My 13yo son plays through chapter 2 of my 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition entry, Fine Tuned. Similar:Without ComPUNction: Doing verbal battle at the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships. “It doesn’t have to be good. It just ha…AestheticsYou didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral—corporations didI never found “Harlem Shake” videos to b…BusinessBasic details for #medievalyork…
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:My Polish grandmother used to bake these cookies, which my wife picked up at a Ukranian fe… My grandmother shaped …AestheticsSuspicions (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 22) Crusher narrates murder-mystery …Rewatching ST:TNG A defeated-looking …PopCultAmazing show. Young lovers, a witty (but often stupid) servant, speeches, rants, exaggerat… PersonalTrack and field fundraiser:photo by Carolyn.…
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:Newspaper For Sale: The Growing Threat of News Deserts in Western PennsylvaniaAs circulation has declined, local newsp…BusinessToday's Google Doodle is Mostly HarmlessFord Prefect kept a script of Godspell i…AestheticsYep, it's time to read student papers on Flannery O'Connor.AcademiaBilbo's party sociological infographic.AestheticsDress Rehearsal for "My Son Pinocchio"My wife, daughter, and I waiting to star…AmusingAnthony Weiner, Reality…
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:Moving from Debate to EmpathyIn my freshman writing class, my job is …AcademiaSon took out trash w/o being asked; daughter wore papercraft tophat to grocery store. Life…I took my daughter to an Alice-in-Wonder…ArtBottled Authors: the predigital dream of the audiobookThere was no way to…
[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…
Similar:Understanding The Fake News Universe The fake news universe is vast and eph…CultureCreating textures for background buildings in a medieval theater simulation project. I can…Creating textures for background buildin…AestheticsIf You Ever Find a Link to ThoughtCatalog, I'm Begging You Not to Click It Here’s a thought… nothing you can …BusinessThis Is What It Looks Like…
Big, sad news in the world of big (sad) journalism. One of Rupert Murdoch’s most senior European executives has resigned following Guardian inquiries about a circulation scam at News Corporation’s flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy…
Before you start answering questions from a telephone solicitor, you must “qualify” the company as a potential prospect for a law suit. If, during the introductory pitch, the telemarketer indicates that they are working for a non-profit firm, or a survey company, hang up immediately. They are not subject to the law and are a…
As a print journalist, I’d always thought programming was a task undertaken done by awkward guys in loose-fitting T-shirts who rarely saw the sun. (I wasn’t altogether wrong about that.) With a little reluctance, I said yes. In the time since, I’ve learnt a lot about programming. I’m not a great programmer, I’m almost certainly…
I touched up an older handout on citing quotations in MLA style. The MLA-style in-text citation is a highly compressed format, designed to preserve the smooth flow of your own ideas (without letting the outside material take over your whole paper). See also: Academic Writing; Using Quotations Effectively; Thesis Statements One engineer who figures prominently in all accounts…