Students who grew up with search engines might change STEM education forever

The headline is oddly STEM-specific, but yes, it used to be that if you worked with computers at all, you had to understand your computer’s file directory structure, so all college instructors could expect that their STEM majors had probably learned this concept as part of their earliest computer training. But the “search” function on individual computers (and also the list of recently saved files that almost every software tool…

I’m not a big fan of Disney’s corporate greed.

I’m not a huge fan of Disney, largely because as a grad student in the 1990s, I chose the 1920-1950 time period for my dissertation based on my expectation that the literary works I studied from that time period would fall out of copyright one by one during my career. I planned to mine my dissertation, using what I learned about the literary works in that time period to create…

How to lie with charts, by the @NYTimes

I tend to defend journalism when showboaters & slogan-quoters attack “the media” in general, but I’m eager to read legitimate critiques of individual news stories. Here’s one that seems to manipulate data out of context to support a fearmongering narrative. (Don’t do this!) 1. Data not normalized2. Not the appropriate visualization3. No differentiation between data and projections4. Not the whole story5. No contextualization of risk And NOT a @nytimes staffer;…

Reuben Klamer, designer of Trek’s “phaser rifle” and Milton-Bradley’s “The Game Of Life” dead at 99

Although more modern-looking rifles appeared as props in ST:The Next Generation and later iterations, the iconic phaser rifle only appeared in the second pilot, the first to feature William Shatner and the character James Kirk. Reuben Klamer, the inventor of Milton Bradley’s The Game of Life board game and the designer of a Starfleet phaser rifle for the original Star Trek TV series, died at his home in La Jolla,…

Power Play (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 15) Troi, Data and O’Brien Take Hostages

Rewatching ST:TNG The Enterprise follows a weak distress signal to a planet where a Federation ship crashed 200 years ago. After a tiny shuttlecraft (with seatbelts!) crashes because of the planet’s glowy storms, some glowy bits enter the bodies of Troi, Data and O’Brien, and before you know it, we have a Die Hard hostage situation, with intelligent and capable villains. Dialogue tells us that Troi is being controlled by…