The always-interesting Language Log offers this detailed and thoughtful analysis of gender and sports terminology. Here’s just a snippet: I’ve never seen man used to refer to a female athlete in an expression like “guard her man” or “I had my man beat”. Nor, for that matter, have I ever seen woman used in such…
There’s nothing terribly stunning or new in this interview with Steve Meretzky, but I’m happy to read his memories about the good old days of text adventuring. SM: It’s kind of hard to imagine, looking back on these text games now, but at the time, they were really the cutting edge–not just of games, but…
No comment. Just watch it. Two minutes well-spent. Via Kairosnews. Similar:NYT: G.W. Bush is "super-overexposed" and "so far to our right" — so they omitted his pre…The quotes in my headline are accurate, …AmusingGreat energy at our Comp & Culture poster paper session. So proud of these students an…AcademiaMaking a villain's lair in #Blender3D (this…
Spill-chuck rares it’s ulgy heed. The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ General Conference, and it referred to the group’s “Quorum of Twelve Apostates” rather than “Apostles.” — Chronicle of Higher Education Similar:Writing, Coding and Education: Why They MatterBack in my grad school days, I was calle…AcademiaClassroom Vignette:…
And to think Charkes Kinbote had to make do with John Shade’s index cards… The influence of authors’ environments on their writing has always interested scholars. Marcel Proust, for example, is known to have been heavily influenced by the paintings he surrounded himself with when he penned the novel Remembrance of Things Past, between 1909…
The Huffington Post said Sunday that it will bankroll a group of investigative journalists, directing them at first to look at stories about the nation’s economy…. Work that the journalists produce will be available for any publication or Web site to use at the same time it is posted on The Huffington Post, she said.…
My wife can’t stand computers, but she’s more than an honorary geek because she knows her classic sci-fi. She pegged this scene instantly. In this re-creation from “The Cage,” green-skinned Orion slave girl Vena dances for Captain Pike. Why does Elchesen put in the hours necessary to create such images? “The time involved depends on…
Ted Stevens was right…. The Internet is a Series of Tubes (techno remix). But the Parisian telegram system in the early 1900s and the American postal system in the mid 20th century had their own tubes, as Molly Wright Steenson demonstrates (in this example of Pecha Kucha, a genre of speech delivered with exactly 20…
My son watches, as a baby becomes totally engrossed with a pair of sunglasses, puzzling over how to get them on his face. The baby keeps manipulating the glasses, turning and twisting them in attempt to get them to stay on. “Look,” says my son. “It’s like his ‘Zork‘.” Similar:Frog and Toad at the Mountain…
People. This is serious. Is nothing sacred? Matt will play the character of Mondain Minax, a cyber-space explorer and weirding weapons expert who lives more in VR than RL. Minax is a member of the crew of the alien Sontarans space vessel Zero Wing (veQDuj’oH Dujllj’e’) which acts as a foil to the Stargate Universe…
Researchers quizzed 571 people aged 17 to 25 about their lives and found those who grew up with sisters were more likely to be happy and balanced.–BBC News Well, at least “Sisters appear to encourage more open communication and cohesion in families.” The words “make people happy” only appear in the headline. From another point…
A number in the news is no longer a cold fact, it is a killer fact, with all the murderous zeal that word implies. Journalists everywhere know the meaning of the phrase, the dagger of detail that runs the opposition through: the 23% up! The £16m wasted! The 140,000 children! For an example, try 271.…
Two police officers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been suspended and are having their employment reviewed following allegations that they dumped copies of The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper, that featured an article about the arrest of another police officer, The Boston Globe reported.– Inside Higher Ed Similar:The Problems of Real-Time Feedback in Teaching…
The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of shutting down all of its public computer labs as part of an effort to cut costs. In an explanation published on the university’s Web site, information-technology officials say that students’ changing habits have rendered the public labs obsolete. A survey conducted last fall revealed that…
Remediation of a classic? A satire on visual cruft? http://www.tomas-nilsson.se/ Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo. Similar:This Woman Inspired One of the First Hit Video Games by Mapping the World’s Longest CaveThe Medium headline calls Colossal Cave …AcademiaGood example of ‘do NOT remove things from photos.’Hat tip to my former student…
This article describes how the Columbia School of Journalism is redesigning its program in order to integrate new media and business skills into the traditional journalism program. Currently, most student work in the introductory course is in print — sometimes published by a professor on a course’s Web page. It is Grueskin’s hope that, in…
Cardin’s Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies. Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements. Advertising and…
“We love you, but signing this agreement doesn’t make us legal partners.” — Aviary EULA That’s from the “summary” column, on the right side of a page that has the equivalent legalese on the other side. It’s an example of a human way to present an end user license agreement (EULA), one of those legal…
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What would it have been like to be brought up by George Orwell? Pretty grim, you might think. But you would be wrong. In June 1944, Orwell and his wife Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair (Eric Blair being Orwell’s real name). Now a retired engineer living happily in an…