After hearing that the 16th-century astronomer Copernicus was to be reburied with honors in a Polish ceremony, I checked the Wikipedia entry. Woah! Among the great polymaths of the Renaissance, Copernicus was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, quadrilingual polyglot, classical scholar, translator, artist,[3] Catholic cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist. Among his many responsibilities,…
Using my iPad, I can’t seem to copy and paste an excerpt, so I’ll just recommend Ian Bogost’s essay. http://www.bogost.com/writing/we_think_in_public_1.shtml Similar:Did you like or share that social media post about two Camp Mystic girls found in a tree? From an article in the Houston Chron…Current_EventsThe Ship #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 2) Sisko defends…
The death of my father-in-law, a hard-working and devoted family man who dreamed of retiring near a Civil War battlefield. The leak in the roof. (The roof is still under warranty, but the roofer will have to climb into the crawlspace while it is raining in order to see what he needs to do.) Submitting…
Attending a memorial service for my wife’s aunt, Julia Young, whose backyard and swimming pool were the heart of my wife’s extended family. Visiting Bushy Run Battlefield with the family. My daughter falling in love with the Drawing Pad app, which costs about as much as a package of cheap markers. Waking up Sunday morning…
I’m still learning the quirks of the iPad, which has turned out to be mostly fascinating, and a little frustrating. Mike Arnzen sent me a link to Jakob Nielsen’s recent column on iPad usability. Yes, the iPad works intuitively, but each designer’s intuition is just a little different. With my brand new gadget, I don’t…
I just donated the cost of a cafeteria meal. I’d rather have my stomach be grumbling a little over a missed lunch than sick over the latest Facebook shenanigan. Similar:Trimsheets baked with greebly texture goodness add eye-pleasing woodgrain & tech detai…AestheticsThe Little Girl from the 1981 LEGO Ad is All Grown Up, and She’s Got…
Jason Scott continues teasing us all as we await the delivery of Get Lamp (and the inventory of goodies to be found within). Coin 0001 is about to be shipped to Don Woods. Similar:Insipidest. Play. Ever. –Pepys, on "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Sort of.After attending a performance of Midsumm…CultureThe first officer's office adjoins the officers'…
Burdened as they are with these “legacy” print costs, newspapers typically spend about 15 percent of their revenue on what, to the Internet world, are their only valuable assets: the people who report, analyze, and edit the news. Varian cited a study by the industry analyst Harold Vogel showing that the figure might reach 35…
From Thrilling Tales (where the future is retro). Ambushed in the Unknowable Vacuum Tube Preserved in the Ultimate Star The Women of Pohl’s Meteors The Satellite from the Equation Hovering Artifact The Poisonous Cat of Space The Comet of Gernsback’s Pool Captives of the Eldritch Behemoth Creature that Blasted Phobos Men of the Unlikely Doctor…
Matt McKeon has posted a striking series of images uses the changing default settings of Facebook to visualize the number of users who can see a Facebook user’s data. You can, of course, change the settings, but Matt’s charts remind us… we are the product Facebook is selling to its advertisers. http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ Similar:The Last Outpost…
Frank Rich takes TV journalism to task for fumbling its coverage of the Times Square bombing attempt. It seems the Big Media bigwigs were too busy at the White House Correspondents Dinner… so the media stars were covering their own schmoozefest, rather than real news. That MSNBC couldn’t be bothered to interrupt its two-hour coverage…
I don’t proclaim to be “holier than thou” by leaving Facebook. And I’m not a Luddite–I blog and make Flash videos and stay informed about the latest and greatest with my favorite gadgets. But I was there when Facebook fell apart in the face of its greed. I didn’t like what I saw and took…
The Crackberry-addict-in-chief warns graduates about a bunch of different, non-Crackberry gadgets, that are bad, apparently because they aren’t Crackberries. “With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than…
The task is simple: in eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. —Marshmallow Challenge Kindergartners regularly beat business school graduates, in part because the suits spent time jockeying for…
Clearly Facebook has taught us some lessons. We want easier ways to share photos, links and short updates with friends, family, co-workers and even, sometimes, the world. But that doesn’t mean the company has earned the right to own and define our identities. It’s time for the best of the tech community to find a…
I spend a lot of time asking students to keep bias out of their writing, and I remind students that the adjectival form of “bias” is “biased.” But it occurs to me that I haven’t really spent that much time explaining what bias is, or talked about the numerous different ways that people can be…
Facebook’s increasing breeches of user trust have even spawned a new term, “zuckering,” as in “That user-interface totally zuckered me into sharing 50 wedding photos,” inspired by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who once used private Facebook data to access email and other accounts of classmates while at Harvard. —NBC Bay Area Similar:Twittering The MachineI’ve never…
The data suggest that 80 percent of professors, with little variance by age, have at least one account with either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Slideshare, or Google Wave. Nearly 60 percent kept accounts with more than one, and a quarter used at least four. A majority, 52 percent, said they used at…
Today in class, I caught the same student texting three times, within ten minutes. I used nonverbal responses and slowly escalated, in order to keep my reaction from interrupting the flow of the class discussion. Yes, we want to treat students like adults; yes, whatever was distracting her may really be serious; yes, she has paid…
I sometimes ask my students to do a “media fast,” in which everyone tries to give up whatever is getting in the way. The last time I assigned the “media fast,” I had noticed that I would often ask my older son read a book to my younger daughter, as a way of keeping them…