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:I touched up an intro to hypertext essays from 2000.When I initially wrote this introduction…CybercultureThe insect apocalypse:…
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…. Similar:Techno-greebles. Geometrically these are identical plain cubes, with custom shaders that s…DesignMy son showed me #PacificRim.My son showed me #PacificRim. Liked the …CybercultureHow to DisagreeIf we’re all going to be disagreeing mor…EssaysThe crying Honduran girl on the cover of Time was not separated from…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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 Similar:The Forsaken (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 17) Lwaxana Troi and the station c…Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir is hosting t…CultureA trend story about millennials, by The New York Times“When it comes down to it, life is reall…Amusing'Nope,' He Says, Body Isn't HisThe story goes…
A touching bit of balanced storytelling, without editorializing, via selection of quotes and telling descriptive details. “I know dads that say they ain’t their kids. I see dads being disrespectful of the mothers. And I see ones who take other men’s kids to football games because they know their fathers aren’t around,” said Mr. McManus,…
My friend Anastasia gave me a home-made lip-balm kit for my 10yo daughter. A blizzard the day after Christmas was the perfect opportunity to stay home and try it out. Similar:The girl will be dancing as the Gold Fairy in Laurel Ballet's Sleeping Beauty tonight… PersonalPittsburgh in the Round review of The Outsiders”It’s due to a…
So, late Friday, we reported on how the Republican Study Committee (the conservative caucus of House Republicans) had put out a surprisingly awesome report about copyright reform. You can read that post to see the details. The report had been fully vetted and reviewed by the RSC before it was released. However, as soon as…
30 Web Designs Featuring Vintage Style Typography. Similar:Still shot from a flyover video that's been taking about 3 minutes to render each fra…AestheticsWhat Is Newsworthy? (10m animated lecture)https://youtu.be/xSKllj9wuSk How do j…CultureLet's face it, it's time to give up on those Portal and Half-Life sequelsReserving judgments is a matter of infin…BusinessI have for some reason reached…
Art Prints by Genis Carreras | Society6. Similar:Earth With RingsSure, Saturn’s rings are cool, but the E…AestheticsIs this why oldsters love nostalgia? I’m 50. I’m in my office casually sharp…CultureWhen you hear your daughter the understudy is going on for a sold-out show. Live theater i… CultureI Love Books: A Campus Library EvolvesI love books.…
Performers Ali Kidder-Mostrom (L) and David Coupe perform a fight scene as a translation of their dialogue is projected on a screen during a performance of “A Klingon Christmas Carol” in Chicago, December 20, 2012. —A Klingon Christmas Carol Similar:Masks serve many purposes. How sad that they’ve become politicized. I’ve seen the original meme on…
Something else has changed, too, beyond the proliferation of screens. Today, I don’t think—and I’m almost afraid to write this, because it’s like the tolling of some great bell—today I don’t think the amateur’s best effort is good enough. We as internet users have less patience and less charity for janky, half-broken experiences. (Which is…
Unexpected consequences, when a developer slims the size (in terms of data) of the YouTube video-watching page from 1.2M down to under 100kb. Having just finished writing the HTML5 video player, I decided to plug it in instead of the far heavier Flash player. Bam! 98KB and only 14 requests. I threaded the code with…
Reaction to the cover: – Newsweek’s last print issue has just a hashtag on the cover. Like using your final breath to ID the killer. @sacca – Newsweek’s last cover: one more flippant stunt. Ooh! A Hashtag! I’m proud to have worked there 1985-93. @jswatz – Glad to see @Newsweek going all digital! Love the…
My 10yo daughter Carolyn played Annie in a Stage Right! Greensburg production Sunday. I was delighted to play President FDR. Here is a clip from our longest scene together, the Annie Cabinet Scene. Similar:Liz Fosslien's insightful comic on unhealthy conflict vs. healthy conflict.PersonalA masked, socially distant museum visit. So nice to get away from syllabuses…
Similar:Star Trek: Voyager Premiered 20 Years AgoI remember wanting to like Voyager a lot…CultureGetting to the Point in Academic Writing Don’t spend three pages establishing…DesignUnderstanding the difference between credible information and propagandaIn the context of my role as a teacher i…CultureTwine: the program that’s democratised the video gaming worldTwine games look and feel profoundly…