A reading from a chapter of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Similar:What have my students learned about creative nonfiction writing? During class they are col…What have my students learned about crea…AcademiaOne Teacher’s Brilliant Strategy to Stop Future School ShootingsEvery Friday since Columbine, one school…CultureClassroom Vignette: MLA StyleStudent (shouldering backpack and headin…AcademiaI studied philosophy…
In the late-eighties and early nineties, electronic writers wrote hypertext fiction and poetry, the classic example being afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce. In hypertext literature the narrative unfolds through a long series of links that produce different outcomes — but now the shrapnel of the technological explosion includes hundreds of sub-categories, each completely unique.…
Very detailed. See the full version at deviantART (I can’t link to it directly). The site also has a great chart showing how to age characters, and a cool nodally-linked display showing subtle shifts between emotional states, all starting with a neutral face. For example, the face does different things on the blank-relaxed-lazy path, as…
I was showing my 7yo daughter some classic arcade games. She asked if I could teach her to make a game of her own, and proceeded to describe the premise. You are a water sprite, catching fish and avoiding sharks. Blowing bubbles at the fish makes you lure them in; blowing a bubble at a…
I’m gearing up to teach a Video Game Culture and Theory course this January. The first time I taught it, in 2006, it didn’t occur to me that students who were looking for information on, say, Space Invaders, would just play any old flash clone, without being discerning about whether it was a faithful port,…
Good overview of the concepts Johnson explores in his book Everything Bad is Good for You. Similar:The Surprisingly Savvy Weird Al Internet Machine When he talks about his business being…Aesthetics2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Exasperating MasterpiecePosting this mostly to prove that I can …AestheticsI Was Fired for Making Fun of Trump After 25 years as the…
I completely missed this, which I stumbled across via the Reeves Library blog. Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition…
The CNN story about The Simpsons limping on after jumping the shark is pretty much what I expected, but I’m blogging it for the infographic. Not quite as epic or information-dense as Minard’s famous map of Napoleon’s march to and from Russia, but still breathtaking. Similar:I worked in a video store for 25 years. Here’s…
Some interesting synergy in my feed reader this morning. The hidden story of the 3D engine – by the people who write them Videogames are beautiful now. It’s not the figurative beauty of yore – the iconic charm of Pac-Man, the elegiac simplicity of the vector-mapped space craft in Elite. Modern games are edging toward…
Research is probably where most new writers fail, because it takes a lot of time. You have to research not only the background of your stories — but the whole literary landscape. It takes a full immersion in the culture you hope to address as a writer to join the wider literary conversation of our…
My wife’s theory about the Norway spiral lights is that, during a practice run, Rudolph had a bit too much eggnog, sending Santa’s sleigh into a death spiral. Similar:Â The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley Because what he never managed to grok …BusinessI should be writing my "Fake News" paper for this weekend's…
Santa, enraged, kills Ensign Jones and attacks the Enterprise in his sleigh. As Scotty works to keep the power flowing to the shields, Kirk and Bones infiltrate Santa’s headquarters. With the help of the comely and lonely Mrs. Claus, Kirk is led to the heart of the workshop, where he learns the truth: Santa is…
You can mute the sound during the annoying advertisement. The delivery of this segment is as good as the premise, but as you can tell from the picture, Palin gets her chance in front of the bongos, too. Similar:‘So, So Angry’: Reporters Who Survived the Capitol Riot Are Still StrugglingI weep for these patriotic, reasonable,…
I just got an e-mail from the university saying that Bob Mendler, a regular guest speaker of our National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, has died. At age 13, he was forced into Nazi slavery, and survived the death of dozens of his immediate family members. In 2008, a blogger posted a detailed account of…
In honor of my spilling spiced wine on myself at a faculty social, while excitedly responding to a question about Charles Babbage, Matt Hoy sent me a link to this awesome Ada Lovelace webcomic. Similar:Overheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool …AcademiaIt will be…
Rhetorician and ethicist Stephen E. Toulmin has died. While I haven’t been able to fit his full system into my freshman writing courses, I did create a brief handout on the Toulmin method. Arguing against the absolute truth advocated in Plato’s idealized formal logic, Toulmin said that truth can be relative. Historical and cultural contexts,…
I would have trimmed about 20 seconds, or given the two lackeys more to do. Still, “The Tetris God” is worth a chuckle. Similar:It’s been a while since something got me into a movie theater. Obviously I wasn’t in a rus… It’s been a while since something got …AmusingMake Video Horizontal Again For confessionals or…
In literature classes, students sometimes privilege author intent to an extent that hampers their ability to interpret literary works. Yes, it is possible to over-analyze anything. And just because there are many possible interpretations of a literary work, that doesn’t mean that every possible interpretation is well-supported by the text. (Occam’s Razor still applies, for…
It’s an open debate whether the plan to scan millions of books and make them searchable online will prove the benefit to humanity that Google promises – or hand it a monopoly over certain digital works, as opponents allege. But the consensus is the company fomented an avoidable backlash by forging ahead with its controversial…
Yes, it was pretentious, sterile, and overblown, but it did rejuvenate the franchise, re-introduced us to the Klingons (love their theme music), and the warp effect was awesome. Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out thirty years ago, Dec 7 1979. I was 11. I had tape-recorded nearly every episode of the series (and I…