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…
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:Showing vs. Telling (Example: "I like to win.")I just wrote these examples on a student…AestheticsWriting Computer Games…
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:West Side Story (Aug 9-12) #somethingscomingCultureSaturday morning cartoons are no moreI certainly have fond memories of Saturd…BusinessPresenting at #NEMLA session 8.1 Friday. “Hacking English: Examining a multimedia sandbox …AcademiaCommon Sense Media's AI Initiative When the kids were little, my wife…CybercultureThe barbican at Mickelgate was…
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…
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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 Balloon Hoax'' by Edgar Allan PoeWhen steampunk was speculative fiction, …AmusingI just learned I only have months to live. This is what I want…
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…
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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:Lies about history in Texas can be traced to the Lone Star State's own Big Lie:…
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:Phantasms (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 6) Data's Trippy Dreams; Riker's Brai…Rewatching ST:TNG Data is walking thr…AmusingThe Course of True Fun…