Similar:Mr. Spock, weren't you wearing blue and black a minute ago?AmusingAnother random background control panel for a #blender3d #steampunk project. I wish all us…AestheticsA masked, socially distant museum visit. So nice to get away from syllabuses and email for… Ford built about a half dozen of the…AestheticsYou are standing in a field.…
Similar:Real college classes have writing assignments and required reading.While I can imagine teaching a course th…AcademiaStar Wars Han Solo in Carbonite Silicon Ice Tray Star Wars Han Solo in Carbonit…AestheticsWe'll Always Have Paris (TNG Rewatch: Season 1, Episode 24)Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…MediaAcademics work to detect ChatGPT and other AI writingToday I met a…
According to a somewhat dry AFP article (posted on a URL that will probably expire soon), “The researchers estimated that in 2008 Australian adults aged 25 and older spent 9.8 billion hours in front of the small screen, and that this time was associated with 286,000 years of life that ended prematurely. | Every single hour…
Our iPads will one day be stacked on a pallet, like these old PCs. They’ll be retro curiosities, having done their jobs — empowering us to build even better tools. Similar:Technology won’t fix America’s neediest schools. It makes bad education worse.[N]o matter how good the design, and des…AcademiaOklahoma Was Never Really O.K. (Frank Rich, Vulture)”Oklahoma!…
The business of journalism is changing. The approaching anniversary of the 9-11 terror attacks is an occasion to reflect on how we received news in the days when newspapers updated their web pages once a day, and Google did not constantly monitor newspaper home pages looking for fresh stories. For journalists thinking about the future,…
A popular handout from my site, Short Stories: 10 Tips for Creative Writers, includes a phrase uncommon enough that Googling for it (“practiced scream therapy“) leads me to short story exercises that develop an example into more detailed studies, or pages that remix the content of my site in order to make a similar point.…
There is a lot to like about Google+, and getting to 25 million users so quickly certainly seems promising for the Google social network. But, it doesn’t bode well if the excitement is already fading. Google needs to not only create a capable social network, but it needs to make that social network compelling enough…
This rhetorical power derives from the “-ification” rather than from the “game”. -ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -ification is always easy and repeatable, and it’s usually bullshit. Just add points. Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets…
I was doing a lot of impulse buying during the $9.99 days, but since then, on occasions when I’ve seen the ebook offered at a higher price than a paperback, I have just turned to interlibrary load instead. “Terrified” by Amazon’s Kindle e-reader and discounted e-book pricing, five major publishers allegedly acted together to increase…
David Mahokey of Dunbar, a senior at Point Park University, and Greg Kerestan of Greensburg, a senior at Seton Hill University, wrote the 20-song score and script, respectively, for ″In Control,″ a musical that focuses in part on Mahokey’s real-life battle with bone cancer. Two free performances of ″In Control,″ directed by Anthony Marino, artistic…
Which is cooler? That my 13yo son was just sitting at the kitchen table singing lyrics to MC Frontalot’s “It Is Pitch Dark,” or that my 9yo daughter was chiming in with corrections? It Is Pitch Dark Similar:Added a splash of color to this section of a #neovictorian #steampunk control panel (for m…AestheticsA very happy…
The heartbreaking thing is that this fall, over 10,000 bookstore employees across America will be out of work. The way the publishing industry is going, many of those people won’t be able to find jobs that are even tangentially related to books anymore; they’ll go on to work in movie theaters and grocery stores and…
The layout of this display at the Carnegie Science Center almost makes it look like the Maria duplicate in Metropolis came before Karel Capek’s play RUR (which was written in 1920, first performed in 1921). Similar:This history of video game graphics is a walk down memory laneBlogging this so I can assign it to my…
The control panel. Similar:Snazzy officer uniforms from the #steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell my now-adult ch…AestheticsOn the spiral staircase that leads from the top deck down to the officers' pub and wa…AestheticsMeet the 12-year-old boy who makes games instead of going to schoolTurning on the anti-clickbait filter: Ho…CulturePolice, citizens and technology factor into…
Images from an extended tour of a cold war submarine. (We liked the tour we took last year so much, my son and I came back.) [portfolio_slideshow size=medium trans=scrollHorz ] Similar:The world's population is lopsided.AwesomeA crushing backlash to Apple’s new iPad adHave you seen Apple’s “Crush” ad? It fea…AestheticsTolkien v. Orwell: Who understood modern surveillance…
My daughter, as the wizard, with her talented castmates, in our local theater school’s preteen summer camp musical. Similar:A student who had often been frustrated during my class used this poem in her final reflec… PersonalYou cannot serve both…PersonalDescent, Part 1 (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 26) Data experiences disturbing…Rewatching ST:TNG Data plays poker wi…CultureBasic…
As for Starbucks, the decision to pull the plug is reportedly up to individual stores thought to be only in New York. —Many New York City Starbucks Locations About To Put An End To Squatters « CBS New York. Awkward phrasing… Who is doing the reporting if this fact is “reportedly” so? Who is doing…
In 2008, when her scientific publication, the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science, became the first in China to use CrossCheck text analysis software to spot plagiarism, Zhang was pleased to be a trailblazer. But when the first set of results came in, she was upset and horrified. “In almost two years, we find about 31 percent…
Interesting story about a performance artist who bought what was once high-tech military gear, but ended up sold as scrap on eBay. A glimpse into the hardware and software suggests some interesting critiques of the industrial-military complex. There was no password on the gear that was supposed to be outfitted on the robot, so he…
My friend and colleague, Balázs Tarnai, shared these pictures of a bluejay catching a bug on his garage roof. Similar:Context for Hayles, My Mother was a Computer (Ch 3 & 4)My undergraduates are working their way …AcademiaAwesome 1935 Soviet Movie Deploys Saxophone-Controlled Robots to Crush Tophat- and Bowler-…I wish I understood Russian, so that I…