls use. Crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping their feet when they don’t get their way, general trotting around showing…
“Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages. But almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form. So, when you’re doing research online, Google is…
“Walter ‘Matt’ Jefferies, the art director who designed the original Enterprise vessel for the first Star Trek series has died, the official website of the sci-fi series has announced.” —Star Trek Enterprise Designer Dies (BBC) True Star Trek nerds will know Jefferies from the eponymous “Jeffries Tube,” where Scotty was often found reversing the polarity of…
Slashdot Poll Yes. No. ! Worst Poll Ever. No, there’s been a worse one. No, there hasn’t. Yes, there has. No! Yes! No! —? [Slashdot Poll] (Slashdot) Nearly 70,000 people took the time to vote in this poll. This is beyond stupid — so far beyond stupid that it approaches significance. It’s impossible to deconstruct this…
“In watching the aftermath of the recent discussion of humanism and anti-humanism (now there’s a fine reductive binary that could use some deconstructing, no?) at Invisible Adjunct, I was startled by the apparent hostility of the fisking performed by Robert Schwartz. Certainly, others in the discussion engaged in a bit of fisking, but none to…
“The Complaint states that through use of such Fake User Interface (“FUI”) dialogs that gave the false appearance of being computer error messages, DoubleClick tricked millions of Internet users into interrupting the work they were performing to respond to the fraudulent error message, only to unexpectedly find both computer and computer user thus hijacked to…
“Lileks is widely linked to and commented upon, and his fans stretch across the vast political spectrum of the Internet’s chattering class. This is a sure sign of broad appeal because the weak are never recognized by the blogosphere and the old and the lazy are mercilessly culled from the herd. Lileks is prospering on…
“Back in the day, having a board with more than one phone line was huge. Two lines meant more than one person could be online at the same time. This was heavy. But it was the end of something, too: the end of that amazing solitude you felt when the busies stopped, and the carrier…
“A Taiwan man who used a different identity through the Internet to double-date his girlfriend, has committed suicide after the girl fell for his email-based alter ego, a Taiwan newspaper reported on Wednesday.” —Woman Dumps Man for Online Alter Ego (IOL) Sounds like an urban legend, but then again so does “Escape” (better known as “The…
“We actually asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn’t give us one.” — Royal Navy submarine crewmember, on the method for firing cruise missiles.Notable Quotes (BBC) From an article titlled “10 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Week“.
“Goodbye ‘e-mail,’ the French government says, and hello ‘courriel’ — the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.” —France Bans ‘E-Mail’! (Wired) What a difference quotation marks can make! And for those of you who are sneering at the silliness of the French, Samantha tells KairosNews…
“Yes, in the world of blogs there are people who specialize in writing for the web. One of those is Dennis Jerz, a good weblog friend of mine. What do I mean by a weblog friend? A weblog is where people are turned into webpages. Dennis has turned himself into webpages in Literacy Weblog. I…
“There’s a reason they call these places ‘bedroom communities’ — you’ll sooner be snoozing before anything exciting ever happens.|But while the news might be snooze-worthy to the world at large, there are people who really do care about what goes on in their community. And as newspapers see a readership in decline, online-only news sources…
“To be named after the number one website for vegetarian information — what could be better?” — GoVeg.com, formerly known as Karin Robertson —Woman Changes Her Name To GoVeg.com (NC Buy) See an earlier entry about the Cool 2B Real Home Page, ( “Sponsored by America’s Beef Producers”).
“Yahoo! are integrating their services much more than Google — not only can you move from one service to the next withough inputting the search term again, but also the new dictionary service. In the query box type define egregious and you obtain a result from the American Heritage Dictionary a definition, plus you also…
“I’d stumbled onto solving my first murder case, having found myself the only eyewitness, yet no matter how frantically I pleaded with John Law that the perp was right in front of them and the very dame they’d been grilling – the sultry but devious Miss Kitwinkle, who played the grieving patsy the way a…
“Socializing is always an option, and as with other online RPGs, real life is certainly at its most rewarding when you manage to find and consort with other like-minded companions. At any rate, it’s hard to fault the game for lack of content or viable activities, and even when certain players try to subvert the…
“Arnold N. Nawrocki, 78, who made eating processed cheese more convenient for billions of consumers by developing individually wrapped slices, died June 30 in Sun City, Ariz.” Gayle Ronan Sims —Sliced-cheese Inventor Dies at 78Knight-Ridder) He was paid $1 for his patent, which obviously brought his employer barrels of money. Via Blogosphere Daily News.