Pong Ported to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Platform
Thanks for the suggestion, Matt.
Senior High
Great series from The Globe and Mail. I seem to recall that articles from this paper disappear behind a pay-per-view firewall after a few weeks, so print these out now if you think you’ll ever get old. Part one Fast times at Senior High The cliques, the gossip, the hot guy with a car: A…
Why typewriters beat computers
The BBC offers a pleasant bit of retrophilia. (Thanks for the link, Robert.) Mrs Huggins tried using a computer about 15 years ago and the memory is still raw. “I had four pages of instructions I had to learn, to send [my previous employers] the stories. Then the blooming thing blew up and they told…
Rage against the machines
Prospect Magazine: When Mogwai isn’t online, he’s called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line “The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an internet…
What We Call the News
“Celebrities in rehab, political punditry and a mauling at the zoo – this is what we’re calling news these days” at JibJab.
Sentence punctuation to indicate slowed speech rate
On Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum invites readers to send in the earliest citation of the use of periods to indicate slow, intense speech. On page 28 of Robert Harris’s novel Archangel (Hutchinson, London, 1998, hardback edition), a character who was tortured for a long time to get information out of him says with pride,…
Phoenix Makes a Grand Entrance
From NASA: NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body. From a distance of…
NASA Spacecraft Appears to Have Landed on Mars
Good news from the NYT: Just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here received a radio signal from the Phoenix on the ground in the icy plains north of Mars’ Arctic circle.
Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-Up
Great little tool from bookrags. Use a drop-down list to construct your own sonnet, using lines from Shakespeare’s corpus. This might be a good tool to ease students into constructing their own sonnets. Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-Up (start a new sonnet) A B A B C D C D E F E F G G To…
Fight for the Life Of the Mind
A good overview of the context and significance of the Sokal Hoax (New York Sun). (Thanks for the link, Robert.) Most of us, most of the time, arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons that have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most of our…
Seeing the International Space Station
I just took the kids outside to watch the International Space Station fly overhead. It was visible for about five minutes, and at its brightest I thought I could see some details (the solar panels?), but it was mostly just a bright dot. It rose from the southwest, went by almost overhead, and disappeared to…
Religious, artisitic, economic, and political aspects of the York Corpus Christi Plays
From an article I published in 1997, back when I thought I was pretty hot stuff to include postage-stamp-sized video clips on a website. The website also featured a Java simulation of the outdoor pageant that celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi (which is today). The outdoor theatrical event in the medieval city of York,…
Prince Caspian: Good Family Choice
The family took in a matinee showing of Prince Caspian. I’d heard mediocre reviews, so I had low expectations. I knew they’d have to add some subplot because the book is pretty thin, and the long narration of Caspian’s boyhood would have been out of place in an action/adventure movie (which is how they’re billing…
Disneyworld 08 – Day One
Who would think of working a casual reference to Aliens into a blog entry about a trip to Disneyland. Nobody but James Lileks, that is. Usually I hate turbulence, but I was too tired to care, and I slept through it like Hicks on the drop down to LV-426.
Seton Hill University Redesigns Home Page
Seton Hill recently unveiled a new home page. The internal pages all seem to be unchanged, so the changes were not radical, but they were welcome. I have a little quibble with this semi-transparent fold-up menu. The menu itself is a good idea, which lets the designers re-use the artwork created for our print and billboard…
YouTube – Blender3D Hairy Softbodies
My first day back in the office since submitting final grades last Tuesday. Part of it I spent familiarizing myself with some new features in Blender3D, such as an easy way to give objects fur (or grass). I never noticed the wave modifier before — that’s how I got the purple cube to start jumping…
blender.org – Blender 2.46
The open-source 3D design too, Blender, has just been updated. I was up until well past midnight last night checking the website every half hour or so, waiting for this release… now I notice it’s up just as I’m on my way out the door. Oh well, I can look forward to using it tonight…
Colossal Cave Adventure Lives Again at UMD
Mike Musgrove, Post I.T. (Washington Post) One computer historian joked that the game’s release “set the entire computer industry back two weeks” when it appeared on Arpanet, the U.S. government-designed Internet precursor, about 30 years ago. That link, by the way, connects to the page of associate English professor Dennis G. Jerz, of Seton Hill…
Pinback's Top 10 Games of All Time
#6 is devoted to Infocom text adventures: And the fact is, the classic Infocom games (I have left it to the reader to pick his or her favorite, as there were so many of such a high quality that it is folly to pick one for this list) were just tremendous entertainment, mainly for two…
What can you do with texts that are in a digital format? « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities: I’ve had a longstanding, friendly debate with a colleague about whether it is sufficient to provide page images of books, or whether text should be converted to a machine- and human-readable format such as XML. She argues that converting scanned books to text is expensive and that the primary goal…