In August 1999, I was blogging about Conservation efforts at Poohsticks Bridge A Penmanship camp in Philadelphia Recovering the only known copy of a lost work by the Greek mathematician Archimedes (erased by a 10th-century monk who scraped off the writing to reuse the parchment) Fourth-graders using e-books at Resurrection Catholic School in Dayton, Ohio…
I noticed an uptick in traffic to an older page, “Technical Writing: What Is It?” So I touched it up and created a new graphic. Similar:“The author talks about [topic]” is filler. Your professors want your college-level ideas.AcademiaLocal News in a Digital AgeLocal TV news is the “most visible prese…AestheticsSad that NASA is taking a…
I won’t be so assertive in the first week of class, but I created this meme out of frustration that some students don’t actually read the feedback that I spend a lot of time writing. (I have experimented with giving more oral feedback. I’ll likely do more of that in my online Shakespeare class.) Similar:Scaring…
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. The Enterprise spends a lot of time in a budget-saving black void, where the crew scans things, searches databases, launches a probe, navigates in circles, gives up, sets a self-destruct timer, philosophizes about death, shuts off the timer, and warps away. I had never seen…
Carolyn plays a teenager who’s outside the “in” group that’s stalked by a killer. She has some action sequences that I know she’ll enjoy filming. I also have “two and a half scenes” playing her father. Similar:Memorizer (Memorization Tool)A Midsummer castmate shared a link to th…CybercultureThe Real Reason Why You Can't WriteHave you ever stopped to think…
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. As science fiction, this was an interesting premise with great production values and character moments, that ultimately didn’t deliver any real drama because our main characters lacked any significant agency. The Child opens with some lovely footage of the Enterprise alongside another starship, and a…
Visited a bog created when loggers cleared part of a forest. Laurel Summit State Park. Similar:A gangway, flanked by still more #steampunk control panels, leads forward from the chief e…AestheticsWhat the police really believe: Inside the distinctive, largely unknown ideology of Americ…“That whole thing about the bad apple? I…CultureLocal News in a Digital AgeLocal TV…
Often when I see people in my social media feed criticizing “the media,” they are unfairly blaming journalists for how the social media ecosystem misuses journalism. Here’s an example from a post by someone arguing that CNN is being unfairly biased against Bernie Sanders. The complaint is that CNN criticizes Sanders for making a claim…
There’s so much I don’t know! When teaching rhetoric, I often use “Is light a wave, or is it a particle?” as an example of a false dichotomy. My high school physics teacher (Rear Admiral Edward Metcalfe Peebles) set up a lecture giving us the “pro-wave” evidence and the “pro-particle” evidence and inviting us to…
“There is an enormous part of the economy hungry for graduates with skills in analysis and communication — skills students are honing as they conduct close readings of texts, persuade their classmates in seminars and hone the style and structure of papers,” Sentz said. That might not be clear to students, however, or to college…
Similar:Uneasy Lies the Head — Tyrant: Shakespeare on PowerJohn Stubbs reviews Stephen Grenblatt’s …AcademiaIn 2019, I have a college student who annotates readings like this!I asked students in my online “Dystopia …AcademiaSeton Hill Virtual Commencement Fall 2020 AcademiaUpdated Media Bias Chart — Left/Center/Right, Facts/Analysis/Partisan/Propaganda (Ad Font…Update — Media Bias Chart 10.0 All h…CultureHow The NY…
I saw my first Food for Groundlings show this weekend. It won’t be my last. I see a lot of theater, and am used to seeing professionals here or there stutter or jump a line. But the actors in Othello at CCAC Sunday night really impressed me with their mastery of Shakespeare’s verbiage. Desdemona in…
I’m 50. I’m in my office casually sharpening my CGI skills, and I get a huge rush when tweets mention a Usenet thread I joined in 2001 & a video game I played in 1992, and I can see the glittering green matrix code explaining it all. Similar:Did you share Russian fake news? Facebook, apparently…
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…
It seems every week some “expert” publishes an article lamenting on the fact that if college students want to ensure they can get a good job after graduation, they should steer clear of “worthless” majors. Go into business or technology, say the authors. Stay away from things like English literature or creative writing. This argument…
Spent much of Tuesday wrestling with code to display messages like “Press E to Open” and connecting them to animations. I’ve done this sort of thing before, but there’s a difference between hacking something to make it work once, and developing a workflow that facilitates churning things out. Plus I keep getting distracted by little…
Fans of Star Trek have thus already been introduced to the plays of William Shakespeare, and experienced intertextual analysis in action as the aforementioned Star Trek episodes directly relate to Hamlet and Henry V. The same can be said of the motion picture The Wrath of Khan, which portrays Ricardo Montalban’s villain as a futuristic Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.…
I’m following a lot of tutorials, and continue to make progress in Unity3D. My character’s feet now react better with the environment. Here she is standing casually with each foot at different levels. With the right code attached to each foot, she will adjust her stance automatically, according to the height and angle of whatever…
Scholar and essayist Ian Bogost traces the history of video game scapegoating, noting that while the panic used to be bi-partisan, and then-senator Hilary Clinton targeted video games in 2005, now it’s mostly GOP voices who blame video games for violent actions such as mass shootings. (Incidentally, the Va Tech shooter preferred Sonic the Hedgehog,…
So looking forward to seeing her in this! Oct 18 – 27, 2019 at The Theatre Factory (Trafford, Pa.) Similar:The girl asked me to read R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) to her. #quarantine #partylik…BooksHospice/Honeymoon “Hospice.” Once the word is uttered a…CultureWriting for the Godless: Flannery O’Connor on Dogma, Belief, and the Difference Between Re…I’m not teaching…