I’m really enjoying the experience. I’ve made a playlist of all the numbers I’m in, and as I drive or do laundry I’m mentally practicing the choreography. What do we do again after the sunburst? Am I supposed to cut in front of or behind Travis when we zip our two separate lines into a…
How very sad that someone with this level of visibility is making the choices Matt Taylor has been making. A female scientist who chose to appear at a public event dressed like the sexualized women on Taylor’s T-shirt would likely be criticized as unprofessional, so it’s only fair to wonder what Dr. Taylor was thinking when he chose to wear…
Vienna State Opera, funny ballet. Слава Украине! – YouTube. Similar:I create five color variations of each #blender3d building I #design, and each of those ha…I create five color variations of each #…AestheticsTweaking yesterday's #steampunk workstations. Now with darker wood (better contrast with c…AestheticsI may or may not make a zapping sound under my breath while…
Words that defined Ronald Reagan’s presidency, as remembered by the White House speechwriter. As a speechwriter you spent your working life watching Reagan, talking about Reagan, reading about Reagan, attempting to inhabit the very mind of Reagan. When you joined him in the Oval Office, you didn’t want to hear him say simply that he…
I gave my class a Poem to read. The author’s Name — I hid. I said, “How would you recognize A poet — edited? “What if each Dash I have removed — And lowercased each Quirk?” The students said, “Well, Dr. Jerz, Then you would be a jerk.” The prose version: The poem I showed…
After last night’s first rehearsal for “Fiddler on the Roof,” things that have made me start singing “Tradition!” in my head so far today: 1) Reading the name “Alyssa.” (Alyssa!) 2) Thinking about textbooks for next semester. (Edition!) 3) Thinking about hell. (Perdition!) 4) Turning on my car engine. (Ignition!) 5) Thinking about my upcoming…
This year I have seen an uptick in the percentage of users who are visiting my website with a mobile device. About a year ago, I introduced a responsive web design on my site, with the idea of making it more friendly to narrow screens. I’m glad that design was already in place before I…
Yes, the article is interesting, but I’m blogging it for the Jane Austen reference. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a journalist in possession of a negative statistic must find a way to blame Millennials for it. In 2012, Jordan Weissmann and I observed that young people were turning away from homes and cars,…
The theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not “a magician with a magic wand”, Pope Francis has declared. Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged…
The FBI fabricated a story to look like a news piece with an Associated Press byline about bomb threats against Lacey’s Timberline High School in 2007, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and revealed by the ACLU on Monday. The FBI also created a fake email link “in the style of…
A comic about Seagulls. If you feel like this…. #FriesGate Similar:West Side Story — 50 Years AgoWhen West Side Story opened on Broadway …CultureI Made My Friends Test the 19th Century’s Hottest Dating Tactic: Reading AloudThere are perfectly good reasons to read…BooksAnd to think… I had just decided to retire this meme because the last…
Although the IF community first formed around Inform, a tool for creating parser-based games of the popular sort released by Infocom (Zork, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, and A Mind Forever Voyaging), tools today are numerous, and many of them bypass the compelling but fricative parser language entirely. For example, in recent years,…
I used to wear a suit and tie when I taught technical writing at my previous job. In part I was sending a message that technical writing is a profession, and in part I was playing dress-up to enjoy the first full-time job I’d ever held (at age 29, after 11 or so years doing…
Victorians had to stay still for 3 seconds for formal portraits, which makes them seem stiffer than they really were.
I did enjoy the opportunity to play with Google Glass briefly, and can imagine certain instances (for instance, while crawling through the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky) when having a hands-free recording device would have been really handy. The social questions raised by Google Glass won’t go away; in the near future, when this sort…
“I don’t see why we are fixated on the single category of income as a measure of success,” James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “If humanities majors tend to become teachers, social workers, clergy, does that mean they are less successful than money managers or engineers?…
NCTE, the National Writing Project, and The New York Times Learning Network invite you to celebrate writing in all its forms: through photos, film, and graphics; with pens, pencils, and computers; in graphs, etchings, and murals; on sidewalks, screens, and paper. This year we encourage you to focus your writing on your community in any way you…
I should probably not grant a student superadmingoddessomgwhathaveidone access to a network at 11:59 on Friday night, but I just did. #trust Similar:The Post-Coding Generation?I knew the command line well, and very o…CybercultureOpinion | Fake News Comes to AcademiaThe three academics call themselves “lef…AcademiaPac-Man”The kids who grew up steering Pac-Man a…DesignWhat a stunningly responsible young man…
I tried hard to frown disapprovingly when my beautiful daughter demonstrated that she can burp the alphabet, but she did *such* a good job… Similar:What my classroom looks like during today's video journalism workshopWithin 3 minutes of being placed into gr…HomeTake that, grass! Eat rotary analog steel.HomeThe Rule of Capek's Robots: A public lecture,…
BABY: read dog book again ME: okay fine show me where the yellow doggie is on this page BABY: [points] ME: good now show me where the brown doggie is on this page BABY: [points] ME: now show me where the author is BABY: [stares blankly] ME: that’s right the author is dead via Mallory…