When I was a kid, and I handed my too-heavy-to-carry Halloween bag to my parents…
…did they steal candy from me while I wasn’t looking, and stuff the empty wrappers into their pockets? If they did, they certainly didn’t confess on their blogs.
Simpsons Writers Jump Into EA, Rockstar Affair
Next Generation: “The game begins with Bart wanting to play a game called Grand Theft Scratchy. Of course this is a parody of Grand Theft Auto. And Marge immediately takes it away from him. She tries to clean up the town and stop the game from being distributed in Springfield because Marge is against video…
Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook – New York Times
The New York Times has published more details about Google’s plans to compete with Facebook: On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and…
Welcome to the Cardboard Tube Fighting League
In a corner of the living room between the couch and the video tape cabinet, my kids keep a huge stash of paper towel rolls, which they use to stage epic battles. The Cardboard Tube Fighting League website is annoying since it’s mostly made up images… I didn’t find any text that I could copy…
ear studio
Ear Studio: Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to…
The Science Education Myth
Business Week says there is no science education crisis; that in fact the US is producing more science experts than the market demands. The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international…
reMIX: Interactive Fiction
Structure, Sign, and Play An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida “There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be…
US agency apologizes for news conference on fires
What if FEMA gave a press conference, and nobody (but FEMA) came? FEMA employees lobbed softball questions during a staged media event. Reuters: No actual reporter attended the news conference in person, agency spokesman Aaron Walker said. A spokeswoman for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has authority over FEMA, called the incident “inexcusable and…
Student Journalism at Religious Colleges
In Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden reports on the National College Media Convention: In his opening remarks, Mattingly, a religion columnist for the Scripps Howard News service and director of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities’ Washington Journalism Center, described six possible models for student newspapers, ranging from a university public relations model (with…
Watson, DNA Discoverer, Retires After Race Remark
Via Bloomberg: James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize as co-discoverer of DNA’s molecular structure, said he plans to retire immediately as chancellor of New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory amid a controversy over racial remarks. The lab suspended Watson from his position earlier this month after he questioned the intelligence of Africans during a…
Video Game Culture and Theory (January, 2008)
Students are starting to ask questions about the online course I’m planning to teach in January. I was very happy with the way the course went the last time I taught it, in 2006. I’m sure I will tweak the course here and there, but here are the course objectives and some other details about…
Interview: Adding emotional characteristics to consumer electronics with Pete Froslie
This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention. There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game ‘Adventure!’ to include Booth as the lead antagonist.
Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings
Web guru Jakob Nielsen risks the wrath of the grammatical bluestockings when he suggests that the passive voice might be useful for headlines, but he’s really talking about front-loading web titles, so that the first two words of a web heading will contain words that will catch the eye of people scanning the page. Since…
Scratch Tutorials
For the past year or so, my main job in our homeschooling family has been to teach Carolyn (5) how to read. Now I’ve picked up the task of teaching Peter (9) computer programming. Last week I wrote a few simple BASIC programs to teach a very basic concept that some of my college students…
Amusing Ourselves to Depth: Is The Onion our most intelligent newspaper?
Greg Beato, from Reason Magazine Online it attracts more than 2 million readers a week. Type onion into Google, and The Onion pops up first. Type the into Google, and The Onion pops up first. But type “best practices for newspapers” into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At…
Karolson & Hobshack
Invisible Games: The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers’ children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime…
Eatmecrunchy
Utterly pointless, and at the same time completely brilliant. You can only eat a few spoonfuls of cereal at a time, so why not keep most of the bowl dry, and soak only a few bites at a time? From eatmecrunchy.com.
Word Play
Rock, Paper, Shotgun prints an assessment of the function of text in recent computer games. Some good discussion of the effect of talking movies, the fact that having good voice actors means you don’t need to write as much dialog (which is a good thing since recording dialog is much more expensive than writing text)…
Neanderthals may have had headline writing gene
From Language Log: Much of the blame for the public’s poor understanding of science must go to a little studied but culturally pivotal genre: news report headlines. Short snappy headlines provide the lazy reader with just enough information to totally misconstrue a story. There’s a reason why the writing in newspapers doesn’t look like the…
You Know Your Fourth-Grader is a Civil War Buff When…
….he looks through the kitchen window and exclaims, “Woah! Those leaves are falling onto the trampoline like Confederate shells on Ft. Sumter in 1861!” (Some context… he hates the fact that leaves get inside the trampoline net, and will furiously throw them out one at a time, guarding the perimeter when he is outside playing.)