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…
Journalists are worrywarts. We worry about toxins in the drinking water, graft at City Hall, opposition leaders in countries you’ve never heard of and the rotator cuffs of journeyman pitchers. We worry about greenhouse gasses, decorum in the Senate, childhood obesity, abandoned pets and the fall lineup on ABC. If there’s an asteroid headed in…
The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook’s drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world…
Everyone that plays video games knows Grande [sic] Theft Auto and it’s [sic] reputation for violence, especially GTA 3, GTA: Vice City and now GTA: San Andreas. Lately, however, GTA:S.A. has come under more fire than its predecessors and it’s all because of something called the “Hot Coffee Mod.” Apparently the .mod,which unlocks minigames that…
One minute, I’m watching families talk about how they don’t know how to buy school clothes for their kids on their minimum wage salaries; the next, I’m watching spoiled 18 year olds watching martial arts films on their $1000 toys, under the pretense of taking notes in a classroom. —Mike Arnzen —Getting By In Class…with…
“Psychiatrists believe that these auditory hallucinations are caused when the brain spontaneously activates, creating a false perception of a voice,” says Professor Hunter of the university’s psychiatry department. “The reason these voices are usually male could be explained by the fact that the female voice is so much more complex that the brain would find…
– You are Albus Dumbledore, a great wizard. You find yourself in a small room. There are exits to the north and west. There is a table in the corner. > Examine table – On the table is a wand and a suspicious pipe > Smoke pipe – As you begin to smoke the pipe…
—Scrollbars (Leegte.org) Interesting sculptural installation that uses Windows scrollbars. Via the very interesting Information Aesthetics.
She banned competitive activities during school hours. —The Evil of Excellence (JoanneJacobs.com) There’s a good discussion sparked by an American School Board Journal article (the content of this URL will probably change when the next issue comes out) that strongly discourages any kind of competition in the classroom. Even a teacher who praises “Madison” for cutting…
Managers had held out hope, however slim, that they might be able to launch Discovery within a few days. But with engineers no closer to figuring out why the fuel sensor malfunctioned Wednesday – a potentially deadly problem – NASA had no choice but to call for a lengthy standdown. NASA is up against the…
Ku Klux Kryptonite (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Are comic books suffering because they are trying to emulate the action of videogames, rather than the edgy, thought-provoking content that only a fringe medium can provide? In a striking series of radio episodes in the 1940s, Superman took on the Ku Klux Klan, after activist Stetson Kennedy spent time…
In a meeting today, I learned that there is such a place as the ?blogosphere.? I thought the speaker was joking, and so appropriately, I giggled. The stern look I received in response jolted me to the realization that not only was this not a joke, but that I was the fool for not knowing…
Like you, I haven’t seen the film, but I have read the script, I’ve talked to a lot of people who worked on the set, and I’ve seen the raunchy t.v. commercial. Frankly, I think the whole project shows an arrogant disrespect for our show, for our cast, for America’s families, and for the sensibilities…
Washington loves farce the way Vienna loves the waltz. It once extravagantly inflated a sex act into the impeachment of a president, and it has now reduced the momentous debacle of the Iraq war into a question of what Rove or someone else said to a reporter on the phone. Soon, the question will turn…
“Middle world is like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see,” he said. “Middle world is the narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness that we judge to be very small or very large.” He mused that perhaps children should be given computer games…
In general, the more code you put into making the page look a certain way, the more time a user spends wondering why the page hasn’t loaded yet. For example, the store locator page that started me on this month’s topic was packed with large menus carefully rendered in alternating color schemes. Every menu had…
In his office with its towering view of midtown Manhattan, Pearlstine boasted that if I’d been writing for Time or Fortune, or any other Time Inc. publication, he would have backed me all the way to the Supreme Court. “We take the First Amendment very seriously around here,” he said. I couldn’t help but recall…
According to the students, the less they were taught, the better. But I knew better. And I had been on the receiving end of some of these half-taught students. One of my colleagues at a large community college in California had confessed that he passed any student who would sit through his course. With no…
Community voices have always contributed to local and national papers. Citizen journalism is different. It often covers a wide territory from soliciting arts and entertainment coverage to providing the angle on the city council budget that the cub reporter might have missed. The London attacks moved the trend to a new level. Web sites from…
Media firms should be able to protect their copyrights. And without any copyright protection of digital content, they may be correct that new high quality content is likely to dry up (along with much of their business). Yet tech and electronics firms are also correct that holding back new technology, merely because it interferes with…