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…
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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…
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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:In…
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…
Great example of investigative journalism, piecing together a coherent narrative from conflicting bits and pieces culled from various sources. A reminder that journalists — even when they are fighting deadlines, and even when they are writing more-fluffy-than-the-crime-beat pieces — must verify claims before going public. Too many sports journalists reported unconfirmed bits and pieces of…
An amazing, inspiring set of accomplishments. This is the 25th year of her presidency. “President Boyle has prepared us well for this moment in our history. During the last decade, the University raised over $105 million in gifts and pledges for the renovation and construction of facilities, the expansion of academic programs and the Seton…
Frequent smartphone use imposes significant psychological costs on the user, and negatively impacts our personal and professional lives. —Daniel Gulati – Harvard Business Review. Similar:Checking sources back in 2006 involved using this *steampunk* contraption.Research Before Google Books AcademiaPict Free Summer Webinar: Shakespeare’s HeroesCultureForgotten closet box: powder blue summer suit with a crisp 1990 $10 bill…
She’ll perform next week as the bumblebee “Hi… are you a flower?” in Pinkalicious (sharing the role with two of her fellow Annies) but today Stage Right posted the cast list for the homeschool preteen production of Peter Pan. She’s a natural for the part. The cast list for the teen “Wizard of Oz” should…
Let’s get this straight first… Flu is the respiratory sickness caused by the influenza virus that threatens the functions of your nose, throat and lungs. Flu is a virus that spreads by injecting its genetic information into the nuclei of your cells. In other words, it hijacks the good cells and controls their function to…
Hold on… An on-again, off-again move by the Obama administration to scrap the federal gas tax in favor of a pay-per-mile fee would boost the tab to Americans as high as 250 percent, raising their current tax of 18.4 cents a gallon to as high as 46 cents, according to a new government study. —New…
I just found my first reading assignment for the “Intro to Literary Study” class I’ll be teaching in a week. Almost every college student who considers majoring in English – or French, or philosophy, or art history – inevitably hears the question: “What in the world are you going to do with that?” The question…
The Twitter version: There’s a slight decrease in violent crime when violent movies are playing. People who like violence tend to go watch the movie instead of going out and doing violent things. Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in…
While blogs still exist as convenient ways for authors to compile and archive their writing over time, commenting has long been driven (by spammers) into other social media, like Twitter and Facebook. What follows is an interesting snapshot of the Cyberculture change, as it was happening. What really changed between 2005 and 2009 was that…
Bosco Verticale was conceived in response to the alarming levels of air pollution in Milan. The structure itself is no more radical than your average high-rise tower block, but when fortified with over 700 balcony-perched trees, not only will the buildings look like two enormous topiaries in the middle of the city, but they will…
In one version of Hawking’s eulogistic story, we praise the smartest person in the world, the brilliant physicist, one of the greatest cosmologists of our time. He fits perfectly well with our conception of how science and its heroes work: To be a genius all one needs is a powerful – a “beautiful” – mind.…