“Postmodern Pooh is intended to satirise not just a few celebrity critics, but the kind of critical writing that academics and students generally tend to come up with today – evasive, incomprehensible, and making enormous, unjustified claims for the power of texts and language. ” Sandy Starr reviews Frederick Crews’s Postmodern Pooh —Pooh-Poohing PostmodernismSpiked) I…
Watch a family change over 27 years: “On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by.” Diego Golberg —Diego TimeZone Zero)
“[A]udience members exposed to slow-downloading pages and then given the opportunity to freely browse the Web were more active in their investigations. They tried more hyperlinks and visited more sites than audience members who viewed pages with faster initial download speeds. In the past, such behavioral and physiological impacts were understood only as a result…
“Herschel, the article declared, had established a ‘new theory of cometary phenomena’; he had discovered planets in other solar systems; and he had ‘solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.’ Then, almost as if it were an afterthought, the article revealed Herschel’s final, stunning achievement. He had discovered life on the moon.”…
“Flags that ripple on the airless Moon, discrepancies in the part numbers of lunar lander components, shadows that point in the wrong direction, the lack of stars seen in the sky – these are all ‘facts’ that have fuelled the conspiracy theory.” —NASA Challenges Moon Hoax ClaimsBBC) My grandfather was convinced that the moon landings…
Since its invention in 1985, the best-selling computer game has robbed numerous addicts of sleep as they race to fit falling blocks together. Now reformed player Erik Demaine and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston have proven how thorny the puzzle really is. —Maths Prove Tetris is HardNature)