I wish there were a secret day between Friday and Sunday, which you could tap into at will, whether to lengthen the work week and get one more project out of the way, or to lengthen the weekend and give you more time to recover. Anyway, Boing Boing’s review of “80 Days” is one of…
Three weeks ago, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet informed staff that the paper would no longer take enterprise pitches for Page 1 of the print edition. Instead, editors from the various news desks would pitch their best enterprise pieces for digital slots on what will be called “Dean’s List.” Those stories’ publication in…
The quotes in my headline are accurate, but completely misleading. Saving this for an example in my journalism class, demonstrating the obligation that journalists have to avoid the perception of bias in their reporting. A photographer for The New York Times says the publication did not crop former President George W. Bush and first lady…
When it comes to picking a typeface, you can’t rely on gut alone. Making the right choice depends on function, context and a whole host of other factors. But how do you ensure you’re going about it the right way? Here we give you pointers to send you in the right direction…Creative Bloq. Similar:We Are…
I’m building a new site for a non-profit and will probably be moving the student newspaper to a new template, so this is the time to think of such things. Similar:The Life and Times of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯But, in addition to symbolizing despair,…CybercultureNarrow ParsersCreating n00b-friendly interactive ficti…CybercultureA quick Sunday visit to #fortligonier with my history-loving son.A quick…
No, Daylight Saving Time was not created to help farmers (actually, they hate it) and no, it doesn’t save energy (running the air conditioner longer in the evenings costs more than we save by turning on fewer lights in the morning). And why are we on “Daylight Standard Time” just four months out of the…
This is the concept of Inside Hamlet, an interactive performance that takes place this weekend and next in the real Elsinore, at Denmark’s Kronborg Castle. Over the course of three five-hour acts, 100 actors will assume the roles of royals and servants of the House of Hamlet—and other related houses who have taken refuge at…
I quibble with The Chronicle headline writer’s notion that paper & pencil are “no-tech,” but hand-written notes are valuable. Students tested right after a lecture tended to answer factual questions equally well regardless of how they took notes, but students who handwrote their notes did consistently better on conceptual questions. What’s more, when students were…
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…
I found that when an app did sell girl characters, it charged on average $7.53, which is a lot in the world of apps. After all, each of the apps I downloaded only cost an average of $0.26. In other words, girl characters cost about 29 times more than the cost of the apps themselves.…
Local TV news is the “most visible presence” in the news space, according to a Pew study, though most TV stories are routine traffic and weather reports and short, shallow “anchor reads” (in which the well-coiffed announcers read into the camera) rather than the result of thoughtful, original reporting. To paraphrase Into the Woods, “Visible…
Test subjects whose test papers “accidentally” included the answer key had an inflated sense of how well they would do on a follow-up test that did not include answers, suggesting that the cheaters were not aware how much their performance on the first test was dependent on their access to answers. The people who’d had…
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…
This made me think of a college friend who regularly Facebooks anecdotes about his job as a librarian, and a former student who produces a radio drama about a hard-boiled, square-jawed time-traveling librarian. Enter the library intoxicated and you’ll get a talking to — the warning — and be asked to leave for the day.…
“This movie has so many cliches in it,” a boy said when Colonial Marines disembarked the drop ship and made their way through rainy darkness to enter the alien-infested colony. My son told him, “This movie was made in 1986. It invented all the cliches.” Another of his friends was impressed by the “personal data transmitters”…
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Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83. — NYTimes.com. Similar:little drops — Why…
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What’s significant in this story is not that a computer can perform tasks more efficiently than a human, but that the computer in question is not deploying a pre-programmed strategy; it is instead teaching itself how to win. When IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and the artificially intelligent Watson…
I’m teaching “The River” today in an “Introduction to Literary Study” course. Demonstrating that we know what to do if we ever encounter such a little boy in real life won’t help us to understand O’Connor’s literary accomplishment. From a Catholic perspective, the mysteries of God are beyond anyone’s understanding. Anyone who prays for God…