What does my ten-year-old son think he has learned from playing Civilization 3? Similar:Why I Rarely Blog about My Home Building ProjectsWe’re kind of in the eye of the storm, b…ModdingI have more to do than mark 99 assignments, but this is a nice stopping point.PersonalCrowther's Adventure: Tough Memes to Squash Will Crowther, an RPG-er,…
Disturbing, yet cool. Biotele.com A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence. Pink (or magenta, to use its official name)…
Update: The AP posted the correction within 18 minutes. Not bad. However… Similar:Twitter and the "Two Minutes Hate"Another of the many, many reflections on…CultureAdorable Dolphin encounter makes Texas sloth video go viralMy social media feed just featured adora…AmusingHeadlines matter. Were they migrants, people who happened to be at a migrant center, pedes…Do the headlines encourage…
Just as I spent the afternoon of 9/11/2001 making a web page, because it helped occupy my mind, I’m spending a few minutes while my daughter is otherwise occupied, observing the phrasing of the WTAE-TV news article: A Seton Hill University student is dead following a police investigation off campus in Greensburg early Sunday morning. …
Interactive Fiction Writing Month (Feb 15 – March 15) This is the blag for Interactive Fiction Month 2009, an attempt to lure beginners into learning Inform through a series of easy tasks with concrete deadlines, and to promote discourse on game design in general. Similar:Students say they prefer lectures, but "active learning" is more effectiveA…
I bugged out of work a few hours early today so I could meet up with the family for a matinee showing of Coraline. The local theater had a rather defensive home-grown sign explaining that the extra $2.50 they were charging per ticket pays for the cost of renting the 3D projection equipment from Disney.…
I didn’t buy a personal Kindle — the price was too steep. But I did ask our library to buy one, and I have been experimenting with reading PDFs on my new tablet PC. So I was interested when I first heard the hype surrounding what may be Amazon’s announcement of the next version of…
If you have a Facebook account, you’re probably familiar with the “25 Things About Me” meme. Mike McPhaden unearthed “Wm. Shakespeare’s Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me,” of which the best (IMHO) is the following: 14 On the topic of dating, my daughter Susanna loues to remind me: ~Jvliet was only thirteen! And I…
Keats can keep his urn with its leaf-fring’d legend. I’ve got a much better slice-of-life to share. When I called my parents tonight, my father reminded me of an exchange he had with my daughter when she was about four. My Daughter (to her grandfather): This is my teddy bear. My Father (to his granddaughter):…
News about a free-speech dust-up in the department where I used to work at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire: This fall, the English department, the publication’s then “administrative home,” voted unanimously to sever its ties to Flip Side, citing, in a statement, interest in “fostering the responsible use of free speech and the mutually respectful community…
My brother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey, is a Steelers fan. He asked for a keepsake issue of the local paper, so I sent out an e-mail to my colleagues to beg for their used copies. The truth is, I wouldn’t even take a free subscription to the print edition, since it would mean more junk piling…
What appears to be a smiley winks out from an 1862 transcript of a speech by ==|;o)> NY Times City Room Similar:And yes, that's her picture in the program (from the PPT Shakespeare contest).At PPT’s The Diary of Anne Frank. …CultureDon't call it "social distancing" or you just might get a polite correction from the admin…AcademiaWhen…
A nifty little primer, compiled by Nate Piekos. CROSSBAR I This is probably the biggest mistake seen amongst amateur letterers. An “I” with the crossbars on top and bottom is virtually only used for the personal pronoun, “I.” The only other allowable use of the “crossbar I” is in abbreviations. Any other instance of the letter should just…
Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica. Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after…
Cantina The current management of this rather seedy venue doesn’t much care about appearances, apparently. Nonetheless, it’s become one of the hottest spots in the area, attracting surly alcoholics from all around. A variety of local acts, the vast majority unrelentingly terrible, play here every Tuesday night. Coincidentally, it’s Tuesday night. A host of unsavory-looking…
Part of a list of jokes the president told at the Alfalfa Club Dinner. This set made me laugh. “In just the first few weeks, I’ve had to engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my BlackBerry. “I finally agreed to limit the number of people…
As I was putting my 10-year-old son to bed tonight, as usual we had a long, free-ranging, unrushed conversation. Somehow I mentioned the missing Doctor Who tapes. Peter got very thoughtful. “If I had a time machine, I could go back to the moment those tapes disappeared. And I could bring them forward in time,…
In my Literary Criticism class, next week we’ll be looking at The Yellow Wallpaper — most of us probably for the umpteenth time. Here’s a comment that just appeared on the course website, that reminds me why I spend six hours straight re-configuring a server from scratch because it got infected with a virus 12…
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a horde of the undead in possession of insatiable hunger for the brains of the living must be in want of a Jane Austin remix.(via) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies covers the same ground as the original masterpiece – only that ground is full freshly-vacated graves. The “strange…
When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called “I’m sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!” and another called “With all due respect, Gaza, I don’t support you,” which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas…