Avoid static, wordy nominalization. Prefer compelling verbs.
New graphic for a handout I first posted in 2000. “Nominalization.”
Security is Sleeping in the Back Seat of the Car
For decades, my mother collected paperbacks that contained a year’s worth of Peanuts newspaper strips. I seem to remember each new year’s book appearing on a rack near the greeting cards. One summer when I was a tween around 1980, I found a big stack of these Peanuts paperbacks in the storage room under the…
ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving
Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab…
We are all of us works in progress. Sometimes progress looks messy.
ChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure Why
Reddit usernames like ‘SolidGoldMagikarp’ are somehow causing the chatbot to give bizarre responses. […] “I’ve just found out that several of the anomalous GPT tokens (“TheNitromeFan”, ” SolidGoldMagikarp”, ” davidjl”, ” Smartstocks”, ” RandomRedditorWithNo”, ) are handles of people who are (competitively? collaboratively?) counting to infinity on a Reddit forum. I kid you not,” Watkins…
AP Style: try to determine, and then respect, a source's preferences when it comes to describing disabilities.
Pa. agency explains why it enacted new ‘no force-on-force rule’ for Bushy Run, other sites
Attending the re-enactment of the Battle of Busy Run was a favorite and familiar part of our homeschool curriculum. The end to battle reenactments at Bushy Run Battlefield has left many members of the community saddened and frustrated. But in Harrisburg, officials with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission consider the new “no force-on-force” policy…
An afternoon with Ben Franklin.
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months
“I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies. Rutger Bregmen writes: “began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island?…
Misaligned interior and exterior portholes. Bulkheads from the deck below visible above the floorboards. I can fix all these issues, but I have to stroll through my model looking for them first. Leveling up my texturing skills. #blender3d #design #aesthetics #blender3dart
The Toulmin model for analyzing arguments came up at a faculty pedagogy workshop today. I spent some downtime updating a web page I posted in 1999.
Time lapse movie shows exoplanets orbiting star HR8799, 133 light years away. (Published in a Northwestern University press release yesterday.)
It’s been a Dwarf Fortress afternoon.
Opinion | Alec Baldwin Didn’t Have to Talk to the Police. Neither Do You.
“[Police] will lie to you about what crime they are actually investigating,” Duane writes in his book, “whether they regard you as a suspect, whether they plan to prosecute you, what evidence they have against you, whether your answers may help you, whether your statements are off the record, and whether the other witnesses have…
I wish I could credit the designer. This is brilliant.
Just submitted final grades for the compressed course that began the day after fall grades were due.
Some problems bringing #Blender3D models into the #Unity3D game engine. The pink represents a missing texture. The underside of the ceiling is reflecting the sky. The fake pools of light on the wallpaper looked great in Blender but awful in Unity. I'm learning. #blender3dart #design #aesthetics
Mindset matters. Sometimes it’s an accomplishment just to make it through the day. But we can aspire to be better than the worst parts of our environment & our attitude.
Academics work to detect ChatGPT and other AI writing
Today I met a class of English majors who love writing, and who expressed concern that AI writers will put them out of a job. Human- and machine-generated prose may one day be indistinguishable. But that does not quell academics’ search for an answer to the question “What makes prose human?” […] “Think about what…
Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks
I knew it! Busted!! “One night someone made a joke about just taking all these ideas, lumping them together, and saying the Greeks had done it all 2,000 years ago,” Haddlebury said. “One thing led to another, and before you know it, we’re coming up with everything from the golden ratio to the Iliad.” “That was…