My sister would fill up a video tape with episodes of Babylon 5 as they aired, and she’d send me each tape as it filled up. When a new tape arrived, my wife and I would watch the whole thing in one sitting. While I haven’t deliberately made time to watch any TV show since…
Most teachers are those who, not surprisingly, have made it through the educational system smoothly enough to replicate it, even when they think of themselves as radical reformers of that system. Especially English teachers. English teachers are the gatekeepers to the normal brained. (I see this all the time when I am hanging out with…
Beatrice the Biologist: How the Brain Works. Similar:The Challenger disaster, Jan. 28, 1986On this day in 1986, the Challenger spac…EducationA WWII Propaganda Campaign Popularized the Myth That Carrots Help You See in the DarkYet another widely held cultural myth fa…CultureSmalltalk through masks is hard; I really was glad to see so many familiar upper halves…
People with similar vocabulary sizes may vary significantly in their talent and in the depth of their understanding. Nonetheless, there’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary. Simply put: knowing more words makes you smarter. And between 1962 and the present, a big segment of the…
NBC aired doctored versions of a 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case, which led to an apology and several people losing their jobs in April. On Monday, MSNBC aired a video that seemed to show a grief-stricken man being heckled by pro-gun lobbyists while talking about his recently murdered son. via The Hollywood Reporter Similar:My hard-working media…
[S]ize seems to predict lifespan. The formula seems to be nature’s way to preserve larger creatures who need time to grow and prosper, and it not only operates in all living things, but even in the cells of living things. It tells animals for example, that there’s a universal limit to life, that though they…
Text A: Uh-Oh, Photo Of Crying Woman On Cover Of National Newspaper Uh-oh, according to alarmed sources across the nation, a picture of a crying woman appeared on the front page of a national newspaper this morning. “Ah, shit—this can’t be good,” Arlington, TX resident James Licari said… –The Onion Test B: What It Feels…
My daughter plays the Bumblebee in “Buzz Off,” which both ended Act I and opened Act II in last weekend’s Stage Right! production of Pinkalicious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gr6jlrndSU Similar:Now that I have polished so many details, I'm working on more selective lighting. #steampu… AestheticsUnity3D Maze Game TutorialWorkspace for an in-progress Unity3D tut…AcademiaBuilding a ridiculous amount of detail…
I’ll blog pretty much anything that has to do with Inform 7. Text-based games, or interactive fiction, have continued to evolve since the days of Zork. Many works can be powerful for play in the classroom: Emily Short’s “interactive epistolary” First Draft of the Revolution, Andrew Plotkin’s physics-grounded Dual Transform, Peter Nepstad’s historically grounded 1893: A…
A significant number of young people today, when they enter the workforce, will never have been exposed to the valuable skills that come with arts education and specifically the theater experience — thinking on one’s feet; effectively communicating; practicing and rehearsing; writing; and collaborating as a team. This is a missed opportunity. According to the…
The web also creates the illusion that all information is available and accessible to anyone at any time. This common view represses the real disparities of access in our world and also undermines the need for educational experts. After all, if you can get all knowledge from Wikipedia or a Google search, why do you…
If you took everything human beings have ever written — an estimated 50 billion megabytes of text — and stored it in DNA, that DNA would still weigh less than a granola bar.”There’s no problem with holding a lot of information in DNA,” Goldman says. “The problem is paying for doing that.”Agilent waived the cost…
Baffled that the young reader for some reason circled the word “cottage” every time she came across it in the text, the used copy of The Scarlet Letter stated that it truly began to doubt Dobson’s reading-comprehension skills when she wrote a note on page 37 suggesting the entire novel might in fact be an…
Apple, Google and Microsoft have very different design aesthetics. Almost Flat Design | Matthew Moore Design. Similar:Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guiltHow could an ordeal-administering priest…CultureThey called it a "flashlight" because early handheld lights weren't designed to shine stea…A student’s short story featuring a trea…CultureBlender 3D Flyover of Fantasy Steampunk…
I’m reading the “Heck: Where Bad Kids Go” books to my 10yo at bedtime. The author envisions prepubescent hell as a kind of eternal middle school, with popular kids and bullies and pointless rules and no hope. Plenty of literary references — the eleven-year-old hero is Milton Fauster, and he has a friend in the…
It’s also abundantly, poignantly clear that during puberty, kids have absolutely no clue how to assess character or read the behavior of others. In 2005, the sociologist Koji Ueno looked at one of the largest samples of adolescents in the United States, and found that only 37 percent of their friendships were reciprocal—meaning that when…
Obviously, given this surge in student demand, we need to make survivalist education another distinctive feature of our educational mission, and we must scramble to build institutional capacity in “apocalypse preparedness.” The admissions office already has brochures: “Where would you send your child: someplace that prepares them for a 20th-century job, or a community that…
IE.png – mlkshk. Similar:NYC sent non-police teams to respond to mental health calls for a month. Data shows that m…Remember that meme that shows two cops s…CultureTell Me a Smart Story: On Podcasts, Videos, and Websites as Writing AssignmentsIt does take longer to evaluate student …AcademiaI think this #denoising filter makes my #CGI scene look…
Headlines once were stuffed full of proper nouns. But it turns out, old-fashioned headlines don’t convey things that aren’t news well. “Three-Legged Dog Desirable”? Nope. It doesn’t work, because there’s nothing there. Nothing except “aww.” And service pieces—how to do x, why not to do y—need the help for their softness too. —The Awl. Similar:Soldiers…
This sounds like something from a Dilbert comic. An employee pays a Chinese worker a fraction of his own salary to do his work for him, and spends the day goofing around at the office. Employee profile –mid-40’s software developer versed in C, C++, perl, java, Ruby, php, python, etc. Relatively long tenure with the…