Video Tips for Students: Don’t do what I’m doing! You can’t see my eyes, the background is distracting, you’re looking up my nose and the lighting is awful.
You might have been asked to submit a short video assignment. Don’t do what I’m doing! You can’t see my eyes, the background is distracting, you’re looking up my nose and the lighting is awful. This short video demonstrates some quick tips that will greatly improve a video submission assignment. Your instructor and your classmates…
Added a pilot and cockpit details to my flyby of a #steampunk scout ship. Costume is a pre-fab placeholder. #makehuman #blender3D
Data-Related Deaths, 1960-2019 (Excluding Fatalities Caused by Misreadings, Typographical Errors, and Paper Cuts)
Masks serve many purposes. How sad that they’ve become politicized.
I’ve seen the original meme on my social media feed. I’ve fixed it. The purpose of the first three masks differs from the purpose of the fourth mask. The first three masks are designed to protect the wearer from breathing in harmful things in the environment. The mask Dr. Fauci wears is designed not to…
Mechanical innards for a Steampunk set piece. #Blender3D #greebles
Okay, a lot of the world is pretty awful right now, but here’s an uplifting video about the “success kid” meme.
No, Trump’s tweet about “Heritage, History, and Greatness” is not a quote from a speech Hitler gave in 1939
Trump really did tweet “This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!” Plugging those words into Google Translate yields “Dies ist ein Kampf um die Rettung des Erbes, der Geschichte und der Größe unseres Landes!” I could be wrong, but I think Größe in German just means “physical size,”…
After a pretty crappy day, I found shreds of joy in this clip of socially distanced salsa.
In my discipline, teaching small seminars typically depends on students sharing their weaknesses and vulnerabilities in pairs and small groups, gradually building trust while the teacher moves through the room, listening and joining in and backing away as appropriate. Masked students who are 6 feet away from each other will have to shout their failures…
Post-Pandemic News: 7 Lessons We Can’t Afford to Forget
Journalists are often criticized for emphasizing bad news. On a day when there are no commercial airliner crashes, there’s no need for a story on the fact that everyone who flew today landed safely. I prefer to get my news from the web, so I don’t follow TV news in any form. However, I was…
Post-publication review as an efficient alternative to pre-publication peer review
Andrew Gelman of “Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science” writes: Peer review is fine for what it is—it tells you that a paper is up to standard in its subfield. Peer reviewers can catch missing references in the literature review. That can be helpful! But if peer review catches anything that the original authors…
Liberal arts college professor assaults alt-right group member
Carefully choosing language that fits your slant is a powerful form of persuasion. I try to teach my students to recognize and avoid biased language, which is a more difficult process than simply firing back with different biased terms that support your own slant (“You’re an anti-choice woman hater,” “No, you’re an anti-life baby killer!”).…
A Matter of Perspective (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 13) Multiple-POV Courtroom Drama
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. An agitated Riker, beamed off of a research station just before it explodes, finds himself charged with murder. Testimony from Riker, the victim’s widow, and (indirectly) the victim tell conflicting stories. A solid storytelling concept, which somewhat freshens a mishmash of already-familiar TNG tropes: a brilliant male scientist, his…
Synchronous Online Classes: 10 Tips for Engaging Students
Every time I have taught an online class, I have made it asynchronous. I’m blogging these synchronous teaching tips so I can find them again when I’m prepping my fall classes (which will likely be HyFlex). The tips offered here won’t miraculously eliminate the initial awkwardness of virtual class sessions, but they’ll help. And over…
The bots are coming. And they have poems.
Yet in a circle pallid as it flow by this bright sun, that with his light display, roll’d from the sands, and half the buds of snow, and calmly on him shall infold away Deep-speare’s creation is nonsensical when you read it closely, but it certainly “scans well,” as an English teacher would say—its…
Leveling up my skills in #blender3D.
Using invisible shapes to cut holes in the hull, and a shrinkwrap modifier to align the cockpit frame and the glass.
Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting
Thoughtful essay from Julio Vincent Gambuto. Get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from…
Dog and TP Wall
Fake Graph: The Actual “Dunning-Kruger Effect” Is NOTHING Like I Thought It Was
For years, I’ve been teaching a fake graph. In pretty much every course I teach, on some day when students seem discouraged or distracted, I’ll draw an X axis labeled “Experience” and a Y-axis labeled “Confidence,” and sketch out the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” curve, as preparation for an informal pep talk. (Update, 27 Nov 2021: My…
MoonBot is back. This time he fights a new adversary. #Blender3D physics practice.
I submitted midterm grades at about 11 last night, quickly modeled a new object, and let the animation render overnight.