I like to think of the cosmos as a theater, yet a theater cannot exist without an audience, to witness and to celebrate. Robot craft and mighty telescopes will continue to show us unimaginable wonders. But when humans return to the moon and put a base there and prepare to go to Mars and become…
The McCarthy purges were a disgraceful blot on the national record of any nation aspiring to free speech, and are still, evidently, a matter of passionate concern. When Elia Kazan, who sang like a bird, was awarded a lifetime Oscar 40 years later, many in Hollywood made it plain that his betrayal was a matter…
Should local papers get a slice of the bail-out pie? Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. “The media is a vitally important part of America,” he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.…
What’s happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple’s WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup…
This NYT overview of the NASA craft designed to replace the space shuttle is a great example of 3D animation in a news context. Similar:Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreamingNeil Gaiman tells us why books matter:Wh…BooksHappy memories of PC games I played with my son (now 19) sitting on my lap.While doing…
Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary responds to the urban legend that his song “Puff, the Magic Dragon” is an extended metaphor for drug use. He then mockingly applies the critical lens of drug metaphors to The Star-Spangled Banner, before the group launches into “Puff.” During the song, we see a montage of people…
I haven’t been to the Modern Languate Association’s annual conference in the last several years, in part because the time slot (between Christmas and New Year’s) is horrible if you want to spend time with your family (imagine that!). Some of it is just sour grapes — I pitched a few proposals to the MLA…
From the LA times, a reminder to get all those family videos onto disc. I talked my father into buying a Betamax way back when. The tapes were smaller, and the quality was better, but the format didn’t stick. Now it’s VHS’s turn. After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of…
I’m sitting with my laptop in the hallway, guarding the kids’ bedrooms, One has already tried to sneak out to watch for St. Nick (I had to put a stuffed snake along the crack under the door to keep her from peeking… I’m sure she’ll fall asleep on the floor, trying to peer under the…
I’ve never been a fan of PDF documents, but now that I have a tablet PC, I thought I would try reading a few PDF documents and see how my tablet functions as an e-book reader, mostly for magazines, dissertations, or the occasional advance proof copy that someone wants to share with me. My first…
I read on Metafilter that publicists for the upcoming movie Coraline have sent beautiful hand-crafted boxes to 50 bloggers. I just finished reading the Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean book (not quite as good as their The Wolves in the Walls, but creepily delightful nonetheless) to my kids last week, so I was curious. Absolutely…
This came up in my feed reader today. Like me, this gamer prefers stories to mindless shoot-em-ups, and laments the current state of commercial gaming. There’s a lot of hipocrysy in the minds of many gamers today. Almost every gamer I talk to tells me they want games with depth, carefully written storylines, and maginificent…
Tonight I was reading my 10-year-old son a chapter in Beorn the Proud, a youth historical fiction that describes the relationship between a 9th-century Irish girl taken as a slave by the son of a Viking king. The heroine, Ness, spits out angry prophecies and pretty much gives the Vikings a piece of her mind…
Raph Koster comments on the internet buzz surrounding a blog entry that went viral. It is like playing a giant game of telephone. Accurate (The Guardian): Game designer Raph Koster picked up on a forum thread about recruitment consultants and WoW. Wrong stuff starts creeping in (Games Campus, which also wins a prize for the…
Owens’s exploits might have been lost to the mists of time if not for an undergraduate student named Jane Browning, who stumbled on the story in a cafe in Gloucester County, Virginia, and tracked down the man behind the legend. You can read more about Owens in his Wikipedia entry and on Ms. Browning’s blog,…
The challenge in an adventure game is not based on fighting enemies, building armies, or the usual competitive activities associated with video games. Rather, the player has to figure out what the designers were thinking when they built the game and follow some script of events in order to win. These events are activated by…
Sad news for Trek fans. Majel Barrett Roddenberry, wife of “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and the actress who portrayed Nurse Chapel on the original science-fiction television series, died Thursday of leukemia, according to the family. —NBC For more, see her biography on Wikipedia. Similar:No, you’re not going crazy – package sizes are shrinking It’s…
For the first time this year, I asked my school to buy me a laptop (a Dell Latitude XT, my first-ever tablet computer). I also asked for a new monitor, and it’s a beauty. I’m pretty pleased with my setup. Of course, it’s fun to set up your office when you don’t have any immediate…
An interesting method of publicizing high-quality science in a form accessible to (and editable by) the general public. RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit work to a new section of the journal, to be launched later this week, that describes families of RNA molecules. The first paper scheduled is “A…
Sad news from the MLA, as reported by Inside Higher Ed. Today the Modern Language Association is releasing information on just how bad the situation is: The number of job postings in the MLA’s Job Information List will be down 21 percent in 2008-9, the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history. For English language…