This is story is from May, but it’s very relevant. Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his way through his PowerPoint presentation. A slide titled “Have you been hit by the Russian troll army?” included a checklist of methods used to deceive readers on social media: image…
I’m planning to begin my online Shakespeare class with commentary on how it’s a good thing that language changes, so that students will (I hope) see the effort they will need to put into understanding English from 400 years ago as part of the process of engaging with a living language, the same process that…
Friendly advice… If you are practicing with your new green screen backdrop, don’t wear a plaid shirt with blue-green in it. I’m not happy with the lighting… the foreground lighting is pretty good (some spare photography lamps — much better than the fluorescent ceiling lights) but I don’t like the shadows on the backdrop. I…
Viral app FaceApp has been giving people the power to change their facial expressions, looks, and now age for several years. But at the same time, people have been giving FaceApp the power to use their pictures — and names — for any purpose it wishes, for as long as it desires. To make FaceApp…
I’m brushing up on my Unity3D skills, and created this simple hedge maze game. When I decided to let the player shoot books instead of bullets, I turned on the physics (so the books bounce and roll), but I forgot to tick the “use gravity” checkbox, so they float. (Music: “Dreaming of Flying” by Celestial…
With the Enterprise in drydock for a computer refit, Riker ends up in the holodeck, fascinated by the sultry hologram he asks the computer to create so someone will admire his trombone talents.
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. The Enterprise visits a sexist planet run by women, where… well, that’s about it. There’s nothing particularly science-fictional about the plot, except that the Enterprise is tracking a space-freighter and looking for space-survivors who disappeared years ago near this space-planet. There’s nothing strategic about the…
From Buzzfeed: Sitting before the Stars and Stripes, another flag pinned to his lapel, former president Barack Obama appears to be delivering an important message about fake news — but something seems slightly…off.
I had a complex model that I created in Blender 2.79, and imported (with some tweaking) successfully to Unity 2018 a few months ago. When I switched to Blender 2.8 and Unity 2018.2, I found big problems with my model. Blender 2.8b tells me that all the normals are exactly what I expect — the…
As a kid, I remember studying my CRT displays with a microscope. Each pixel that I could control with BASIC on my TRS-80 or Atari 800 or Commodore-64 was made up of tiny arrays of red, blue, and green dots that I could not control directly. There was one display mode of the Atari 800…
This morning a journalism student told me a friend in a different class was complaining that “the media” was stigmatizing mental illness in its coverage of yesterday’s mass shooting in California. My student told me she remembered I had mentioned that reporters often don’t write the headlines under which their stories are published, but she…
For the UK Guardian, the news is the words the White House used while accusing Acosta of an action caught on video. For Fox, Sanders was accused of sharing an allegedly “‘doctored’” video of a neutrally-identified “interaction.” For the Washington Post, the White House “shares doctored video” — no accusation, no scare quotes. Read…
Not fun, but done.
An important but small detail in a Blender3D project I just finished is this trench-coated character. I started with a clip-art silhouette, but it looked pretty drab. Thanks to a little pixel-doctoring in The GIMP, I touched up the center image. The schlubby pant cuffs on this guy don’t fit the character, so I smoothed…
The three academics call themselves “left-leaning liberals.” Yet they’re dismayed by what they describe as a “grievance studies” takeover of academia, especially its encroachment into the sciences… The trio say they’ve proved that higher ed’s fixation on identity politics enables “absurd and horrific” scholarship. Their submissions were outlandish—but no more so, they insist, than others written in earnest and published by these journals.
Gender, Place & Culture, for instance, published a 2017 paper that wasn’t a hoax analyzing the “feminist posthumanist politics” of what squirrels eat. This year Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy, published an analysis of a one-woman show featuring “the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat.” The performance supposedly offers “a synthaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychological fallout.”
I am not particularly into anime, though when I was about 12 I was entranced to run across episodes of Star Blazers that aired on my local TV station one summer at about 7am. Having said that, I found this trailer for a (theoretical) anime reworking of Star Wars very appealing.
I spent about 30 seconds eyeballing the hexcode colors for Starfleet uniforms so that, from now on, when I’m marking papers, my Canvas interface will remind me just a little bit of Star Trek. Where do you create joy? Captain’s log… supplemental entry. It’s not a perfect match, but the blue and gold are hard…
In my freshman writing class, my job is to teach students how to write a researched essay. I encourage students to pick topics that interest them, but I warn them that if they go into their project already convinced that one answer is correct (that euthanasia should/should not be legal, that abortion is murder/healthcare, that…
I can sympathize with the sentiment, but the top part of this meme (the white text on black background) is not how I’d frame the situation. My take (which I’ve added underneath the original) is that when two sources disagree, assuming that one must be right and the other must be wrong is a form…