Last week my daughter and I were a little too early to see the Westmoreland Museum of American Art’s new exhibit, so we revisited some of our favorite items in the permanent collection. Similar:Shen Yun Chinese dance troupeOne of seven touring groups devoted to s…ArtDuet (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 18) Kira is convinced…
Students also need to learn that being offended is an emotional response, not a rational one. If you don’t like something I’ve said–or, as in this case, something somebody else said–don’t just get upset about it. See if you can formulate a cogent rebuttal. That, too, is a key element of critical thinking. Finally–and most…
Soon after WWII began, the USS Requin began serving as a training target for sonar crews. After several refits during the Cold War, she eventually came to rest in Pittsburgh as a museum exhibit in 1990.
Because a beautiful sunny day at the pool apparently by itself isn’t enough, we upped the ante with SCUBA gear. Similar:The Future of Academic Style: Why Citations Still Matter in the Age of GoogleLooking forward to getting my copy of th…AcademiaWhen Students Won't Do the ReadingReading this story from IHE recalled my …AcademiaHow Bill Gates…
I was at a youth car wash today, watching my son and the other the kids spray each other (and sometimes the cars). One of the customers happened to be carrying an anthology of dystopian science fiction. We got to chatting, and he told me about this parlor game — which sadly seems to be…
A long-time fan of Edith Nesmit recounts what it was like to be asked to write a sequel. I was flattered to be asked but initially declined: I felt it would be restricting to try to write in another author’s style, especially if they were writing long ago. I did say, just to sound obliging,…
That awesome image showing Earth, Venus and Jupiter from Mars? It’s cool, but according to Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait, it’s from planetarium software. I was about to reblog it myself, but did a quick check first. An unreal Mars skyline | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine. Similar:Just finished a good literature class discussion on this…
More great satire from The Onion. PASADENA, CA—Barely 72 hours after the landing of its Mars rover, NASA officials announced Thursday that their mission had ended, as Curiosity’s two-gigabyte memory card was now filled to capacity. “Well, that’s that, folks,” said chief scientist John Grotzinger, explaining that after Curiosity’s Mars Descent Imager took an especially…
My colleague Fran Leap, a thoughtful and wise explorer of intellect and the human heart as related to the divine, describes her experience as a Christian coming to know a very different holy text– one that comes from an aural rather than scriptural tradition. The Qur’an longs to convince its hearers of the fragile and…
Word. This list was published in 2008, so it’s unthinkable that student could graduate from a journalism program today without these competencies. I’d have to add “the fundamentals of coding a multimedia project” and I want to add “the ability to mine a database for a story.” With all the new changes brought about by…
Similar:How important is the look 'n' feel of your website?”The look ‘n’ feel of your website is im…BusinessJournalism isn’t dying. But it’s changing WAY faster than most people understand.Think of journalism as falling into thre…BusinessNASA Confirms That Curiosity Found An Ancient Martian Stream Last year, NASA announced that the Cur…GovernmentShould your grieving mum see…
Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. Stage Right has a 15-year history of quality education and professional local theater. But you wouldn’t know it from their old website… the talented and busy people who maintained the old site would regularly take down old content (such as the announcement of cast lists, or…
I haven’t taught a technical writing course in a while… I was thinking of offering it again sometime soon, so I was happy to see the recommendations on the rhet-comp making list, Rhonda McCafferty: There are also good excerpts in David R. Russell’s *Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History*. The second edition was published…
Even though both sides share their point-of-views, they agreed on a common ground to help beautify the James River Park System. —NBC12.com A typical TV-news style “send them into the laundry detergent commercial feeling happy” story conclusion, designed to train the viewer to think of TV news as a valuable provider of wisdom and establisher…
A couple weeks before my high school production of Arsenic and Old Lace, I got into a batch of poison ivy at a mandatory class retreat. I was playing the lead, and there were a couple of stage kisses, so rehearsals were quite awkward with my bandaged hands. A couple days ago I (finally) mowed…
NASA’s rover Curiosity touched down deep in a Martian crater early Monday after a picture-perfect descent and landing, beginning what promises to be the most ambitious planetary mission in history. via NASA mission to Mars: Rover Curiosity touches down – The Washington Post. Similar:Operation War DiaryOne hundred years ago today, Britain dec…CultureMost Christians don’t actually…
According to the data, when men (but not women) watched a defector get punished, they showed additional activation in reward related areas of the brain, such as the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens. These are essential elements of the dopamine reward pathway, that same highway of nerves that also gets titillated by sex, drugs and…
The real problem is timing — they had called me for the second week of classes. I wouldn’t mind sharing this civic responsibility so much when I’m not so busy, but the first couple weeks of term are crazy enough. Similar:What are you eating at midnight breakfast?PersonalMisaligned interior and exterior portholes. Bulkheads from the deck…
I have no problem with baby pictures, but thought this was an amusing write up (by a former student). But really, who doesn’t love a baby photo? I do. It’s the perfect way to share in the cuteness of a child, but not actually clean up after one. I’ve followed the lives of some of…
Matthew Gordon, a linguist at the University of Missouri, says that with the advent of the Internet “a new wrinkle has been added to the complaint tradition.” In the pre-digital era, he says, “most texts we read came from published works — books, newspapers, journals, et cetera. This means they represented the variety of English…