When the kids were little, my wife and I managed their media consumption with the help of reviews from sites like Common Sense Media. (Or maybe a competitor. It was a long time ago… I emailed the webmaster to correct a detail they got wrong in a VeggieTales review.) I’m impressed by the level of…
Attending Religious Perspectives on the War in Gaza. Similar:This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m… CultureThe Best Word Book Ever, 1963 and 1991.As a child, I obsessed over many Richard…BooksWhen your January term starts Dec 18. #partylikeaprofAcademiaIdeal Homeschool Summer Day: Studying Latin, Justifying Nilla Wafers,…
For confessionals or tapdance routines vertical video is fine. When my students do multimedia projects I remind them that the video screen in our classroom is horizontal, so if they do use a vertical video there’s plenty of room for them to add infographics and annotations. Or they can actually edit a vertical video. If…
Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing. […] A trained and tested LLM, when presented with a new text prompt, will generate the most likely next word, append it to the prompt, generate another next word, and continue in this manner,…
Look what I found on my shelf in a closet. #history #archaeology #media Similar:After I noticed an overnight traffic spike to a classic handout, I touched it up and creat…This is the overall traffic to my websit…PersonalParty Like a Jerz My dad just made us root beer floats.PersonalHappily masked in center row C. (The daughter is…
This was before the printing press, so books were copied by hand on parchment, which made them expensive and rare. Most people didn’t read much, especially for pleasure. Instead, they listened to books at group readings for entertainment. Pero López de Ayala wrote at the end of the 14th century, “It also pleased me to…
Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced. (It’s the third of three examples she uses.) Similar:I'm amused by the quirky…
I’m sure the good-apple cops will fairly and thoroughly investigate reports about someone stealing newspapers containing a story about alleged rapes at an underage drinking party at the police chief’s house. Nearly all the copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer published a…
Ascending the path to High Hrothgar? No, just the steps from the parking lot at the appropriately named Seton Hill University. (It’s 101 steps, by the way.) Similar:On Office Hours and Student Contact at the Small Liberal Arts College I don’t expect students to be constantl…AcademiaLecturing is So Much Easier than Leading a DiscussionLecturing is…
This is offensive, deeply troubling, and, sadly, totally predictable. Julian Dibbell documented similar behavior 30 years ago in his article about sexual assault in the text-only virtual world LambaMOO. (Content warning… sexual assault in a multi-user virtual environment.) A woman has revealed she was ‘virtually gang raped’ by four male avatars in Meta‘s Horizon Worlds –…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The Ship On a mineral survey of a planet that just happens to look like Southern California, O’Brien trades playful barbs with crewman Muniz. Unlike most episodes where the leads have all the fun, this mission is fairly crawling with random crew we’ve never seen before. An unidentified ship appears randomly and crashes…
In general, I find Canvas a fairly decent system, but after a particularly frustrating hour wrestling with rubrics, I decided to spend two more hours blogging about my frustrations. I would expect a drop-down list to be populated with all the rubrics I’ve already created for my current class, and it would be a nice…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Worf and O’Brien want to search for overdue Sisko and Dax, but Kira invokes the Defiant’s standing orders to guard the station. When the captain’s damaged runabout turns up, we learn Starfleet wants him to prove that, per Odo’s intelligence, Gowron is a Changeling. Quark shows concern for Odo: “That’s one depressed ex-changeling.”…
I voiced Jack Rollins, writer of the popular holiday songs “Frosty the Snowman” and “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” in another “Whispers of the Past” documentary focused on Scottdale, Pa. Similar:What Causes the Smell of New & Old Books?Generally, it is the chemical breakdown …AestheticsWe'll Always Have Paris (TNG Rewatch: Season 1, Episode 24)Rewatching Star…
“Be straight like a board!” My father is pressing me flat against the ceiling from my nose to my toes, and I’m squirming with laughter. His hands are so strong. I remember him helping my little fingers spread Limburger cheese — we called it our “buddy cheese.” My father worked as a…
POV: You are coding the automatic doors on your fantasy neovictorian cruiser personal project and you notice the strikeplate in the doorframe does not line up with the door latch. #unity3d #blender3d #revision #qc Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.AestheticsUtility Tactical Waist Pack Pouch Military Camping Hiking Outdoor Hand Waist Bag: Sports…
Similar:Yesterday's Enterprise (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 15) Alternate histor…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….MediaSnowfall at the White House (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour, Jan 7) Tweeted by W…My social media feed was full of people …AestheticsHow’s newsgathering during COVID-19 at the state level? Depends on the governor.Journalists covering state responses…
As a grad student in the 1990s, I chose to focus my dissertation on the years 1920-1950, on the theory that works published during that time period would fall out of copyright during the prime of my academic career. I imagined that one of my ongoing scholarly projects would be to publish free, annotated editions…
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Right now I can move the player around but the NPCs either just stand there or run to a random location and stop. Similar:It's such a privilege to introduce these young people to Shakespeare's body of work.After starting my 200-level “Shakespeare…AcademiaThe Struggle to Save Ballet From ItselfA former dancer reckons with the rigors …AestheticsAnother section…