Designed exclusively for Amazon Prime subscribers who own a Kindle (sorry, iPad users – the Kindle App alone will not suffice), the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allows consumers to borrow one book per month without any due dates. Amazon can only offer this option because the books are digital; the company isn’t loaning consumers much…
Testing out the new WordPress iOS app on my iPod Touch. Improved authoring tools, very much appreciated. Similar:English Teacher Re-Titles Classic Poems As Clickbait In Last-Ditch Effort To Trick Student…Funny and clever. Via Excuse the Bananas…AcademiaTom Bissell writes a letter to Niko Bellic about Grand Theft Auto VI haven’t played GTAV, and probably neve…CultureHe couldn’t…
One of the most popular pages on my site — a single page that earns about 20% of my hits — started out as a class assignment for a technical writing student whose project for a real-world client ran into a snag. In Fall 2002, I showed my student Kathy Kennedy a model of a…
Similar:Journalist Nellie Bly Began her Around the World in 72 Days Tour Nov 14, 1989 From Wikipedia: In 1888 Bly suggest…CultureI just dusted off a #textadventure project I started in Inform6 around 1999.I just dusted off a #textadventure proje…CybercultureSuch A Good Feeling: The Affectionate Documentary 'Won't You Be My Neighbor?'My son and I saw “Won’t…
I believe I feel like a pribbling idle-headed mumble-news. (Thanks for the link, Jessica!) Tastefully Offensive | Premium Funny: Shakespeare Insult Kit – StumbleUpon. Similar:My Memories of "Joseph…" [an original cast member reflects on Rice/Webber/Waring's amazi…My high school Drama coach and freshman …Drama"Cool" Rosetta Mission Scientist Matt Taylor Objectifies Women via T-Shirt, LanguageHow very sad that…
My 13yo son plays through chapter 2 of my 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition entry, Fine Tuned. Similar:Transfigurations (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 25) Injured Humanoid Charm…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….MediaInfographics: the PowerPoint of the 2010sI used to say that PowerPoint slideshows…CybercultureUnion siege cannon, printing press, and "From Slavery to Freedom" were the highl…PersonalSon…
The local paper’s headline spins the news a bit more negatively than it probably deserves. I rather enjoy the opportunity to look at some familiar words in a fresh light. Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer: (Current Text) Priest: Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us. (New text)…
[poll id=”2″] Similar:I'm not a big fan of Disney's corporate greed.I’m not a huge fan of Disney, largely be…AcademiaSuperman Comic about Sympathy and HopeJust in case someone out there could use…AestheticsShrek Image Mashup (Musical Theatre Promo)Hey, Tony. See this photo of Shrek? H…AestheticsA.I. 'Completes' Keith Haring's Intentionally Unfinished Painting After learning of his AIDS diagnosis…AestheticsUpdated…
While teaching Richard II in a Shakespeare class, I had to get up to speed on the rules and customs of succession, as Shakespeare knew them, so that my students and I could understand and explore the political issues that Elizabethan audiences would find in the play. News from England today bears word of some…
Students collaborate on a breaking news journalism assignment. I wrote a mock police report, an official statement from a university official, and some personal info from various simulated sources, and gave students 45 minutes to churn out a news story. Here, students collaborate on a Google doc while consulting their textbook on a iPad. My…
In the mid-1950s mathematician John McCarthy issued a call for research on “Automata Studies,” but the phrase was so bland that few people understood what he meant. So he came up with a more provocative description of the idea he was promoting. He called it artificial intelligence. via John McCarthy, the father of artificial intelligence,…
A fantastic series of photos exploring the world as it was. The photo of Louie Armstrong playing his trumpet in front of the Egyptian pyramids is pretty cool, but I’m going to call out this one. NASA’s Project LOLA or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related…
The problem is that Google is killing off the current crop of social functions from Reader – and in doing so, they’re fundamentally altering the way most of us use Reader, and in the process they’re sending a huge archive of curated posts and shares and comments down into the void. And this is a…
Similar:The Girl's Obsession with Scottish History ContinuesWife: “What did you do with your bedshee…AestheticsInmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviewsAn amazing story of hope and dignity. T…BooksPen Pals (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 15) Data Hears a WhoRewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…EmpathyWhat would I get if I added powdered…
Of Archimedes, he who allegedly popularized the word “Eureka!”: “His cleverness is beautiful. Understanding Archimedes is like understanding the most elegant joke in the world.” The researchers paid their respects to the 10th-century scribe who copied down works by Archimedes of lasting importance. The palimpsest contains the only version of “On Floating Islands” in Greek…
The value of this essay is not specifically in the nostalgia for ye goode ole days of bloggynge, but rather the combination of work-ethic angst and the recognition of the value of investing effort in long-term projects, as opposed to seeking immediate rewards for clear-cut, predetermined actions. The philosophical reflections of the shovel-wielding ditch-digger are…
The greatest abstract for a journal article ever – 22 Words. Similar:Teaching “The Odyssey” at San QuentinThe opening of “The Odyssey” describes O…BooksRespect the Text: Teaching Textual Primacy to Non-English MajorsIn the past, I have used the first day o…AcademiaIn August, 2002, I was blogging about ebook readers and email in teaching; how urban legen…In…
[J]ournals ceased being a means of communication a long time ago – more than 20 years ago for sure. New research would be unveiled in seminars, circulated as NBER Working Papers, long before anything showed up in a journal. Whole literatures could flourish, mature, and grow decadent before the first article got properly published…. The…
“It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in…
Caves and sandboxes are some kinds of game spaces I’ve explored in conversations (and an unpublished manuscript) with David Thomas, so I was very interested in these musings from Not Your Mama’s Gamer. In a landscape polluted by smog and litter, box stores, fast food chains, more subdivisions and ever more streets–it becomes harder and…