“But here’s the dirty little secret that may go farther in explaining why usability stinks: Most developers and designers don’t give a rat’s ass about it. The developers want the thing to have lots of features, so usability is the designers’ problem. The designers want the project to look great, so how it works is…
“Hello from above our magnificent planet Earth.|The perspective is truly awe-inspiring. This is a terrific mission and we are very busy doing science round the clock.|Just getting a moment to type e-mail is precious so this will be short, and distributed to many who I know and love.|I have seen some incredible sights: lightning spreading…
“As students, they were members of free-speech movements; now that they’ve earned tenure, they have become advocates of speech codes. Radicals when they were on the bottom, they’ve become censors when they’re on top. And they see no discrepancy in their actions.” Daphne Patai —The Great Tattling Scare on Campuses (Chronicle) I recently had a very…
“But however it may be in the art gallery, in moral issues we often cannot agree to differ. Agreeing to differ with Genghis is in effect agreeing to tolerate fox-hunting, and my whole stance was against that. Moral issues are frequently ones where we want to coordinate, and where we are finding what to forbid…
“The Fake CNN News Generator was online only a week, but generated a lot of controversy after ersatz news stories were picked up by local outlets and reported as real. Phony stories about the death of musician Dave Matthews, or the Olsen twins attending local universities, for example, appeared in a number of local newspapers,…
I built a bloated icebox made to store my ripe ingredients. Its shelves are crammed with shrunken tentacles, and scalps are jammed beside the vats of larva, pulp, and gore. The handle’s slick. It’s hard to shut the door against the swelling mold. It must be slammed. This foul refrigerator of the damned will always…
“Horror is the genre of the jolt, the shock, the spark. The horror story’s conflict is always a matter of life and death, but death — even to an undead creature — always comes as a surprise. The climax of a horror tale is almost unilaterally a killing blow, catching someone or something unaware. Death…
“[I]ndividuals randomly assigned to write about emotional topics evidence improved physical health compared with those who write about superficial topics…. [F]lexibility in the use of common words — particularly personal pronouns — when writing about traumatic memories was related to positive health outcomes.” R. Sherlock Campbell and James W. Pennebaker —The Secret Life of Pronouns:…