Relationships start with a period of courtship: on Facebook, messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, posts are shared on each other’s timelines. The following graph shows the average number of timeline posts exchanged between two people who are about to become a couple. We studied the group of people who changed their status from “Single”…
Me: Yes, that sound was me choking up while running The Secret Garden lines with Carolyn. Wife: (Laughs.) Me: So, you married a sensitive man. Now shut up. Wife: You should blog that. Similar:A crushing backlash to Apple’s new iPad adHave you seen Apple’s “Crush” ad? It fea…Aesthetics'A Klingon Christmas Carol' Translates Dickens' Scrooge Fable…
Shirley Temple Black, who as a dimpled, precocious and determined little girl in the 1930s sang and tap-danced her way to a height of Hollywood stardom and worldwide fame that no other child has reached, died on Monday night at her home in Woodside, Calif. She was 85. — NYTimes.com. Similar:xkcd: Headlines It: nailed. xkcd:…
Shaenon K. Garrity – New Smithson!. Similar:Starship Down #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 7) During a battle with the Jem'Ha…Rewatching ST:DS9 An enjoyable “crisi…EmpathyMore modular, swappable building components. I’ve got to work on the sides of these mid-si…More modular, swappable building compone…AestheticsI'm honestly not sure where that came from.For my summer project, teaching myself…
Beyond their music itself, their greatest strengths were clarity of image and the way they balanced. It’s a truism that no pop format is any good unless it can be expressed in one sentence, but the Beatles went beyond that, they could each be said in one word: Lennon was the brutal one, McCartney was…
Really. These things aren’t at all associated with nerds. Look at the manly color. Look at the size of those straps. Guys who wear this use metal filings as toothpaste. Chuck Norris wears these in memes! For God’s sake, would you look at the keywords! There’s no reference to how convenient these pockets would be for SD cards,…
I’ve told my journalism students that TV is not my favorite medium, but we are doing a unit on video journalism nonetheless. They have to know, and be experienced in, the conventions of television journalism if they are going to have a chance of escaping (and maybe transforming) its worst effects There is *no* reporting…
I don’t see learning to code as a substitute for learning another human language. True, computer programming is learning a “foreign language” in the sense that you are trying to map how you give instructions in your native tongue to how a digital recipient recognizes what you’re trying to say in its highly structured vocabulary…
filmmakers behind the “Hunger Games” movies will digitally recreate late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in a major yet-to-be-shot scene, sources from the flick said. Editors will use computer graphics and camera tricks — instead of rewriting the script — to film at least one heartfelt scene featuring Hoffman’s character, the gamesmaker Plutarch Heavensbee. “You can…
Labcoats, suits (but not if you are female!) or safari suits (but not if you are female!) are the academic uniform du jour. The names given to the academics are telling, with the majority being less than complimentary: Professor Dinglebat, Professor P. Brain, Professor Blabbermouth, Professor Bumblebrain, Professor Muddlehead, Professor Hogwash, Professor Bumble, Professor Dumkopf,…
Have you ever stopped to think about what you believe about yourself as a writer? Have you ever considered what you believe about the work you produce? Your beliefs run the show, usually subconsciously. And if they’re limiting or negative beliefs, they’ll stop that show dead in its tracks. You believe certain theories about why…
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When you’re writing just for yourself, you’re in control. Of everything. You control what your characters do, what they say and think and wear, what happens to them, where their story begins and ends. Every aspect of the story is completely in your hands. It’s your book. All yours. When you work with a publisher,…
The robots are quickly and surely coming for our jobs, and we’ve comforted ourselves thus far with a palliative that goes something like this: They can’t do our creative work. They won’t do our journalism or make our art or write our poetry. Except that the startup Narrative Science has $6 million to execute its…
It was May 2007. I was living with a bohemian set on Chicago’s north side, a crowd ranging from Foucault-fixated college kids to middle-aged Bukowski-bred alcoholics. We drank and talked politics on the balcony in the evenings, pausing only to sneer at hipsters strumming back-porch Beatles sing-a-longs. By night, I took part in barbed criticism…
Tevor Owens writes: Giving up my games ended up being a bit of an emotional experience. I think the emotion of that experience underscores why it matters for the Library to collect games. The box of games and systems had sat in our basement for the last five years, and my mother’s basement for a…
Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics is absolutely fantastic in its entirety, certain to engage the simultaneous states of entertainment and education with unequaled grace. Complement it with scientists’ answers to little kids’ questions about how the world works, then bend your mind by considering what it’s like to live in a universe…
Because this is a practical, hands-on, interdisciplinary class, the students all need to be on roughly the same page early on. And that is how I end up back with teaching English studies students how to code – we are starting with really basic Unix commands to understand how computers work, and build on these…
“I think it’s a really strange proposal in 2014,” said Stephen M. Saideman, a professor at Carleton University in Canada and one of many political science scholars who assailed the policy on social media. “I would have expected it in 2006.” Faculty members, several outside the field of international studies, said the proposal is simultaneously…
I was in my final semester of high school. I remember Principal Burch came over the loudspeaker to announce that the Challenger “blew up on the pad,” which I knew wasn’t true because I was watching a TV… probably in the library. Years later, I was teaching an advanced technical writing class, and we studied…