RT @DepressedDarth: Dear J.J. Abrams, If the new Star Wars is bad, you will forever be known as Jar Jar Abrams. Sincerely, Star Wars fans Similar:Emily Dickinson Fun Page #literature #amusing #dashes Emily Dickinson Fun Page #literatu…AmusingAn Hour of Monastic Silence in Media Studies Class (plus an awesome drum solo)I announced that my 300-level Media…
I really like MailChimp’s “Social” plugin, which not only publishes a WordPress blog entry to Twitter and Facebook, but also collects responses from Twitter and Facebook users and collects them as WordPress comments. Today I installed a different plugin, Twitter Tools, which is really just a single tool — it lets you create a WordPress…
Habits for happiness: tips for looking on the bright side of life. At bedtime, in order to avoid a nightly litany of complaints, I ask my glass-is-half-empty-and-I-hate-the-pirate-glass-and-there’s-a-bug-in-it tween to list three good things, two neutral things, and one sad thing about her day. Sometimes if she needs to share more than one sad thing, I…
While researching my obligations for #juryduty Thursday, I came across this “Juror’s Creed.” The gender-specific reference to men, the instruction to reflect upon the virtues of democracy, and the instruction to respect the judge’s education all hint at a historical context for the creed. Institutions never put their creeds into writing unless they feel those…
Spent a productive work day doing nothing but optimizing my blog. Added a very nice plugin for displaying thumbnails of related posts. Similar:How The Ballpoint Pen Killed CursiveIn Death of a Salesman, Biff impulsively…BusinessTrack and field fundraiser:photo by Carolyn. FIRST ONE!!!PersonalWhy I Rarely Blog about My Home Building ProjectsWe’re kind of in the eye of…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:Special ed teacher quits: ‘I just cannot justify making students cry anymore’The disorder is in the system which requ…CultureImpact of One-size-fits-all Web DesignI don’t particularly miss the splash lan…BusinessJournalists Prefer "Said"Journalists prefer the neutral “said” to…EducationThe Importance of Writing Skills in Tech-Related FieldsGood…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:Pope Leo XIV names AI one of the reasons for his papal name…I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There…Current_EventsDon’t Text While Parenting — It Will Make You CrankyThe study summarized in Time Magazine lo…CultureFacebook's director of media tries to appease news industryFacebook’s Patrick…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:After your shift at the protocol station, join me in the officers' lounge, just up the spi… Aesthetics"The threat is no longer simply from government censorship."After using examples from Warsaw and Pra…CultureFamily Business…
While I am uncomfortable with the whole “classroom as marketplace” metaphor, since it’s pretty much gamifying without the fun, I am nonetheless interested in this strategy for encouraging students to collaborate by having them attach a value to the artifacts they present to the class for sharing.. We shop for everything from apps to ideas.…
The researchers found that each singer’s heartbeat was linked to the song’s melody – i.e. the speed and structure of the music. They also found that when the choir sang together, their heart rates tended to increase and decrease at similar times. “As soon as the singing begins, (the hearts) start following each other,” Vickhoff…
We live in an elegant universe. The cosmos is like a string symphony. Genes are selfish. There is an endless battle between thermodynamics and gravity. Do you love these statements, or hate them? The reading world gets pretty divided over whether or not it’s okay to apply metaphors and similes to descriptive science writing. It…
Literature majors and students otherwise drawn to literature courses can be an introverted bunch. Students overall can at times resist course projects that fall outside the expected parameters of a given discipline. Yet my class proved my assumptions wrong. Many of the students were nervous, to be sure, but overall they seemed to enjoy the…
Let’s start at the end point: what you’re doing right now. You are pulling information from a network onto a screen, enhancing your embodied experience with a communication web filled with people and machines. You do this by pointing and clicking, tapping a few commands, organizing your thoughts into symbols that can be read and…
Feeling productive. Hammered out eight scripts for training vids (3-5min each). It helps that I had an outline & know the content well. Similar:Tweet: For an anatomy project, my #geekling made a Vulcan…For an anatomy project, my #geekling mad…TweetsParallel Structure vs. Faulty ParallelismI just touched up a handout on Parallel …HumanitiesParallel structure in writing: Use…
So, the correct quote from “Miri” is actually “No ‘blah blah blah’” not “No more ‘blah blah blah.’” Classic Trek trivia I did not know. Similar:It's been nice knowing you, iPad3 It’s been nice knowing you, iPad3, but…TweetsOverheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool…
For me, summer vacation means spending hours modeling shelves full of antique books in Blender-3D, so that the library adjacent to the bridge in my steampunk ship-of-the-line looks more lived-in. Similar:Why I Resist Web Redesigns (And Maybe You Do, Too)Words many of us never want to hear: “It…AestheticsBlender Griffin, Part 2After another couple of hours…
Came around the corner and saw my kids huddled on the couch, reading an Iron Man comic. http://t.co/S3xPQoZh1o Similar:Parallel structure in writing: Use it!These comic panels cover the issue well….HumanitiesIn Defense Of Metaphors In Science WritingWe live in an elegant universe. The c…CultureTweet: For an anatomy project, my #geekling made a Vulcan…For an anatomy project,…
I am reading to my daughter the fourth book in “Heck: Where Bad Kids Go,” and have recently finished reading her the fourth Oz book. But not too long ago I read her The Snow Queen, and once last year she asked me to read “Goblin Market” again. A mixture of kid-friendly classics and popular…
The search for what went right might take a hard look at the job market for our graduates. One recent survey, by the Web site payscale.com, paints a somewhat depressing picture of salaries, with humanities majors typically earning from $5,000 to $15,000 less than those with undergraduate professional degrees. Fifteen years after graduation, however, the…
Because apparently I am not already nerdy enough, the universe presented me with this version of Star Wars, written in the style of a Shakespeare play. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars® | Quirk Books : Publishers & Seekers of All Things Awesome. Similar:I am not really sure why I have kept it up this long. I…