Kismet is set in ancient Baghdad, a time historians call “The Islamic Golden Age.” Johnstown is in western Pennsylvania. “Flight 93 flew right over our heads,” school Superintendent Thomas Fleming Jr. explains. United Airlines Flight 93, of course, plowed into the ground nearby on Sept. 11, 2001, after the hijackers were overpowered by the passengers…
From a recent IFDB review by Peter Pears: Who else who write such a good game, with such engaging characters, such pleasant puzzles, such lovely writing, and then proceed to first release it in a buggy and incomplete fashion? Even today it’s not complete, though vastly superior to its first release – the last sections…
And this is, apparently, the best they could come up with? FUD works when you have the advantage of power, or numbers… or, apparently, a still-hefty taxpayer-backed budget. “A refrigerator has never been hacked,” an announcer says in the first message as an actress pins a paper bill to her fridge. In the other ad,…
Since President Barack Obama announced last month that he would sign an executive order allowing states to request waivers from mandatory participation in the program, at least 27 have signaled that they will ask to opt out, and most others are reviewing their options. — States line up to ditch No Child Left Behind –…
Realizing that students today “interact with the world in radically different ways than previous generations,” Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., was one of the first schools in the country to give its students iPads after Apple introduced its iconic tablet computer last year. But it was Seton Hill’s vision for transforming education through the…
On Twitter, SHU librarian Kelly Clever linked to a ProfHacker blog post about iPad snobbishness, writing We’re so used to most folks at #setonhill having iPads… Is it a different story off-campus? http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/ipads-and-the-embarrassment-factor/36245 Having been a committed PDA user since 1998, I use my iPod Touch all the time, but I honestly can’t say I would have thought…
There, now. You see that? Facebook says it didn’t mean to keep tracking you after you logged out. The bad mistake is gone from the code, and Facebook is as safe and happy a web site as it ever was. What were you all worried about? Let me ruffle your hair and send you outside…
I’ve already blogged about the awesome modular tables. Now I’ll talk about the whiteboard wall. This morning I wanted to help my students understand why, in Oedipus Rex, the characters say things like “I wonder when Creon will get here. Look, there he is. I can see from his face that he’s got an answer…
Because this is mostly a serial list, there’s not a lot of journalistic depth to this piece, but I did enjoy reading it. It’s a rather stark comment on how fatherhood has affected my movie-going when I realize I haven’t seen a single one of these movies, other than “Baby’s Day Out.” Macdonald is an…
Hey, woman at the 9-11 exhibit, posing for your boyfriend to take a picture as if you are running from the collapsing World Trade Towers is even tackier than your go-go boots and miniskirt. Similar:Lighting makes a difference. The officers' pub from the interplanetary cruiser #steampunk … AestheticsLLM error rates I worked on LLMs, and…
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I’ve long been a fan of Tom Wayman’s poem “Did I Miss Anything,” and I may have showed it to students once or twice, but I’ve never incorporated it into a syllabus, mostly because the classroom is stressful enough without teachers unleashing their frustrations back at the students. Rather than use this poem, I include…
More likely a measurement error than a scientific breakthrough. Either that, or I’m one of the fools the mad scientists are thinking of when, in the glow of their V-shaped sparky wire climbing arc thingy, they raise their rubber-gloved fists and scream, “Fools! I shall destroy them all!” A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos…
My daughter is a Oompa Loompa and a “bad nut” squirrel in this show. Stage Right kicks off a new group of theatrical productions this weekend with the ″sweet″ part of its ″Sweet, Hot and Wild″ season, an adaptation by Richard George of the classic Roald Dahl story, ″Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.″ The story…
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An online game has helped determine the structure of an enzyme that could pave the way for anti-AIDS drugs. The game, called Foldit, allows players to create new shapes of proteins by randomly folding digital molecules on their computer screens. In the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, scientists write that they have been puzzled…
My grandfather, Joseph Jerz, worked as a tool & die cutter for Ford. After he retired, he bought a new Ford car every few years, and passed his previous car along to my father. So I ended up with a lot of experience driving Fords, and for my first few years at Seton Hill, I…
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In its sometimes-turbulent thirty-year history, the graphic-adventure genre has driven technology adoption, ridden at both the crest and trough of the graphics and audio waves, touched the lives of millions of people, and shaped the rise (and, in some cases, fall) of several big-name people and companies in the gaming industry. It’s a genre that…
The right to take photographs in the United States is being challenged more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples have included photographing industrial plants, bridges, buildings, trains, and bus stations.…