When I finally found a way to contact Verizon through “email” (really a form to fill out), I typed out my complaint. I have separate internet and telephone accounts; for some reason, the payments I try to make to one account are being applied to the other account, so one account is overdue and the…
PROUSTZAC Enhances and enriches remembrance of things past. Can lead to increased carbohydrate consumption. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Banned Performance Enhancing Substances in Literary Competitions.. Similar:The Cover Letter That Led to Awesome InterviewsWhen I do a career planning unit, I am o…BusinessI've Stopped Creating Syllabi. Now I Create Syllabuses.At some point, using “syllabi” as the pl…AcademiaNew…
The talented and insightful scholar Matt Kirschenbaum tells a wonderful story. Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing in…
That’s me in the white shirt, with a tie around my head. The show opens tonight. Anthony Marino, artistic director for the performing arts group and professional theater company Stage Right! in Greensburg, has played the role of Judas in the classical musical, “Godspell” eight times. He is about to take stage for the ninth…
But when I do, it’s because they are this adorable. Saving this for the next time my daughter is crabby and needs some comfort. Similar:Frodo Baggins, A.B.D.When I had pneumonia a few years into my…AcademiaTrials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial Time Travel…Rewatching ST:DS9 Strait-laced time c…AmusingThe Girl's Obsession with Scottish…
The article is short, but I particularly like the links that show the wording of the questions and the survey methodology. Bear in mind that this survey does not check o see which form of news is more accurate, comprehensive, unbiased, timely, profitable, etc. The survey just asks for personal preference. More Americans turn to…
The Tribune-Review is very dependable in its coverage of the local arts. (That’s me kneeling in the white shirt, with a tie around my head.) It’s not always the adults who are the teachers. In Stage Right’s production of the Broadway musical “Godspell,” director Anthony Marino says it’s the youngest performers who spread the word…
Here’s a great article I’m asking all my journalism students and all my lit-crit students to read. Words do more than just describe the world. They literally define it. They shape and frame it. “Most people don’t understand this,” says linguist George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley. “Most people think that words just…
Is higher education ready for the switch to mobile technology? It’s kinda cool to be working at a university where the Luddites are the ones who are attached to their laptops, but I’m conscious of our need to do more. When I put a ton of work into a website for a performing arts school…
While competing in the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest Saturday, contestant Gerald Green reportedly incorporated characters, dialogue, and set design from 16th-century English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus into his elaborately choreographed dunk routine. “Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee/Faustus hath cut his arm, and with his…
Lessard pushes back in useful ways against the notion that modern computer games emerged fullly-formed from the coding experiments of Will Crowther — a notion I’ve helped to promote (though of course I’m exaggerating as I present it here). I’ll want to read through the essay again in more detail, but here is part of…
Apparently these are two famous and physically attractive celebrities who are popular enough that lots of people will wade through lots of words in order to look at pictures of them doing things that celebrities do. Which presumably does not usually include talking about the federal budget. Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the Sequester.…
The ways that the informal speech of women impacts the language is soooo underexplored. For the past five years, Sali Tagliamonte, a linguist at the University of Toronto, has been gathering digital-communications data from students. In analyzing nearly 4 million words, she’s found some interesting patterns. “This reduplication of letters, it’s not all crazy,” she told…
Fascinating. Barsalou then goes all math geek and applies to the data the Bayes’ Theorem formula for calculating conditional probabilities. After a little mathematical shake and bake, he determines there is a 61.9 percent chance that any given casualty is wearing a red shirt. That still sounds high, but it’s not really once you consider…
Here’s a brief clip of a rehearsal of “All for the Best,” from the Stage Right! Greensburg production of Godspell. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P8Kje6PvHg (I’m in the back on the left, wearing a tie as a headband.) Similar:Two More Chances to See Prime Stage's Twelfth NightThe show runs tonight at 8 and Sunday at…BooksCarolyn made it to the…
Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person…
Okay, so yeah. One of these describes a very unpleasant, completely ruined vacation. The other sounds like hell. Similar:Please use the microphone at public events (I have an auditory processing disorder and can… Still recovering from this morning’s t…AcademiaJustine Sacco Is Good at Her Job, and How I Came To Peace With HerJustine Sacco is…
Apple’s marketing strategy in the 1980s presented its products as democratic and liberating, but the freedoms the Apple users enjoy include the inability to customize or otherwise access the working interior. Apple users trade freedom for security. In short, expansion slots made standardization impossible (partly because software writers needed consistent underlying hardware to produce widely…
Journalism without the sourced quotes from eyewitnesses is weak. Opinions with shoehorned-in-because-the-job-description-requires-it quotes is weak journalism. But this is an interesting challenge to the traditional assumptions I have been passing along to my journalism students. I hate useless quotes. Most often, for journalists, such quotes are the equivalent of the time-card hourly workers have to…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=517BhV1j0uU Similar:Dress rehearsal for Mamma Mia. This weekend only.PersonalAttached (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 8) Picard and Crusher are telepathical… Rewatching ST:TNG Picard and Crusher…AmusingMy crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding skil…AestheticsBeautiful day for a walk.PersonalPlaywright #AugustWilson Takes Center Stage on U.S. Postal Service Commemorative Forever …https://twitter.com/USPS/status/13548292…CultureSam…