NAVY TO DROP ALL-CAPS COMMUNICATIONS

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Caps off to the Navy’s plan to drop all-caps.

OFFICIAL COMMUNICATIONS AND ORDERS HAVE BEEN IN ALL CAPS SINCE 19TH CENTURY.

YOUNG SAILORS ACCUSTOMED TO TEXTING SEE ALL-CAPS ORDERS AS A FORM OF SHOUTING!

NAVY WANTS ITS ORDERS AND OFFICIAL MESSAGES TO BE MORE READABLE AND LESS RUDE.

“WHILE THIS DECISION WAS MADE TO SAVE [...]

Lego faces are getting angrier, study finds

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The headline is hype. How about “Lego faces are getting more diverse?” That would be just as true, and less misleading. Many of the recent sets come with heads that you can rotate — a happy face on one side, a scared or angry face on the other side. So it’s also true that Lego [...]

Positive Feedback on a Blogging Assignment

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A former student who is now excelling in grad school took a moment to share her thoughts about my blogging portfolio assignment, which is usually 25-40% of a student’s grade.

In April, a different former student who had blogged for me in several classes, whom I invited as a career workshop guest, surprised me [...]

The Essayification of Everything

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The word Michel de Montaigne chose to describe his prose ruminations published in 1580 was “Essais,” which, at the time, meant merely “Attempts,” as no such genre had yet been codified. This etymology is significant, as it points toward the experimental nature of essayistic writing: it involves the nuanced process of trying something out. Later [...]

Ave atque vale

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What is a liberal education and what it is for? From Cicero’s artes liberales, to the attempts at common curricula in more recent times, to the chaotic cafeteria that passes for a curriculum in most American universities today, the concept has suffered from vagueness, confusion, and contradiction. From the beginning, the champions of a liberal [...]

Remembering When Ice Cream Was, You Know, Ice Cream – NYTimes.com

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I’ll be alert, you be alert, for Breyers “frozen dairy dessert.”

[N]ot all Breyers is what we once understood the name to mean. A Breyers carton in the store’s freezer might be ice cream, but the Breyers carton right beside it, identical in nearly every way, might be something called “frozen dairy dessert” — which, [...]

Computers and Writing Conference 2013

Where a nerd can be a nerd.

(Thanks for sharing the photo, Jill Morris.)

It’s Not What You Say; It’s What Google Says

“More people will learn about your institution from Wikipedia than from your own site,” the panelist said. “And in a crisis, more people will learn about what happened from Facebook and Twitter than from your own press releases.” That was a sobering assessment to many of us in the room. –It's Not What You Say; [...]

Does Math Exist?

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Millions of high-school students might wish math did not exist, but, alas, it does, at least as a human creation. The question, however, of whether math exists independent of humans is a much deeper one, and PBS’s Mike Rugnetta gives a fun, brief overview of the age-old philosophical debate in the video above.

via [...]

The Speech Eisenhower Never Gave On The Normandy Invasion

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A fascinating text from an alternate history.

“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” Eisenhower wrote. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery [...]

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