Pheromone – A hormonal substance secreted by an individual.

Really helpful definition from a “Pinkalicous” children’s theater study guide. That’ll clear everything right up for the kiddos, won’t it? Similar:Living Room PhysicsI’ve blogged before about my eight-year-…EducationWatching Shakespeare With Your KidsMy retired parents and bachelor engineer…CultureMoonBot (from the family steampunk bedtime RPG 2007-2013) vs. a crate and lamps.https://youtu.be/h2P2Ve-oZ1U AestheticsIf You’re An English Major You…

Study shows college students think they’re more special than ever…even those that can’t read or write and barely study

A hype-heavy treatment of a recent study (named vaguely as the “American Freshman Survey,” in the article, but not actually cited or dated… I found a copy of a 2011 report). While students are much more likely to call themselves gifted in writing abilities, objective test scores actually show that their writing abilities are far…

At Home In Fantasy’s Nerd-Built Worlds

In other words, more than the profound lessons on the corrupting influence of power, more than the stirring battle scenes, more even than beloved characters like Frodo and Sam, readers came to Tolkien’s books for the rich, magical world that they built out of his words. Martin has taken this lesson to heart in his…

Wikipedia hoax about a war that never happened deleted after 5 years

My first-year writing students generally know they aren’t supposed to use Wikipedia as a source in a research paper, but many can’t quite articulate why. A willingness to trace a citation to its source and evaluate the source, rather than accept the source uncritically, is crucial to intellectual competence in the Information Age. An article…

‘The Fun Stuff,’ by James Wood, and More

Virginia Woolf had to reassure the public in 1922: “Oh, yes dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair,” even as journalists crowed over the death of “that lavender-scented little old lady of literature.” “Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead,” John Leonard observed in 1982. “This is always…

Weekly and seasonal patterns in visits to an MLA Style tips page

The WordPress extension Jetpack provided me with thus chart, showing a million hits to an instructional web page (on formatting a paper in MLA style) stretched out over about 16 months. The weekly traffic peaks on Mondays and bottoms out on Fridays (with a sharp spike late Sunday, stretching past midnight, thus puffing up the…

Family Questions Boy’s Suspension Over Gun Gesture

A six-year-old who was warned not to pretend to shoot his classmates with scissors later made a shooting gesture with his fingers, and has now been suspended. A parent reacting to the story told a reporter “I wouldn’t expect someone to do that to my child, and if they did, I would expect some type…

BBC Four – Shakespeare Uncovered

I’m slated to teach Shakespeare this fall… blogging this for future reference. Six Shakespearean actors and directors go in search of the greatest dramatist who ever lived by revealing the stories behind and the wonders within some of his greatest plays BBC Four – Shakespeare Uncovered. Similar:Effects of Internet use on the adolescent brain: despite…

Ranked First out of 2 Billion Google Hits for Something Really Obscure

I just noticed a mild traffic spike over the past few days, and after a little digging, learned a page on my blog is currently first out of 2 billion hits for something I blogged about in July. A different, related search returns the same page first out of 2.4 billion hits. Thanks to traffic…

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2013?

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28…

Neil Gaiman’s Journal

This is great advice for everybody. I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something. So…

How To Gain or Lose 30 Minutes of Life Every Day

If you smoke two cigarettes, you lose 30 minutes of your life. Exercise for 20 minutes, and you gain two units of microlife. Over time bad habits accelerate your aging, and good habits slow it down… — Scientific American. Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.AestheticsRules of Engagement #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 18)…

Lost Treasures of Infocom Review [Mobile App]

Someone’s put a lot of time into ensuring the games play exceptionally well on mobile. The on-screen keyboard is a necessary evil, one that’s ameliorated by a great little auto-complete feature. It’s context-sensitive, so if you want to whip something from your inventory out in a pinch, the game will probably predict it by the…

Explore – Laconic history of the world in a typographic map…

Explore – Laconic history of the world in a typographic map…. Similar:Hacking the Attention EconomyThe techniques that are unfolding are ha…CultureIn News, What’s Fake and What’s Real Can Depend on What You Want to Believe The proliferation of fake and hy…CultureHaven (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 10) When a low-stakes rom-com shows Troi's beau and…

Tenth Grade Tech Trends

My high school experience was very analog. I had been word-processing most of my school papers and doing some recreational coding/hacking since I was in middle school (around 1982), but didn’t start using email until I went to college (1986), and then only sparingly until I left the country for grad school. So it was…

Why Students Today Complain About Grades—and How We Can Fix It

I periodically get emails from former students who thank me, several years after a class is over, for challenging them in a way that prepared them for life after college. I don’t get so many grateful comments while the students are still in college. I don’t blame my students, but a certain proportion does seem…

Snow Fall: Finally an articulation for the digerati of what a big, expensive newsroom can do

Yes, the NYT multimedia “Snow Fall” was wonderful, and my new media colleagues are excited by it. But it took 11 staff members 6 months to publish. Is this really what new media journalists should emulate? How can I scale this down to the classroom? The future of journalism is about speed, volume, rough and…

What the New York Times’s ‘Snow Fall’ Means to Online Journalism’s Future

The New York Times debuted a new multimedia feature Thursday so beautiful it has a lot of people wondering — especially those inside the New York Times — if the mainstream media is about to forgo words and pictures for a whole lot more. Unlike a standard words-on-page article that doesn’t diverge too much from print in the design department,…

E-book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines | Pew Internet Libraries mobile

The population of e-book readers is growing. In the past year, the number of those who read e-books increased from 16% of all Americans ages 16 and older to 23%. At the same time, the number of those who read printed books in the previous 12 months fell from 72% of the population ages 16…

After Hours – Why The Star Trek Universe is Secretly Horrifying

After Hours – Why The Star Trek Universe is Secretly Horrifying Similar:A trend story about millennials, by The New York Times“When it comes down to it, life is reall…AmusingMicrosoft's Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It: "If I had to choose between your…According to screenshots posted by …Current_EventsI went with frisse. German uses esse “to…