But what about tweets containing “church” AND “beer”? So in honor of the 4th of July, we selected all geotagged tweets[1] sent within the continental US between June 22 and June 28 (about 10 million in total) and extracted all tweets containing the word “church” (17,686 tweets of which half originated on Sunday) or “beer”…
A few years ago, in Niagara Falls for an Irish Dance competition, we stopped at a hydraulic power museum. My son spotted what was wrong with this sign. Similar:"I might be putting a little too much effort into designing the cravat for the captai…AestheticsThe AI Mirror Test: Why Even the Smartest People Keep Falling ShortWhat is…
My daughter (in pigtails) joins the Wacongo Dance Company in an audience participation segment… then joins her cast waiting to perform her own show. Similar:That 'Useless' Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest TicketWhat kind of boss hires a thwarted actre…AcademiaWest Side Story (Aug 9-12) #somethingscomingCultureAnother section of a #steampunk control panel for a texture…
Here’s a brief video, made up of clips I took at the Carnegie Science Center in July 2009, just a few weeks after the opening of the new, permanent exhibit, Roboworld. The clips have been sitting idle on my hard drive for years, but I’ve recently gotten some practice with Apple’s iMovie, and thought I’d…
For me, the July 4 weekend marks the halfway point for the summer — if it’s not the chronological center of the summer, it is the time when I look at the number of weeks before fall classes start, and look at the list of things I had hoped to accomplish for the summer, and…
Summer vacation means if I am telling my kids steampunk bedtime stories, and the story requires an ether-powered vehicle larger than a life pod, but smaller than the ship-of-the-line where most of the plot takes place, I can visit Wikipedia to look for a class name — I like “sloop” — and then dash out…
Do we really need Justin Bieber to make this story relevant? They’re steampunks, part of an international movement that’s a mashup of do-it-yourselfers, ahistorical recreationists and science fiction aficionados who are happily reliving a past that never was. The Victorian era was “a wonderful era when people were still being surprised by the world,” says…
Kierkegaard recognized, over 150 years ago, that we live life forward but we understand it backward. He was speaking about our being immersed in time itself: The simple truth that we live our present moments in a sort of confusion continuously being clarified by the retrospective understanding that comes later. Most novelists work to soften…
Despite the lopsided drawing and grey shading around the eyes, these are not the zombies, these are the protagonists of a government-issued graphic novel designed to teach general disaster awareness. Similar:How Artists on Twitter Tricked Spammy T-Shirt Stores Into Admitting Their Automated Art Th…Yesterday, an artist on Twitter named Na…BusinessSAT essay section: Problems with grading, instruction,…
Imagination is a powerful social tool. The novel provides us with a sustained window into another world, while still exercising the creative faculties that make us co-creators of the worlds we read about. Having said all that, I am aware that there may be some confirmation bias operating, as I here introduce an article that…
Will the celebrity interpretation spark or short-circuit a student’s own interpretive creativity? Were I to use this, I would want to use the video as one of several possible sources of authority, including the student’s own, original, interpretation. ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ The Sonnets by William Shakespeare allows you…
It’s just this feeling I have when I view the last several dozen images saved to my photostream. Similar:What, exactly, am I looking at here? I’m so confused.What, exactly, am I looking at here? I’m…PersonalIn November 2000, I was blogging about the US Presidential election, mirrors, Arts & Lette…In November 2000, I was blogging about…
Google, which declined to comment on the gender breakdown of its social network, has a long tradition of using its own products internally before releasing them to the public. Products like Gmail and Google Buzz had lengthy incubation periods inside the company before they were released to the public. But that internal testing process can…
Despite iPod-strong sales, air conditioning remained a luxury for many years. Newspapers in the ’20s and ’30s were still filled with headlines about thousands of deaths and “prostrations” linked to summer heat. It would be decades before most newly built single-family homes in the United States had A.C. — hard to believe today, when Census…
It’s a stretch to say Atari has turned 40, since there isn’t much left but the name, but this is still an interesting read. Companies began collapsing and Atari was soon sold to a man named Jack Tramiel. Over the next decade, Atari made computers, a game console called Jaguar and a handheld game machine…
Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don’t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what some…
Orla Reynolds Design. Similar:Raw Deal on Printer Ink”The ink we print with can cost more tha…BusinessMy understanding of biased polls is… (choose one) AmusingThe Boat (Graphic Novel)My mother had a cousin who served in Vie…AestheticsGoogle's Super Bowl Ad: A Romance in SearchI didn’t watch the game, but I did catch…AestheticsIf I don't design the control panels…
I had already spent a couple hours today tweaking the smartphone version of my website, so this study was a welcome affirmation. Young adults – Nearly half of cell internet users ages 18-29 (45%) do most of their online browsing on their phone. Non-whites – Half (51%) of black cell internet users do most of…
Actually a rather dorky story, but I love the final quotes about the dog: “He’s not usually very smart. “He’s really dopey and just likes to chew socks.” —Choking dog saves its own life by dialling 999 Similar:A fleet of drones performs a light show in Ireland for St. Patrick's Day. I can’t help thinking…
How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret? The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell,…