At the Carnegie Museum of Art. Similar:Fun With Charts: Scale MattersAt first glance, this chart makes it loo…CultureI just discovered what will grind up a significant portion of my free time over the break.So Khan Academy now has a grammar unit. …PersonalLove Online”The exchange of love letters was centra…CultureHow Star Wars was saved in the…
Similar:The girl continues her exploration of Scottish history.Carolyn: “Does no one have a kind word f…PersonalMy journalism students just gave me this wristband: "What would Jerz do? / Verify or duck…. AestheticsThe dark future of American space exploration: NASA's golden age is about to come to a thu…I remember, as a kid, being thrilled by…
Similar:Lounge area of a steampunk villain’s lair. Still needs a light fixture or two. #blender3dAestheticsMaking sidewalks to go with the buildings. Tedious but will save time later. #blender3d #m…PersonalThose emails can wait.PersonalJimmy Kimmel Reveals "Worst Twerk Fail EVER – Girl Catches Fire" PrankBrilliant. The combination of a looks-to…AmusingKLINGON STYLE (Star Trek Parody of PSY -…
In the bird-flight simulator at the Pittsburgh Aviary, the girl twists and turns, careening around buildings, dive-bombing alleyways, and comes to a perfect landing in the middle of the street just as her timer runs out. The boy immediately heads up to clear the buildings, then flies toward the horizon to see how far he…
The new book from the University of Kentucky Press, Mammoth Cave Curiosities” A Guide to Rockphobia, Dating, Saber-toothed Cats and Other Subterranean Marvels, offers some new tidbits from Will Crowther about his ground-breaking 1970s computer game, “Colossal Cave Adventure.” In a subsection confidently headed “The First Computer Adventure Game,” we find this weaselly clunker: “Developed in…
Fascinating theory. The hard work of raising helpless babies is part of the natural selection process that made us as a species so intelligent. Natural selection favors humans with large brains, because those humans tend to be smarter. This may create evolutionary incentives for babies that are born at an even earlier developmental stage, which…
I’m somewhat interested in the topic, but I’m actually posting about this because my freshman writing students are now in the process of gathering sources for their research paper. I have to train them to ignore reader-friendly science journalism like this, and instead engage directly with the academic source this reporter is summarizing. That’s a…
The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it…
The animal versus machine moment is brought to you by Guard From Above, which describes itself as “the world’s first company specialized in training birds of prey to intercept hostile drones.” Source: —Wash Post Similar:MSU asks faculty & staff to volunteer in short-staffed dining halls; @MSU_Football tweets …MSU, instead of asking your profs to vol…AcademiaOne…
I clicked for the topic, but it was the writing that captured me. The first impulse sets a secret timer, and what the fly does in the next 20 seconds will determine its fate. If it avoids the hairs, it will live. If it bumps a second one, it sets off another electrical impulse, which raises…
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently captured a unique view of Earth from the spacecraft’s vantage point in orbit around the moon. “The image is simply stunning,” said Noah Petro, Deputy Project Scientist for LRO at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The image of the Earth evokes the famous ‘Blue Marble’ image taken by Astronaut Harrison Schmitt during Apollo…
Electronic Book Review just published an article I wrote with Dave Thomas, on cave space in video game ecology. Parts of this article are a companion to my 2007 Digital Humanities Quarterly article on the 1970s text computer game Colossal Cave Adventure. Crowther’s translation of real world caving experience into the digital medium provides a…
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“It is over three hours long, and it is like a cross between Noel Coward and The Terminator” – Ivor Benjamin describing the original version of “R.U.R.”Last Wednesday I went to see an adaption of Karel Čapek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, presented at the British Library. | There was one question from the audience that…
It won’t make the afternoon of mowing more magical, but in the front lawn today I did find this mushroom fairy ring. Similar:The karyotype of Pimelodella cristata (Siluriformes: Heptapteridae) from Central Amazon ba…Some scholarly journals have a more rigo…AcademiaIn February, 2001, I was blogging about computer nostalgia, Napster, a horror typing game,…In February, 2001, I…
When we banish the dark, what do we lose? The stars, of course. But what else? Archaeologist Colleen Morgan reflects. In Turkey and Jordan I’d sleep on the roof, watching shooting stars and satellites, feeling the depth of space all around me. In cities, hell, in most places, all the artificial light flattens the sky,…
Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a “destructive myth” had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies. He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a “kind of paganism” because it…
If you’ve ever wanted to see the reigns of Henry VIII’s wives represented in a pie chart, the New Statesman is here to serve. Catherine was queen for 24 years. That’s nearly seven times longer than her nearest successor. It’s nearly 50 times longer than Anne of Cleves, who was queen for all of six…
You see less than 20 color nuances: you are a dichromats, like dogs, which means you have 2 types of cones only. You are likely to wear black, beige, and blue. 25% of the population is dichromat. You see between 20 and 32 color nuances: you are a trichromat, you have 3 types of cones…