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:Henry V Fans: Today is St…
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:My meme about the distracted boyfriend memeAmusingToasting…
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:First time experimenting with depth of field. The pilot's perch in a fancy #steampunk crui… AestheticsThree-dimenstional PrintersA new generation of three-dimensional pr…DesignIT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE — Berkeley Rep audio productionSinclair Lewis’s 1935 anti-fascist novel…CultureGoogle…
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…
Similar:Pythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than PythagorasTranslating the markings from base 60 – …CultureIn November 1999, I was blogging about books, camomile tea and Skylon 4, the death of Star…In November 1999, I was blogging about …CybercultureLet's talk about AI art (long, scrollworthy post from The Oatmeal)https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_artAestheticsdungeon.jpg (JPEG Image, 2535×1616…
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…
I generally discourage my students from delivering PowerPoint presentations, in part because they typically grab images from everywhere and anywhere, which is a practice I don’t want them to retain if they should start working for the student paper. I prefer instead for students to post a richly linked blog entry (with links pointing directly…
A minor disturbance is a 6, while a major disturbance is a 6X. A major accident is a 7X. An officer wanting to grab something to eat? That’s a 50. Got that? 10-4. (Understood.) Dallas police acknowledge there could be a slight learning curve for some officers and dispatchers. But they don’t anticipate issues, especially…
Many married women choose to hyphenate their married name and maiden name. But there are times when you just shouldn’t!! (Mature Content) CBS 13 I laughed so hard my six-year-old daughter rushed downstairs to ask why I was crying. Similar:Graphic Design Pun Cards Sara Heffernan designed these wonder…AestheticsThank you, male ballet dancers everywhere, for making…
The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.– Times Online I’m teaching Plath in my American Lit class tomorrow. Similar:The reluctant wisdom of a science major in my freshman writing class.”There’s nothing left to say,” said a sc…AcademiaUnmarked assignments…
I don’t know any bloggers who don’t crave comments, but there are many more places than blogs that you can leave comments these days: on news articles, photos, videos, comment walls, and more. Comment writing is something of a new art form, and as many people who get comments will tell you, some are great…
You can’t do this on dead trees. A great example of how a new media widget makes a news article interactive. From the Wall Street Journal. The Letter Law View Interactive Compare letter frequency across various English language sources, from Scrabble to newspapers to fiction. Similar:Exploring Myst's Brave New World”We wanted a true persistent world.…
THERE is nothing particularly unusual about the living room of the two-story town house that Scott Veazie shares with his wife in Washougal, Wash., except for one piece of furniture in a corner: a full-size replica of the captain’s chair from the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, as seen in the original “Star Trek” television…