Number of times one of my $9.99 headphones fell out of my ears while I was mowing the lawn this morning: 3. Likelihood I might spend $159 on AirPods: 0%. Likelihood I might spend $15.90 on AirPods: 0%. Similar:AI is better at writing poems than you’d expect. But that’s fine. Even the most rebellious poets…
When you plug an audio cable into a smartphone, it just works. It doesn’t matter whether the headphones were made by the same manufacturer as the phone. It doesn’t even matter what you’re trying to do with the audio signal—it works whether the cable is going into a speaker, a mixing board, or a recording…
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…
Update: Here’s a clip of the whole breakfast scene (recorded during a performance). A few weeks ago, my 14yo played Helen Keller in the Latrobe Cabaret Theatre’s production of The Miracle Worker. This clip is from a rehearsal of the epic breakfast scene, a wordless battle of wills between young Helen (who has been blind…
All ITT Tech campuses will be shut down, its parent company announced today. — Inside Higher Ed Similar:I Set A Trap To Catch Students Cheating With AI. The Result Was DeflatingMy classes are generally small enough th…AcademiaTom Bissell writes a letter to Niko Bellic about Grand Theft Auto VI haven’t played GTAV, and probably neve…CultureUnvaccinated dad…
Will Crowther, an RPG-er, created the first text-based adventure game for computers Colossal Cave Adventure in 1975.6 When Don Woods developed it into Adventure in 1976-1977 he added the Tolkienian elements of trolls and elves. —Helen Young, Journal of Tolkien Research Well, yes, but Crowther had already started with the Tolkenian elements of underground dwarves,…
I just saw the following clickbait for an ongoing non-story in the technology world: “All the latest speculation about [topic X] in one place.” That’s less like a news headline and more like the punchline to a New Yorker cartoon. No, I did not click the link. Similar:In October 2001, I was blogging about nothing,…
Great reporting from Christopher Goffard of the LA Times. Now she watched as her ruin seemed to unfold before her. It was enough to send her to jail, and more than enough to destroy her name. Source: She was the PTA mom everyone knew. Who would want to harm her? Similar:You are personally responsible for…
Similar:The boy approved of the WWII historical fiction Dunkirk. CultureIn a literature class, the author's words matter more than the author's life and times, or… Updating the graphic for a resource …AcademiaBird flight simulator. The boy goes for altitude and distance, the girl does stunts.In the bird-flight simulator at the Pitt…CyberculturePlaying a well-dressed bad guy. PersonalWhen she's…
In situations of change, it is natural for human beings to look for touchstones. As a human being, I had always sought a center to my life, an example to follow. What I hadn’t realized was that I was already following a path into the future. It was pointed out to me at a business…
Don’t trust your Facebook feed. All Facebook wants is for you to spend time on Facebook, so that they can sell your attention to the highest bidder. Facebook recently fired 18 employees whose job was to write headlines for and monitor the “Trending Topics” list. When that list fell under scrutiny for an alleged…
Saving this for the next time I teach Shakespeare. All well and good, you say, but my parents are worried about what I’m going to do after I graduate. There, too, Shakespeare can be a model. When he was born, there wasn’t yet a professional theater in London. In other words, his education had prepared him…
Certain it is, that he was a great favorite among all the good wives of the village, who, as usual with the amiable sex, took his part in all family squabbles, and never failed, whenever they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle. The children…
Today, Facebook announced that human curators will no longer write short descriptions that accompany trending topics on the site. Instead, the company will rely on an algorithmic process to “pull excerpts directly from stories.” The company also said it will stop using human curators to sort through the news…. It’s important to note that Facebook originally…
Our future robot overlords never looked so squishy. A team of Harvard University scientists has built an entirely soft robot — one that’s inspired by an octopus. The octobot, described this week in the journal Nature, could pave the way toward more effective soft robots that could be used in search and rescue, exploration and…
Similar:In September 1999 I was blogging about Tom Stoppard, techno-utopianism, voice-recognition …In September 1999, I was blogging about …CybercultureChilling analysis of organized, anonymous disinformation campaign against Parkland survivo…Forty-seven minutes after news broke of …CultureHow To Talk To Babies About Semiotics (and Marxist Theory)BABY: read dog book again ME: okay fine…AcademiaResults of the 18th Annual Interactive…
This short film documents an early attempt to use hypertext to help students study poetry. A fascinating early collaboration between computer science and the humanities. Similar:Your Students Learn by Doing, Not by ListeningToday one of my students gave a final pr…AcademiaThe ballroom of my #steampunk fantasy space cruiser is now a less lonely place. Thanks…
Similar:Look at the unusual colors chosen by the three Russian cosmonauts who just arrived at the …Personal"Gen Zers know the difference between rock-solid news and AI-generated memes. They just do…Over the past couple of years, researche…CultureNot doing well. As usual.PersonalUshering The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. @prime_stagePersonalMuch Ado About Nothing (Beatrice is my literary…
If movies about space have taught us anything, it’s that no one can hear you scream. If you get lost in space, nobody’s going to find you. Unless you’re a spacecraft with a direct link to NASA. Then, there is hope for you yet. STEREO-B, from the Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory mission, went missing on…
Today my son asked me to take him shopping for his favorite foods. He’s tired of fast-food take-out. I told him I was busy today running the spotlight for and videotaping yet another one of Carolyn’s performances (this time her voice teacher’s summer revue).
The poor boy has been left at home a lot while the rest of us did so much theater over the summer. He competed in a chess tournament last week. I fell asleep in the next room. He came in second place. (I have no pictures. I’m a bad father.)