A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families

Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2×2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?” And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece…

cyoa (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Beatiful graphic visualization of CYOA books.  Not just in the abstract — these are visualizations of specific CYOA titles. At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page.…

Cuteness

A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and…

Hope or Hype on the Cloud

At the 2009 Educause Conference, Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud. Woo, who took the anti-cloud position, said that just because higher education is moving en masse toward outsourcing services such as e-mail and data management to external providers does not necessarily mean it is moving in the right direction. “I’m not sure why…

I now pronounce you….

A man and a wife saw what happened and the man ran with the baby’s mother to help her pick the child up from the ground, police said. CBS Chicago I presume this was the level of detail in the police report, so the journalist is just echoing what’s in the report.  But “husband and…

Commemorating the Holocaust

A few of the many events scheduled in the Pittsburgh region. “Of Faith and Kristallnacht,” a panel discussion with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University; Sister Gemma del Duca, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University; and the Rev. Don Green, executive director of Christian Associates of Southwestern Pennsylvania; among…