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:Higgs and Englert Are Awarded Nobel Prize in PhysicsBeautiful, beautiful science writing…
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:An open letter to Trump from the US press corpsThis is the message I’ve been…
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…
Friday night, my daughter will be playing the lead in the Stage Right! musical version of “The Princess and the Pea” — her first starring role. After rehearsal today, she jumped at the chance to get messy by painting with Mark, our set designer. Similar:The Icarus Factor (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 14)Rewatching Star Trek:…
Grammar signifies more than just a person’s ability to remember high school English. I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts. In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how…
Yes, I got a chuckle over this, but if we present this as evidence of a link between grammar and class / morality / character, that requires a bit of circular thinking. First of all, the substitution of “u” for “you” has nothing to do with grammar, it’s just a shortcut often made by people…
Dickens is so brilliant a stylist, his vision of the world so idiosyncratic and yet so telling, that one might say that his subject is his unique rendering of his subject, in an echo of Mark Rothko’s statement, “The subject of the painting is the painting”—except of course, Dickens’s great subject was nothing so subjective…
Fantastic series of photos, showing sci-fi spaceships digitally inserted into photos that appear to have been taken at real airshows. To be more believable, we probably need to see more poorly-framed, snapshot-style “here’s my kid standing in front of a Moonbase Alpha Eagle,” but this was still a lot of fun. Sci-Fi Airshow: Guided Tour.…
Fascinating… asking test subjects to think more globally (in terms of the relationships between the parts that make the whole) reduced the bias that makes people think of women as body parts. People were also better at discerning women’s individual body parts than they were at men’s individual body parts, further confirming the local processing,…
Focusing on the materiality of writing, this page offers a brief but fascinating overview of how design and culture affect the act of writing (and vice-versa). Just as we find laptops essential for writing, researching, and storing valuable information, the Victorians found their writing desks indispensable for storing writing materials; valuables, including money and jewelry;…
As tablets, smartphones, and microportables of various sorts become more common, this is not a surprise. It’s really only a question of when. Newsweek will eventually transition to an online publication, owner IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) said today, marking the beginning of the end for the magazine’s 79-year run as a print weekly. —Bloomberg. Similar:We were a…
Sal Khan has done something remarkable in creating such a vast and varied library, and he deserves to be recognized. His commitment to making the site free is a rare and selfless act, and he deserves to be praised. Sal Khan is a good guy with a good mission. What he’s not, though, is a…
The other day, my wife suggested a Carnegie Science Center-related post. Only once before — in 2003 — has she volunteered a topic like that, so I took her up on the offer. I’ve noticed that, on every trip to the CSC, my wife slips away to browse the museum store while I’m watching the…
I love the WordPress Social plugin, which grabs Twitter and Facebook responses to a WordPress post, and compiles them as comments along with the original post. But I get plenty of social media attention on the stand-alone pages on my site — that is, instructional handouts that I use year after year, so it’s posted…
SomethingSoSam. Similar:Why NORAD Tracks SantaThe call had come in on one of the top s…AmusingRules for Civility: 14-Year-Old George Washington's 110 Commandments for Cultivating Chara… Every Action done in Company, ought…CultureAn Unexpecting MinorityTruthfully, I expected my new department…AcademiaPerchance to Dream: LARPing Hamlet at Castle ElsinoreThis is the concept of Inside Hamlet, an…CultureWhen You've Already Got…
Imagine writing a letter of reccommendation for one of the hundreds of students in your money-saving Massive Open Online Course: I’m pleased to recommend the person who identifies herself as Amy Clayton in my MOOC of 11,389 students, Education and Society. I have known Ms. Clayton since she began the course on May 16, 2012…
Why don’t states require students to take four years of English and math, and three or four years of science? Why isn’t there a class dedicated to teaching the fundamentals of writing? For that matter, why don’t we require more than two years of history or social studies and foreign language? The students want it—69…
“I think this is a clear example of the fact that sensitivity matters as a photojournalist,” says Gutierrez. “If you can’t feel and if you can’t approach this like a human being you’re not going to make pictures that mean anything.” That sense of care works its way up the chain of command at newspapers…