I took my kids to a water park all day, and spent it completely off the grid. This is big news. The Washington Post Co. agreed Monday to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four…
I made a lot of impulse Kindle purchases during the phase when so many books were $9.99. I’ve never bought an iBook… whenever possible, I buy via Kindle instead, as a consumerist means of protesting Apple’s meddling with the price of books. US regulators have called for Apple to be forced to cancel certain e-book…
If I ever over-react to a tweet, I hope the tweeter is as understanding as Hilary Sargent. Politico’s Ben White changed his Twitter profile photo yesterday to a new photo, which showed him kind of smirking (or something). A week or two ago I yelled at Business Insider for not including Ben White in some…
Businessman John Henry, the principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, has entered into an agreement to buy The Boston Globe for $70 million, a massive drop from its record $1.1 billion price two decades ago. Similar:Len Deighton’s Bomber, the first book ever written on a word processor.The talented and insightful scholar Matt…BooksRossum's Universal Robots (Act…
The kids and I enjoy nerdy board games. (I love both of you very much, but when we play Star Trek Monopoly, Daddy is ALWAYS the captain’s chair.) Similar:Analysis | The ‘Kellyanne Conway on the couch’ controversy is so incredibly dumbOne photo from the event shows her scrol…CultureReuben Klamer, designer of Trek's "phaser rifle" and…
To summarize the findings: because they didn’t teach to the test, the professors who instilled the deepest learning in their students came out looking the worst in terms of student evaluations and initial exam performance. To me, these results were staggering, and I don’t say that lightly. Bottom line? Student evaluations are of questionable value.…
The idea that generations of Shakespeare scholars got it all wrong appeals to the Saturday morning “kids rule!” ethos, where the kids smirk into the camera, adult authorities are easily duped, and the bad guys foreclosing on the pizza parlor can be thwarted by dumping a bucket of water on their legal documents. Similar:Visionary #StarTrek…
Filing this wonderful resource for the next time I introduce students to the subject. Before beginning our journey to learn HTML and CSS it is important to understand the differences between the two languages, their syntax, and some common terminology. As an overview, HTML is a hyper text markup language created to give content structure…
I didn’t expect a pseudo-Elizabethan rendering of Star Wars to be great literature, but the R2 soliloquies add an unexpectedly amusing new narrative layer. So far, I can say the “Chorus” character is overused, too frequently walking onstage and delivering lines of exposition that ought instead be woven into the expanded dialogue between the characters.…
I asked my #geekling whether she was ready for bed; with her mouth full of mouthwash, she imitated Capt. Pike’s two-flash no. #tos #startrek Similar:One of the benefits of teaching at a small college, with small classes…In a final reflection video for a freshm…AcademiaA picture of puffy white clouds floating in a blue skyAestheticsStudents present…
Just finished watching a two-part episode of classic Star Trek. I know all the old episodes backwards and forwards, since as a kid I made audiocassette tapes of the after-school reruns, and listened to them over and over. (The writers were never confident that the special effects would be any good, so a character always…
I keep a silly personal blog devoted to a six-legged toy that both my kids have outgrown but which still amuses me. I sometimes use that blog, and that toy, in classroom activities, and occasionally students develop an affection for what I called a “hectopus” (combining “hexagon” with “octopus,” though I concede “hexapus” would have…
Just as early filmmakers couldn’t have predicted the level of ongoing interest in their work more than 100 years later, who can say what future generations will find important to know and preserve about the early history of software? While the notion that someone might go diving into some long outmoded version of Word might…
RT @THATCampPGH: @DennisJerz Registration is open for #THATCamp #Pittsburgh! Spread the word…. Similar:Yes, I do feel rather awesome right now.Lost brand-new earbuds. Reached in pocke…PersonalIn Defense Of Metaphors In Science WritingWe live in an elegant universe. The c…CultureOverheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool…
Every second is a deadline, every instant is a potential publication. Mistakes like this happen, and a healthy organization focuses on how to fix the system to avoid the problem, rather than on whom to blame. It looks as though they’ve fixed it, but for a glorious 16 minutes this was the Chicago Tribune homepage.…
If I can get the English majors in my news writing class interested in the statistics unit, I’ll be very happy indeed. “When I first realized that I had signed up to be in what is essentially an English class with only accounting majors, I expected the conversation and discussion of the books we read…
Here are some clips from a heartfelt, belty ballad that my daughter and her good friend will be singing this weekend in “13: The Musical.” They’ll each be playing the part of Patrice (the protagonist’s love interest) on different nights. The song is “The Lamest Place in the World.” We spent a fun afternoon filming…
Lest you think this is just a complicated revenge scheme against my mom (which, let’s be clear, it is), it’s this exact phenomenon that keeps driving Facebook’s user engagement numbers down. Far more than the fears about future employment, more than the creepy coworker who “likes” all your bikini pictures, it is the fear of…
You dont actually get hired by Amazon. Almost everyone is employed by a staffing service. First though, you have to kill an hour and a half of your time filling out an application online and taking insane personality test. Im not sure why they have such a lengthy test Ive filled out a lot of…
I can’t summon up actual nostalgia for the postal service. Telegrams were always a much a better plot device: “It’s a telegram from my Aunt Sadie, you know, the one I’ve never mentioned before but whose pet allergies would no doubt disrupt Junior’s new dog-walking business. It seems she’s in town, but she doesn’t say…