A number of people who’ve seen NASA’s annual lunar phase and libration videos have asked what the other side of the Moon looks like, the side that can’t be seen from the Earth. This video answers that question. The imagery was created using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data. A number of people who’ve seen NASA’s annual…
Language nerds will appreciate this news story about a Latin vandal. The scratching on one of the cars spelled out “Nemo me inpune lacessit.” The phrase means “No one attacks me with impunity.” The quotation, in fact, comes from Edgar Allan Poes classic horror story “The Cask of Amontillado.” It is the family crest of…
There is no Englilsh word “alot.” That is, there wasn’t, until this cartoonist created an imaginary beast who could help make sense of all the sentences that use the non-word “alot” (instead of “a lot”). Hyperbole and a Half: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything. Similar:Just finished a good literature class discussion on…
If there really are teachers who list assignments by “do date” rather than “due date,” I’ve never heard from one. Students who fall behind sometimes say “I didn’t know whether the readings listed for Monday are due on *Monday* or whether they are due on *Wednesday*.” How likely is it that the student really *is*…
The concept for a Doctor Who set came from the Lego Ideas website where fans can submit suggestions, which are then put to the vote.The winning design created by Dr Who fan, Andrew Clark, featured a mock-up of various doctors, including David Tennant and Tom Baker, alongside Billie Piper, K9 the robot dog, and versions…
In a study, over 1000 gamers were surveyed to see how the average player interacts with a game system that allows the player to choose a “good” or “evil” path through a game story. The finding was that the average gamer prefers to be good or heroic in such games. Gamers are most interested in…
Lee said in an announcement from her publisher, Penguin Random House, that she completed Go Set a Watchman in the mid-1950s, but set it aside after the publication of her debut and never returned to it. “It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort,”…
The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded. The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web. For most people, it ends there. But that’s barely scratching the surface.…
This is a little story about an inspirational prose poem from the 1920s, a repeatedly unsuccessful US presidential contender from the 50s, a spoken-word recording released by Star Trek’s Mr. Spock in the 1960s, a Grammy-winning new-age anthem from the 70s, and a software company that taught my son to play chess. Similar:Nipper Hears "His…
After the break, we’ll tell you how important it is for you watch our live WeatherFear (TM) StormPorterCast (TM) Mobile NewsHole Coverage Team tell you to keep watching for the next XtremeSnowFerno (TM) WeatherUnleashed NatureBlast ScareCast (TM), so that the advertising manager can sell your eyeballs (and thus earn enough to buy his kid another…
Sara Heffernan designed these wonderful visual-textual gags. Graphic Design Pun Cards on Behance. Similar:Here I am sketching spaceships like I’m 12 again. I feel like re-reading the novelization …AestheticsThe Amazon Mystery: What America's Strangest Tech Company Is Really Up ToSeriously: What is Amazon? A retail comp…BusinessLego goes steampunkBe still, my nerdy heart. Steampunk —…AestheticsToday's 10 sq…
On this day in 1986, the Challenger space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. All seven of the Challenger astronauts, who had blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, perished. One of the crew members, Christa McAuliffe, had won a nationwide NASA competition to be the first…
The idea of students as customers relies on models of customer service that are not what experts in the field actually teach (as explicated in this letter to The Chronicle by Clara Burke). We develop crude quantitative evaluative tools while businesses use more and more complex qualitative focus groups and sophisticated assessments. And we apply…
In the past few years, I have noticed more students are applying the word “novel” to any text they might be asked to study in class, whether that text is a book-length fictional narrative, a play, a poem, a political manifesto, or a collection of academic essays. I wrote up this lecture to introduce the…
“It’s quite gobsmacking to think that a story could be told for 10,000 years,” Nicholas Reid, a linguist at Australia’s University of New England specializing in Aboriginal Australian languages, said. “It’s almost unimaginable that people would transmit stories about things like islands that are currently underwater accurately across 400 generations.” —Scientific American. Similar:The Challenger disaster, Jan.…
[Jobs] was right to leave out the productivity features and go big on the simple tactile pleasure of holding the Internet in your hands. But for all its popularity and appeal, the iPad never has quite cleared the bar he set for it, which was to be “far better” at some key tasks than a…
In the last chaotic days of Nazi Germany, in a train transferring concentration camp prisoners to Dachau, a teenager hears the cries of babies. At 14, William Glied has already lost his family. Similar:'Arrival' Is Smart, Stylish Sci-Fi About Language, Not Laser BeamsThe premise sounds quite interesting. Re…CultureFacebook Spot-tests New Local News FeedI have no reason…
I know next to nothing about archery. According to this video, even the little I thought I knew was completely wrong. An archers with a quiver on his back is a movie icon which is widespread throughout the world. But putting arrows in a quiver on your back is not a good solution. It is…
Okay, I confess, I was once in the audience at an MLA session about medieval drama, when someone brought up a relevant computer simulation, and there was a disagreement over how to interpret the results. I raised my hand and said, “I created that simulation,” and weighed in on one side of the debate. It all…
I’m sure there are hipsters, even now, lamenting “I just think without the organic feel of the human arm, the selfie really loses something,” but we have not listened to them before, and we need not heed them now. —The Washington Post. Similar:Turnitin.com UI Woes: One-click, No-confirmation Deletion of QuickMark SetsIn general, I find Turnitin.com’s…