1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: “Score a few points for Bud!”Dorky but bookish (therefore fun) ‘open the nearest book to page 23’ meme Found…
Questions (by whom, I don’t know) had been raised about my collegiality and some had reached the ears of the search committees where my applications were under review. I racked my brain for the comment or incident that could have sparked such rumors. Had I inadvertently said something in a seminar or a conference that…
Rural users lag in broadband adoption, and infrastructure availability is a reason for this. Here are some highlights from the Pew Internet Project’s February 2004 survey: 55% of all adult Internet users – or 34% of all adult Americans – have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job. 39% of…
There is still the childhood picture just where it‘salways been, right above “I was born Justin Allyn Hall in Chicago at 12:01pm on December 16, 1974.” And there in the heart of the page is still the one-line paragraph that first woke me out of my early Web-surfing coma: “When I was eight, my father,…
An increasing number of us seem interested in learning political news only from media that tell us what we want to hear. That’s dangerous for the press and the people. What should be done? —Unvarnished Truth?: Perception of bias undermines media (Dallas Morning News)
So much for the evolutionary advantage of love. As to the proximate, immediate cause of love, scientists have found that the mother-offspring bond in humans and other animals is mediated by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. What researchers at University College London have now found is that romantic and maternal love activate many of the…
Instead of starring a busty young woman or a porn stud with rock-hard abs, the Flash-powered site features an actor in a chicken suit, dressed in lingerie. And unlike previous big-business attempts to cash in on an Internet trend, the Subservient Chicken site quickly became an Internet hit. —Chris Ulbrich —Porno Hen Hawks for Burger…
There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging — but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the…
The 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition has opened for business. The yearly competition, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is for short pieces of interactive fiction. At this point IF authors can sign up to take part in the competition, and everyone can learn how to judge the games when they are released in October of this…
Testing my new RSS feed I am having some trouble coding up my new RSS feed. If you’ve got a content aggregator, and you’d like to let me know how my feed works for you, please let me know. BTW… What’s a content aggregator?
Diaries and journals are a longstanding fixture of writing and foreign language classes. Journals are also commonly employed in other subjects, including lab notebooks in the sciences, and sketch books and portfolios for teaching the arts. Teachers often encourage students to keep notes of their own, and sometimes use these notes as an additional indicator…
It’s been almost thirty years since young Laura and Sandy Crowther sat down at a Teletype and took their first steps into the mysterious subterranean world their father, Will, created for them. Now, if Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction is any indication, Crowther and Woods’s pioneering computer game Adventure and…
I’m sitting in class and it hurts my ass I stare at the clock and watch the time pass. Tick tock; Tick tock the professor; I mock. The class is like hell, unfortunately no bell to ring to ring to let me be free I can’t wait I have to pee! —Amanda Hoffer —Cover slam…whaaaaat (Hoffer’s…
Prison officials destroyed computer files containing inmates’ personal writing days after a prisoner won a national writing award, best-selling author Wally Lamb said. Lamb, who teaches a creative writing workshop at the York Correctional Facility in East Lyme, said Wednesday that 15 women inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the…
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, Punk Rock, Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airlines —Billy Joel —Annotated ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ I once thought about doing this kind of thing in a class, but I couldn’t find the right environment.
In order to gather sufficient resources to support my self, my spouse, and my offspring, I must augment my vision with externally mounted lenses, which I wear on the bridge of my nose. My glasses make me feel professorial; without them, I still feel like an ordinary person pretending to be qualified to teach. But…
A long overdue Grand Finale to the celebrated ‘Peanuts’ cartoon strip. By Raymond J. Dartsch. With apologies to Schulz. —Rest in Peace, Charlie Brown Really horrible. I mean it. Sick, sick, sick. I couldn’t stop clicking. The artwork is decent, but the lettering is hard to read… I hadn’t realized just how much Shultz’s wobbly…
Researchers are finding players can make sharper soldiers, drivers and surgeons. Their reaction time is better, their peripheral vision more acute. They are taking risks, finding themselves at ease in a demanding environment that requires paying attention on several levels at once. While there are countless examples of children vegetating in front of the box,…
If you use Google to search for “Judaism”, “Jewish” or “Jewish people”, the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of…
Part attention to detail, part science, part Vulcan mind meld, exegesis allows a critic to enter and extend the context of a work of art, whether it be through the useful reductions of Sunday book reviews, the half millennium of minutiae that have accumulated to make Shakespeare ?The Bard? or revelatory reappraisals in the manner…