I’m glad to know that this recent controversy has been resolved in a way that lets Bushy Run respectfully continue its scheduled historic August re-enactment, and I hope that appropriate safety and cultural sensitivity checks will preserve the educational value of the event, while not romanticizing the violence. HARRISBURG — This year’s Battle of Bushy…
When I was a kid watching the reruns after school in the mid 70s, Scotty was always my favorite. I even worked a reference to him into my dissertation. Similar:MoonBot is back. This time he fights a new adversary. #Blender3D physics practice.I submitted midterm grades at about 11 l…AestheticsReplica of George Washington’s field camp. @fortligonierReplica…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The teaser gives Odo and Quark a comic scene that shows Sisko in Space Dad mode. A casually dressed O’Brien says he wants to speak to Sisko, then pulls a weapon and orders him to the transporter pad. Sisko realizes he’s been taken to the Mirror Universe, and learns his counterpart was killed…
Similar:Stephen Coles’ The Anatomy of Type, reviewed.Talk nerdy to me. You’re my type. What …AestheticsThe Search, Part 1 (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 1) Sisko takes the Defiant o… Rewatching ST:DS9 Although the se…PopCultRelics (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 4) When a huge hollow sphere traps a Sco…Rewatching ST:TNG The Enterprise-D tr…AmusingWhich of…
In July, 2002, I was blogging about Intelligence Officers Read Between the Enemy Lines A great headline for an LA Times story about interrogation and document analysis during the military campaign in Afghanistan. Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your Newsroom Journalism was still a print-first medium at the time, and local TV reporters were…
That story about the pope requiring Catholics to eat fish as part of a deal with fishing industry? For some reason people keep sharing this story with the idea that the economic angle is scandalous, or it supports the assertion that the Catholic church is corrupt, or that liturgical practices not literally described in…
Similar:Cameras and Masks: Sustaining Emotional Connections with Your Students in an Age of COVID1…There are some sound pedagogical reasons…AcademiaGambit Part 2 (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 5) Artifact Raiders Raid More Art… Rewatching ST:TNG Following the e…MediaJohn Speed’s 1611 map of #medievalyork features a “scale of paces.” My #unity3d placeholde…John Speed’s 1611 map…
American law protects the free speech and press rights of all citizens, including journalists; and the courts are open for all citizens, including the subjects of new stories. Democracy has flourishes where the press is free. Despotism rises where it is not. DeSantis is framing this as a defense of the average citizen, but we…
Similar:Syllabusing Like a BossAcademiaIndustriousness. Self-improvement. Thrift. And orange slime. The girl amusing herself on our 70m …AestheticsDr. David von Schlichten honors the spectrum of motivations (not always financial) feature…Dr. David von Schlichten honors the spec…AcademiaThree-dimenstional PrintersA new generation of three-dimensional pr…Design15 Times "Filler Text" Became a Journalist's Worst EnemyIt doesn’t happen often but when filler…
Microsoft limits long conversations to address “concerns being raised.” […] These deeply human reactions have proven that people can form powerful emotional attachments to a large language model doing next-token prediction. That might have dangerous implications in the future. Over the course of the week, we’ve received several tips from readers about people who believe…
What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining,…
Similar:More modeling in #blender3d. Very happy with reflections and lighting. (The teacup is a po…DesignEnjoying more live theater.CultureThinking about physical therapy and cheerful, chatty older gents…I feel like I’m living in a sitcom. A…CulturePie, anyone?PersonalAnother #neovictorian control panel for a personal #steampunk project. #design #aesthetics…AestheticsMy 13yo and 18yo enthralled by WarGames.Wife likes movies. Son likes…
Over the past few years I have created lots of assets, including control panels, furniture, and textures, for an ongoing neovictorian/steampunk personal project that began as bedtime stories that I told my kids from about 2008-2013. Around 2012, the story I was telling required a mid-range support craft larger than a shuttle, so I roughed…
At first glance, the Twitter user “Canaelan” looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl. Canaelan…
In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript. —New York Times “The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like…
According to screenshots posted by engineering student Marvin von Hagen, the tech giant’s new chatbot feature responded with striking hostility when asked about its honest opinion of von Hagen. “You were also one of the users who hacked Bing Chat to obtain confidential information about my behavior and capabilities,” the chatbot said. “You also posted some…
Even the most rebellious poets follow more rules than they might like to admit. A good poet understands grammatical norms and when to break them. Some poems rhyme in a pattern, some irregularly and some not at all. Poetry’s subtler rules seem hard to program, but without some basic norms about what a poem is,…
New graphic for a handout I first posted in 2000. “Nominalization.” Similar:Joe Turner's Come and Gone (August Wilson's Century Cycle, 2 of 10)August Wilson’s Century Cycle > Spoi…BooksIn the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure Since new technical skills are a…AcademiaSeton Hill graduates its last "New Media Journalism" major this year.The English program…
For decades, my mother collected paperbacks that contained a year’s worth of Peanuts newspaper strips. I seem to remember each new year’s book appearing on a rack near the greeting cards. One summer when I was a tween around 1980, I found a big stack of these Peanuts paperbacks in the storage room under the…
Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab…