Pa. students enrolling in online gym classes

Rosemary sends me this link from PhillyBurbs.com: About 600 students are enrolled at Pennsylvania Learners Online, a cyber charter school where online gym is a requirement, and 12 others are enrolled in a program called e-Cademy to make up a failed credit. Rich Campsie, who teaches physical education at e-Cademy and at Pennsylvania Learners Online, said he works with students…

Chess boxers slug it out

I’m not usually interested in sports, but this sounds fantastic: chess boxing. Berlin is home to the world’s biggest chess boxing club with some 40 members and it is in an old freight station here that the two men settled the matter early yesterday. The match began over a chess board set up on a…

The Burden of the Humanities

Wilfred M. McClay: The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual ­finger-­painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject…

Person of interest

Language Log has a good post on a phrase that I’ve seen cropping up increasingly in journalism: Person of interest, called a “euphemism for a suspect” by the National Association of Police Chiefs, is now routinely used in investigations of all types, from murders to brush fires.  Donna Shaw, writing in the American Journalism Review…

The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs

Online University Reviews has posted an entry guaranteed to generate some in-bound link traffic. There are many sites I’d never heard of before. Academics are flocking to the Internet like never before, particularly to start a blog. Faculty members in colleges across the world are connecting with people on a whole new level. Let’s face…

3-second Men

From MetaFilter, which is better known as a link filter, comes this detailed story about one small but important part of the Battle of Gettysburg. They smash into the oncoming lines and stop the Southern charge, but their success proves their undoing. As they push the center of the rebel lines back, the wings enfold…

The Difficulty with Difficulty in Games

Beyond balancing difficulty is the simple question of whether it serves any purpose in the game at all. Back at the Pickford blog, another article goes into the various game design options that let a player break down the difficulty at their own pace. Although these games still utilize difficulty to a certain extent, there…