This looks very, very interesting. I may experiment with this in one or more of my classes this term. When we launched the new Google Docs last April, one of the big changes was moving comments to the sidebar and letting people reply to comments. Today, we’re updating comments in Google Docs to facilitate rapid and…
Crates and barrels are 3-D versions of the dots that PAC-Man eats. They’re features of the gaming genre, not only because they are easy to generate, but because we already know what they do. As gamers, many of us roll our eyes at the clichés that have sprung up within the industry. Every red barrel…
A student writes, I have the Kindle version of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and I’ve had some difficulty trying to figure out how to cite it… I’ve looked all over the internet but I can’t seem to find one solid way of citing it. I was wondering if you had any suggestions because I’m…
Someone needs a basic geometry lesson. Brown marmorated stink bugs lay especially beautiful egg clusters — sea green with exactly 27 to 28 eggs in each mass. The assemblage of eggs looks a little like a one-dimensional view of a stack of cannon balls. Stink bugs meet their nemesis in Asian wasp – USATODAY.com. A…
A few months after I switched from a PC to a Mac, I switched my photo archive from Picasa to iPhoto. But for a while there, I was trying to put my photos in both locations. Then when I started running out of space, I combined my photo albums, but I botched it. My iPhoto…
Sharing content is cool. Sharing tools is even better. Sharing tools to make new tools would be even better still. As a professional Final Cut Pro videomaker myself, I was personally frustrated that Apple kept making it easier and easier for anyone to replicate my technical skills with much simpler tools. Now Apple’s making these…
Yes, please, I would certainly like one of those. Thanks for asking. Steampunk Submarine Room » Geeky Gadgets. Similar:Just a #neovictorian avatar in spats and a tailcoat, checking out the back porch and bridg… AestheticsThe Dauphin (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 10)A pretty 16yo destined to bring peace to…AmusingThey Should Have Used Another TypefaceHave you…
NASA’s Messenger probe is about 10 days away from parking in an elliptical orbit around Mercury, the innermost planet of our solar system. Messenger has been en route since 2004, making a crazy Spirograph-looking series of orbits around the sun, taking the craft past Venus, and past Mercury three times, and finally heading for orbit…
Despite the differences from discipline to discipline, a good thesis will generally have the following characteristics: A good thesis sentence will make a claim. This doesn’t mean that you have to reduce an idea to an “either/or” proposition and then take a stand. Rather, you need to develop an interesting perspective that you can support…
Digital Humanities is the deliberate, critical application of emerging technology to the study of traditional subjects such as literature, art, philosophy, and language, often (but not always) with a focus on how those traditional fields are now using emerging technology. We are deliberate and critical when we foreground the study of our own digital tools…
“Krusty Gets Kancelled” is one of the greatest of all “Simpsons” episodes, but if it were a poem, it would need to have nearly as many footnotes as “The Waste Land” — and the further away from its original air date we get, the truer that’s going to be. "Krusty Gets Kancelled" is one of the greatest…
There were actually no chains in this episode, but there were spandex-clad women, explosions, and Dr. Huer’s superhuman power to deploy payloads of expertly-timed exposition. About to start livetweeting another #BuckRogers about 2 hours ago via Twitter for iPad #BuckRogers Unchained Woman about 2 hours ago via Twitter for iPad Jamie Lee Curtis us the…
What if each ebook came with a black box with wires and a red LED.. Or maybe a computer voice intoning a countdown… HarperCollins has informed libraries that henceforth, ebooks will be sold on the condition that they can only be circulated 26 times before they self-destruct. HarperCollins argues that this reflects the usage characteristics…
A long held-belief about Crowther’s Adventure was that it was designed as a “cave simulation” and it was Woods who came along added magic and treasures and turned it from interactive simulation into interactive fiction. We know, from the hard work of Dennis Jerz locating the original source (before Don Woods started modifying it) that…
Twitter started out, years ago, as a social service for a common techno-clique who all attended the South by Southwest music conference, so trending topics made sense. But since then, it’s expanded and fragmented into a mass medium made up of non-overlapping micro-communities. Everybody uses Twitter differently, but almost everybody consciously or unconsciously cultivates their…
From the day he and his wife brought their son home five years ago, the family’s every movement and word was captured and tracked with a series of fisheye lenses in every room in their house. The purpose was to understand how we learn language, in context, through the words we hear. MIT Scientist Captures…
My wife suddenly decided I should be a Good Dad (TM) and take the kids sledding. (I said okay, as long as she was coming along, too. There she is at the bottom of the hill, way in the background.) Our hilly campus was almost deserted, since we’re starting our three-day spring break. Similar:Though I…
I’m looking forward to the publication next year of the discovery of an extraterrestrial rabbit in a meteor. While they’re at it, they might as well throw in a bigfoot print on the surface and chupacabra coprolite from space. All will be about as convincing as this story. Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites? :…
A neighbor invited us over to help feed the lambs they are raising in their garage. (The mother sheep died, and her lambs needed more care than the owners could manage.) The lambs are Piccolo and Brown Sugar. Similar:Take a look at the moon tonight!I wish I had the time or energy to get o…AestheticsChoosing…
Let’s see what the peer review process does to this claim. In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to…