—Writing Machines (Flickr) Great photos of old typewriters and old computers. Similar:Panic, confusion aboard sinking cruise chip – CNN.com Nobody’s perfect, but this proofread…Current_EventsStory Pitch: How writers present an article idea to a busy editor I hoped this slide would appeal to m…AmusingEconomics in Early Computer Games(First published 27 May 2020, when I fou…BusinessAttribution, Editorializing and…
Thomson ?cannot hold back the realization that the movies have never been good enough.? As a form, he writes, movies are ?most acute when fixed on what happens next; whereas literature, sooner or later, is about the meaning behind events.? This explains better than anything else I know why it is that the finest movies…
Hawthorne’s description of the Custom House emphasizes the nearby dilapidated wharves and decayed wooden warehouses crumbling to ruin and his office “cobwebbed and dingy with old paint.” Hawthorne offers us an almost gothic Custom House, a fitting element in the introduction to a romance novel. The Custom House is, in fact, an airy, handsome structure,…
The woods were all a-twitter with rumors that the Seven Dwarves were planning a live reunion after their attempted solo careers had dismally sputtered into Z-list oblivion and it was all just a matter of meeting a ten-page list of outlandish demands (including 700-threadcount Egyptian cotton bedsheets, lots of white lilies and a separate trailer…
Taken in isolation, NO always means NO. But in a conversation, there is always a surrounding context for the use of the word “No.” In a routine conversation, we extrapolate or infer a ton of non-verbal information and automatically apply it to attempt to determine the “real” meaning. For example, let’s say I offer you…
My brother, a political scientist at a Scottish university, has always worn a coat and tie to class. “Why do you dress up like that?” I asked him once. I knew it didn’t relate to his teaching; he runs a very interactive classroom, with plenty of discussion and argument. He’s also a nice, laid-back guy.…
While gangsta rap is seen as celebrating the violence and aggression that claimed two of its brightest stars, “geeksta” rap is a hip-hop genre celebrating coding skills and school grades. Also dubbed “nerdcore,” this branch of hip-hop is for geeks, by geeks. —Robert Andrews —Rap Marketing Comes to Nerdcore (Wired) Similar:Descent, Part 1 (#StarTrek #TNG…
In this essay, we will explore the idea of emergence. We will examine how objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive. We will present examples with simple squares that turn on and off, but the underlying ideas will provide you with a new perspective for thinking about…
There are already educational and psychotherapeutic treatments for writer’s block, some fairly effective. But remember, not many people want to be treated for hypergraphia. Their writing is usually very important to them. That raises an important point: What right do I have to give a medical name to a character trait that people value in…
Okay. It’s true, as Johnson says, that video games can be intensely challenging and absorbing, and that book-loving snobs tend to be oblivious to this fact. It’s true that “The Sopranos” is complicated and subtle as well as violent. And although you yourself don’t watch “24,” your smart colleagues talk endlessly about its intricate plotting.…
Each book in “For Pittsburgh” has about 450,000 characters, and will take about 20 hours, on average, to cycle through the LED tubes. Each side of the display has about 750 tubes stretching from the bottom edge of the convention center’s roof up to its peak. The letters, about 3-foot-high-by-1-foot-wide, scroll vertically up the horizontal…
Computer technology is an invaluable supplement for research, but it becomes inefficient when it is used as a substitute for the hands-on investigation of the stacks. In any large, old library, there are unknown quantities of printed materials that cannot be found in electronic catalogs. Some of them were missed during the shift from cards…
—Scrollbars (Leegte.org) Interesting sculptural installation that uses Windows scrollbars. Via the very interesting Information Aesthetics. Similar:I have for some reason reached another #duolingo milestone.CultureAdding detail to a #steampunk control panel workstation. #blender3d #design #aesthetics #b…AestheticsInterface changes make it a little harder to work with Google's image searchWhen I’m looking for a picture I’m going…BusinessThere are two…
My 7-year-old son envisions random evildoers coming into our house and abducting him — and we don’t let him watch TV news. But how can anyone miss the danger teases that blast through prime time like buckshot? And while we debase ourselves by playing voyeur to the pain of families immersed in tragedy, we ignore…
As befits its beginnings, the genre is planted firmly in pop culture’s nerd division. The films most often given the fanfic treatment – The Matrix, X-Men, and Pirates of the Caribbean – wing straight out of dork central. There are thousands of fanfics online for each popular anime TV series, and many hundreds for sci-fi…
Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop. Far more is in store. Take “Hamlet.” –Gregory M. Lamb —How the…
We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going. The recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore’s graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with…
On Father’s Day, while we were headed east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, on our way to a family vacation in Amish country, the steering on our 1992 Taurus gave out. The car spun out in the grassy median, flipped over, and came to rest partially in a westbound lane.–Dennis G. Jerz —What I Did on…
Mine Ears Have Heard the Tinkling of the Righteous Ice Cream Bells (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) An ice cream truck just drove by our street, playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic“. It’s an emotionally rousing march, but it sounded very strange in this jingly kid-attracting arrangement. Okay, it was part of a patriotic medley, but it…
The horrible conclusion which had been gradually intruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as…