A Simple Investigation #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 17) Odo falls for a femme fatale

Rewatching ST:DS9 A duo of knobby-faced macguffin-hunters, bantering like the crooks from Home Alone, rough up a bumpy-foreheaded alien, then vaporize him. In Quark’s, Bashir is happily casting his friends Dax and O’Brien in his next unnamed-for-copyright-reasons British superspy holodeck adventure, Operation Nudge-Wink. Odo declines, looking uncomfortable. I had never seen this episode before. What…

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Pope Leo XIV names AI one of the reasons for his papal name

…I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response…

Aesthetics / Art / Culture / Drama / Humanities / Writing

This 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s plays

“Aw, man, you know the brother um takin’ ‘bout. He always be up at Eddie’s, light skin, heavy-set, like a fly-on-the-wall, be greasin’ secondhand tweeds, that ol’ newsboy cap, slanted to one side, pencil stub behind his ear. “Wylie to Elmore…. wit’ them empty side pockets, his corduroys be singin’ the blues, cues Bessie on the…

Culture / Current_Events / Ethics / Government / Journalism / Media / Politics

Washington Post Cartoonist Who Quit Over Bezos Cartoon Wins Pulitzer Prize

Former Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes — who resigned in January over the paper spiking a cartoon that depicted the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, and other tech titans bending the knee to Donald Trump — won the Pulitzer Prize on Monday. At the time, Telnaes said she had “never had a cartoon killed because of who…

Business / Cyberculture / Ethics / Media / Technology

A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

The newest and most powerful technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why. Today’s A.I. bots are based on complex mathematical systems that learn…

Doctor Bashir, I Presume #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 16) Smarmy hologram designer exposes a Bashir family secret, romances Leeta

Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark watches with detached bemusement as Rom backs out of declaring his interest in Leeta. As O’Brien celebrates a win over Bashir at darts, Dr. Zimmerman, a hologram researcher (whose face Star Trek fans will instantly know from the then-contemporary Trek series Voyager) says he’s here to make Bashir “immortal.” Starfleet has chosen…

Had a great time with AmLit students at the August Wilson block party

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Shakespeare did not leave his wife Anne in Stratford, letter fragment suggests

It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his “second best bed”, although still a valued item. Now a leading Shakespeare expert has analysed a…

Pater Noster Passenger Elevators

Some 50 years ago, my father took me to his office in Washington, DC. I believe he was working for the Social Security Administration as a technical writer. I remember he held tightly onto my hand as we used a moving lift like this. The event was notable to young me for two reasons. One,…

Notes on Teaching August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle

I first taught Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle during an intensive 3-week online course during the 2020-21 winter break, during the Time of Covid. The nature of that course was such that I could only reasonably require students to read 6 of Wilson’s 10 plays; I think I required everyone to read 4, and then split the…

AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can’t bar its journalists

A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to restore The Associated Press’ full access to cover presidential events, affirming on First Amendment grounds that the government cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled that the government…

By Inferno’s Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edgeplay and prison camp stratagems

Rewatching ST:DS9 After the recap of last week’s “In Purgatory’s Shadow,” we see the Defiant, a couple of runabouts, and Dukat’s Bird of Prey lining up against the huge Dominion fleet. But instead of attacking, the invaders head for Cardassia which (we learn from an even smugger than usual Dukat) has joined the Dominion. In…

In Purgatory’s Shadow #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 14) Garak answers a coded message as Dominion forces prepare to attack

Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira helps Odo re-adjust to life as a shape-shifter, obliviously but brutally friendzoning him in the process. Upon learning that someone on the other side of the wormhole is sending encrypted Cardassian military signals, Sisko calls on Garak. The enigmatic tailor downplays the event, telling his found family (Dr. Bashir and Ziyal) the…

This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For months I’ve been looking at my own simulated crowds from a similar angle and I was a bit disoriented.

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My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding skills.

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Jesus Christ Superstar

I have a daughter who does things. Her next is ensemble/musician/understudy for Mary Magdelene in Jesus Christ Superstar, Pittsburgh Musical Theater Apr 3-13. Similar:A Simple Investigation #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 17) Odo falls for a femme…Pope Leo XIV names AI one of the reasons for his papal nameThis 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood…

For the Uniform #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 13) Sisko pursues former Federation officer Eddington

Rewatching ST:DS9 In a cave (again with the caves) Sisko, in civilian clothes, seeks an informer, but is instead met by the rogue security officer Eddington, who uses the plight of the refugees in the cave to justify his treason against Starfleet. Eddington claims the moral high ground, but Sisko is unimpressed. Eddington beams away…

Midterm Grades Spring 2025: Posted!

I planned ahead pretty well this term. I like the pace in all my classes.

The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)

I always enjoy my visits to the studio. This recording was a quick one!

MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibility

After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading. I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat…

The Begotten #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 12) Kira and Odo face surrogacy

Rewatching ST:DS9 Odo walks stiffly into the infirmary, where Bashir scolds him for not taking better care of his recently-acquired humanoid body. Quark presents a bottle with what he says is a dead changeling. Odo, entranced, says it’s alive. Bashir manages to mostly unflabbergast the creature’s cellular jimberjams, and there is certainly no plot significance…

More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent them

Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and even people who intentionally break the law, are less likely to kill people with their cars. On 22 May 1997, the Swedish government presented Bill 1996/97:137 to parliament. It cemented zero deaths as a long-term goal for road fatalities. It reiterated that…

Stapler jam during a midterm exam.

My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…

The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)

As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about Marshall McLuhan here, a bit of Harold Innis there… Blogging this so I keep this in mind the next time I teach a course like The History and Future of the Book. (There’s so much out there!) [S]ome media are…

The Darkness and the Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 11) A serial killer targets Kira’s former resistance colleagues

Rewatching ST:DS9 In a cave (again with the caves), a pleasant-looking Bajoran monk welcomes guests to a “days of atonement” retreat, and is zapped by a beam of light. In the infirmary, the very pregnant Kira, griping comically that the herbs she’s been prescribed mean sedatives don’t work, learns that Latha, formerly a violent member…