Soap: How Much Cleaner Does It Actually Make Your Hands?

This is not encouraging. The scientists tested three types of soap dispenser, in both lab and real-world settings. Of the three variants, the dispensers that were refillable from a giant bottle of liquid soap were by far the filthiest, leading to a 26-fold increase in handwashers’ bacteria levels. —Health – Brian Fung – Soap: How…

Feelies: The Lost Art of Immersing the Narrative

This paper discusses the materializations of story world entities that are distributed with game packaging, here referred to as feelies, as props that support narrative elements in story-driven digital games. The narrative support is suggested to function on global and local levels, where the first one refers to the immersive effects concerning the story world,…

Science: It’s a Girl Thing

I won’t be showing this to my daughter. I might instead show it as part of a media studies unit, as an example of a self-made PR disaster. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZtMmt5rC6g Update: I didn’t think that would stay up for long in its original location. Here’s a copy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA Similar:The Unbearable Weakness of Trump’s MinionsNote that the…

My 14yo Helps Teach a Vacation Bible School Class

In character as “Pontius Pilate,” washing his hands of the fate of Jesus, Peter asked one of the kids a rhetorical question. When the kid responded with, “Duh!” my son quipped, “One does not say ‘duh’ to the prefect of Judea. I think we’re gonna need another cross here.” Similar:When backwards newbie poets write…PersonalChristmas 1970.…

My 10yo Launches a Soda Bottle Rocket

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“Excuse me just a second…” Microsoft product showcase features a frozen ‘Surface’ tablet

Microsoft executive Steve Sinofsky jogs to the side of the stage to replace a frozen Surface tablet computer, during an otherwise slick product demo in Los Angeles. Video: Microsoft’s Surface tablet ‘fails’ during Los Angeles showcase – Telegraph. Similar:The Teen Brain “Shuts Down” When It Hears Mom’s CriticismWired summarizes an egghead study for th…CultureWe Are…

Missing Freshman Comp – Lingua Franca – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Have you hugged your college’s freshman writing course today? (Not the students, not the teachers—we don’t want disciplinary hearings. The course.) Like most who have worked in English departments, I was rarely excited to be assigned freshman rhetoric (as it was called where I started). The essay-grading was back-breaking and social-life-destroying, to say nothing of…

Reports suggest UVa board wanted president to eliminate language programs

Apparently, her defense of the classics and German was among the reasons UVa recently ousted the presudent. As a grad student needing to beef up my foreign kanguage credentuals, I took the summer German course Herr McDonald comments on here. William C. McDonald, director of undergraduate studies in German at the university, stressing that he…