My latest Blender 3D experiment. Similar:First Stanford code poetry slam reveals the literary side of computer codeLeslie Wu, a doctoral student in compute…AestheticsThis winter I changed my weekday alarm tone to chirping birds. This winter I changed my weekday ala…AestheticsA day after using an apparently altered hurricane map, Trump defends his Alabama claimIt was Mr.…
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…
Political message? You decide. Blip from Sean Mullen on Vimeo. Similar:Reporters say White House sometimes demands changes to press-pool reports The decades-old White House press pool…CultureBlogging is NOT Analog Writing in Digital SpacesBlogging in education is about quality a…CybercultureData-Related Deaths, 1960-2019 (Excluding Fatalities Caused by Misreadings, Typographical … DesignThe Little Girl from the 1981 LEGO…
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:Sherlock Holmes and The Woman (WAOB Live Virtual…
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;…
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:Principal fires security guards to hire art teachers — and transforms elementary schoolThe school was plagued by violence and d…ArtHow…
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…
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,…
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 (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…
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…
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…
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…
Similar:The Random Pulp Science Fiction Title Generator from Cornelius Zappencackler's DERANGE-O-L…From Thrilling Tales (where the future i…AmusingYour Brain on ShakespeareAmusingI was part of a nerve-racking, thrilling attempt to break a world record I drove the girl and myself to the Pal…AestheticsThe Essayification of EverythingThe word Michel de Montaigne chose to de…EssaysWhat Is Life Like…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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:Making the…