A fantastic series of photos exploring the world as it was. The photo of Louie Armstrong playing his trumpet in front of the Egyptian pyramids is pretty cool, but I’m going to call out this one. NASA’s Project LOLA or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related…
Caves and sandboxes are some kinds of game spaces I’ve explored in conversations (and an unpublished manuscript) with David Thomas, so I was very interested in these musings from Not Your Mama’s Gamer. In a landscape polluted by smog and litter, box stores, fast food chains, more subdivisions and ever more streets–it becomes harder and…
As my news writing students work on several drafts ahead of a mid-term revision date, I found myself thinking of ways to remind them of the inverted pyramid. This BNKR Arquitectura concept for an “Earthscraper” (underground skyscraper) proposes to create a huge amount of prime downtown space, without sacrificing a central square. (The space is…
The blog format relieves publishers from the tiresome duty of producing covers and front pages and things to make their content more attractive and make readers want it. In some cases, it enables publishers to surrender any responsibility for making content attractive in the first place. There is a prophetic scene in the magnificent movie…
Because this is mostly a serial list, there’s not a lot of journalistic depth to this piece, but I did enjoy reading it. It’s a rather stark comment on how fatherhood has affected my movie-going when I realize I haven’t seen a single one of these movies, other than “Baby’s Day Out.” Macdonald is an…
Hey, woman at the 9-11 exhibit, posing for your boyfriend to take a picture as if you are running from the collapsing World Trade Towers is even tackier than your go-go boots and miniskirt. Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Students are trusting software like this to do their work.A former student working in…
In its sometimes-turbulent thirty-year history, the graphic-adventure genre has driven technology adoption, ridden at both the crest and trough of the graphics and audio waves, touched the lives of millions of people, and shaped the rise (and, in some cases, fall) of several big-name people and companies in the gaming industry. It’s a genre that…
Borders put many independent bookstores put of business, and now has gone under too. http://www.reddit.com/user/jessers25 Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations…
Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Visiting the #scienceofpixar exhibit @kaminsciencecenterQuick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial Time Travel…Each building…
Star Wars Han Solo in Carbonite Silicon Ice Tray. “All too freezy.” Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Visiting the #scienceofpixar exhibit @kaminsciencecenterQuick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials…
Instead of dispensing a card like Zoltar, the Gypsy would actually speak your fortune from a hidden record player. When you dropped a nickel in the slot, her eyes would flash, her teeth would chatter and her voice would come floating from a tube extending out of the eight-foot-tall box. Word got out when the…
Freelance photographer Jen McKendrick won’t take pictures of “ugly people” — that is, the high school bullies who were doing what bullies do on Facebook. “If you are ugly on the inside,” says McKendrick, “I’m sorry but I won’t take your photos to make you look pretty on the outside!” A WTAE-TV article explains it thus: McKendrick…
The control panel. Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Students are trusting software like this to do their work.A former student working in SEO shared this. I miss Google classic.Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.I’m thinking this is a still from the cringey Season 1 episode of TNG where the…
My friend and colleague, Balázs Tarnai, shared these pictures of a bluejay catching a bug on his garage roof. Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Each building in my #medievalyork simulation has four levels of detail (so that distant ob…Another corner building. Designed and textured. Needs an interior. #blender3d #design #ae…The complex geometry on…
This painting, of two impish children taking advantage of a moment of unsupervised freedom as their mother naps, is one of my favorites from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, here in Greensburg. The pun in the title intrigues me, as does the amazing complexity of the children’s clothing. The painting was not there when…
We’ve all seen how Ken Burns brings old photos to life by panning and zooming. This clip demonstrates a striking effect of mapping a 2D photo onto a 3D surface. The animator has to clone in order to create the missing data — the background details that are hidden by foreground objects. But the end…
I love this piece, on display at the Westmoreland Museum of Art, as part of “They Practice What They Teach: Artist Faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology.” Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season…
Working on some very complex stuff in Blender 3D. Here’s how it’s making me feel. That’s a 3D model, fully rigged with a posable digital skeleton. Her skin is slightly translucent, her curly hair bounces when she moves, her glasses cast a reflection. It’s actually a very satisfying thing to that I could pose her…
One of my favorite comments from last year’s communal exploration of the source code for Colossal Cave Adventure. Stephen Ramsay writes: I’m going to call it the “Code on a Grecian Urn” problem. Let me begin by calling attention to Nick Montfort’s wonderfully pithy note at the end of Week 1:”Hm, I don’t know. The…
The North Quad Residential Complex at the University of Michigan is the ideal place for a conference on Computers and Writing. I’ll do my part to fetishize the awesome people-focused technology in this place. A team from Seton Hill University (Laura Patterson, Christine Cusick, and I) gave a workshop on teaching writing with iPads. I…