I was crawling along the bottom of the lake on my arms and knees, looking for stones to skim, when my hand and knee felt something long and hard buried in the clay and sand. I pulled it out and saw that it was different from the sticks or rocks I usually find. One end…
https://youtu.be/tOYQc8vByoY Similar:Waiting for the sound of bagpipes. #setonhillgrad 2016PersonalA Conversation with Dennis Jerz, Actor — WAOB Audio Theatrehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU6vs0ZB…DramaMinneapolis protest cleanup: Did you share this meme without fact-checking it? (Don’t spre… A Facebook meme with 52k reactions a…CultureMy daughter was five or six when she created the character “Moonbot” for the #steampunk be…https://youtu.be/GoWiNB_tlJ8 AestheticsStandardized Test Scores…
We just bought a new refrigerator from our local Sears. As a kid, I remember circling toys I wanted in the Christmas catalog. Pages of Legos, Matchbox cars, sleeping bags, remote-controlled cars. There might have been no Sears at all if Richard Sears, a 19th-century railway agent, hadn’t received an unwanted shipment of watches. He…
Similar:Solitaire ChessSpent a relaxing evening in playing soli…AmusingCome see Carolyn and her talented castmates in The Fantasticks (Theatre Factory, Trafford …PersonalSteampunk officer uniforms — test #Blender3D #Unity3Dhttps://youtu.be/SDh4TW8ujNg The vide…AestheticsAnother 10 sq cm of #steampunk control panel. Trying to add a subtle pattern to the light-…One of many steampunk control panels I’v…AestheticsJohn Speed’s 1611 map of…
Making this illustration in Blender3D was almost as much fun as voicing the role of Electron Jones. This was my first project using the Cycles rendering engine. In the first episode of “Electron Jones,” the narrator describes looking down on a “levi-train” as a lunar transport takes off into the twilight sky in the futuristic…
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…
As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they targeted fields they pejoratively dub “grievance studies” — “gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy” — which they consider peculiarly susceptible to fashionable nonsense. Does the hoax identify something uniquely rotten in gender and sexuality studies, or could…
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.”
More than half of the hostile responses to The Last Jedi, episode eight of the Star Wars saga, were politically motivated trolling or the result of non-human bot activity, according to an academic paper published by a US digital media expert. Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC), analysed Twitter activity about the…
Flight 93 crash site and Tower of Voices. Well worth the side trip on the way back from a weekend gig. I had to explain to the girl why the 9/11/2001 newspaper in the exhibit didn’t mention the attacks (it had been printed overnight). She was especially moved by the recorded messages left by some…
The girl performed musical commercials for a fund-raiser in the Laurel Highlands. On the way back we stopped at a Denny’s, and after I paid the bill the waitress said she was impressed to see a teenaged girl enjoying an outing with her father without having a phone glued to her hand. (Carolyn had just…
Who, I thought, besides a multidisciplinary team in search of research funding, could possibly imagine that a digital account of the impact of reading digital print on human cognition would be effective? For such an account rests on the supremacy of the very thing it seeks to counteract, which can be summarized as a view of the human mind/brain that is itself computational in form.
There are ways to raise a child’s test scores that have nothing to with helping that child learn. In the past 10 years I have seen far more students — even the most capable, most brilliant students — paralyzed with fear about grades. In high school, you got good grades if you followed instructions and…
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. Similar:Another section of a…
Similar:What about Socialization?Sometimes, I worry that by homeschooling…Current_EventsFallout Monopoly with the boy. PersonalIn between 3 walks and a chess game with my son, today I managed to churn out a second 10s…AestheticsLiving Room PhysicsI’ve blogged before about my eight-year-…EducationTalk with us about books! English as a minor or second major @setonhilluniversityAcademiaI am a dog and I…
The New York Public Library has a program that lets youths check out briefcases, handbags, and neckties for job interviews or other formal occasions.
Transcript: Me: (Starts writing a routine email for textbook adoption committee.) Me: (Accidentally paraphrases part of Roy Batty’s “Tears in rain” monologue.) Me: (Checks IMDB to refresh my memory of the full quote.) Me: (Checks Blade Runner Wiki to confirm umlaut in Tannhäuser Gate.) Me: (Looks up Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.) Me: What, what was…
As circulation has declined, local newspapers have had to adjust for the loss in revenue, sometimes by shrinking the size of their staffs, sometimes by selling out or closing up shop all together.
It’s a myth that humanities majors don’t care about post-graduation employment. What changed was the safety valve of subsequent law school enrollment.
Law school was long the default post-graduation plan for majors in qualitative fields. As long as you had the prospect of a lucrative legal career after college, you could safely major in English or poli sci. Those students didn’t ignore the vocational imperative; they just postponed it. And for a long time, that worked pretty well.
But the Great Recession, combined with AI and offshoring, did a number on law as a career option.
The Cask of Amotillado (read by Dennis Jerz, for WAOB Audio Theatre) Similar:Mariah Carey meets William Carlos Williams AmusingWaiting for the house to open. @prime_stagePersonalHypertext as a Teaching Tool — Brown University Poetry Classroom 1974This short film documents an early attem…AcademiaInform 7 is now open sourceInform is a design system for interactiv…CultureIf I don’t stock…