Blender Walk Cycle demo — small girl wearing a red sailor suit

My latest Blender 3D experiment. Similar:Dress rehearsal for Mamma Mia. This weekend only.PersonalVerizon's $4.4 billion deal for AOL sends AOL stock on a tearVerizon has experimented with journalism…BusinessThe exposition officer needs instant access to a pencil case, logbook and mission-critical…AestheticsMy outward-bound editor's graduation cap.PersonalHollow Pursuits (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 21) Misfit Crewmember Faces…Rewatching…

College Newspapers – Confessions of a Community College Dean

I’m all for training students in fact-gathering, clear writing, and getting a sense of the outside world. But I’m wondering if the time-honored student newspaper is still the best way to do that. Has your campus found a more contemporary way to get students the benefits that newspapers used to offer? Maybe a way that…

Hovbergs blogg | Blip

Political message? You decide. Blip from Sean Mullen on Vimeo. Similar:Humanities and STEM Can and Should Get Along BetterIn my lit and writing classes, I regular…AcademiaInternational Studies Association proposes to bar editors from blogging “I think it’s a really strange propo…AcademiaEven in the U.S., Chinese Students May Have Tiananmen ‘Amnesia’But now that he was at…

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale on Vimeo

Imagine if all teaching happened like this… if all persuasion came from demonstrations like this. World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival. I’ve watched it three more times since blogging it, and it still makes me smile. Similar:Mailbag: breaking in again » Raph's WebsiteGood advice…

Ten Predictions About Digital Literature

Within five years: (1) Many online journals and magazines now only publishing traditional text-based fiction and poetry will, as part of their online offerings, publish digital literature on a regular basis; (2) Most major universities and many colleges (if they don’t already) will offer courses in New Media, and those courses will cover/include digital literature;…

Nailed 'Em – Library Crime

Colbert’s tag line brought tears to my eyes. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kerry!) The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Nailed ‘Em – Library Crime www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers Similar:Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my ‘Chrome’ search with a fake AI answer It was time to download…

A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web

The Associate Press has for some time claimed that people should pay for reprinting the title of an AP article and linking to the full text. I stopped quoting from AP stories when the AP claimed bloggers needed a license to quote more than 5 words from an AP story. (Keep both of these things…

Mourning the Death of Handwriting

The cause of the decline in handwriting may lie not so much in computers as in standardized testing. The Federal Government’s landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, on the dismal state of public education, ushered in a new era of standardized assessment that has intensified since the passage in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act. “In schools today,…

MLA Update 2009

I’m teaching “Writing about Literature” this fall, so I should be up on the new changes in MLA format. (Via the Reeves Library blog.) I like some of the changes in MLA 2009, including labeling the source of a publication (“Web” or “Print” or “DVD” or the like) and standardizing italics instead of underlining (which…

Mark Bernstein: Newspapers Are Big, Not Bloated

Mark Bernstein (hypertext publisher and theorist) makes some good observations about the print-based newspaper industry: I remember visiting the Chicago Sun Times/Daily News building as a kid, where my best friend’s dad was a columnist. The place was huge! But it wasn’t filled with middle managers; it was filled with compositors and pressmen and ad…

An Apology from Amazon – kindle Discussion Forum

This is a little late, but it’s still the right way to handle the criticism. From Amazon: This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is…

Happy Anniversary, Leigh

I’ve kept a running tally… I’ve been bored for a total of 4 and 1/2 hours during our 15 years of marriage. You’re the organizer and the schedule-keeper and the worrier, which frees me to camp with the kids in the backyard, marshal a pony army against the dollhouse fortress, and read to them until…

Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance

Listservs, a trademarked software for running e-mail lists whose name is often used to refer to the lists themselves, were once a “killer app” that tempted many professors to try the Internet in the first place, back when many established scholars were skeptical of computers. A Chronicle article nearly 15 years ago proclaimed the exciting…

One Small Step for the Media…

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Restore the noble purpose of libraries

David Stanley pointed me to this thoughtful essay. Modern librarians who prioritize information over knowledge perpetuate a distraction from the real purpose of a library. A library facilitates the patient gathering of knowledge – whose acquisition is superior to almost every other endeavor. Religions have adapted to technology for the most part without being destroyed…

Adobe Strikes Again, Ruining the Lunar Landing for my Son

I’ve blogged before about how much I dislike Adobe’s arrogant use of popups that take over your computer while you are trying to do something else. This morning, I set up the computer my kids use so that my son would be able to follow the simulated progress of Apollo 11 on wechoosethemoon.org. That meant…

Forty Years of Lunar Lander

Lunar Lander — the game — at 40. Among the millions who watched the Apollo 11 landing was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the Apollo 12 launch, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple…

Op-Ed Contributor – One Giant Leap to Nowhere

Tom Wolfe (author of space program biography The Right Stuff (which incidentally was the movie I took my first-ever date to see back in 1983) ) describes how the Cold War derailed the grand adventure of space exploration. Shockingly, the decay started while the Apollo program was still underway. [I]n October 1969, I began to…

Blender Tutorial: Rigging

This tutorial shows how to rig the fingers in a very clever way. I’d seen this technique described in a text tutorial somewhere, but after seeing it here, I understand it. I also appreciated seeing how to adjust b-bones so that they only rotate, without bending (which results in noodly-looking joints). I really love Blender,…

Neil Armstrong Took One Small Step, Then Made a Giant Retreat Into Private Life

The first man on the moon doesn’t feel his life is defined by being the first man on the moon? As if the world would remember much more than Armstrong’s “one piece of fireworks”? Would his name belong beside Magellan’s or Marco Polo’s if not for Armstrong’s singular achievement? —Paul Farhi, Washington Post Similar:U Michigan's…