I made this slide up for a conference presentation a few years ago. (Of course, it applies to the procrastinating professor, too.) Similar:Why We Forget Most of the Books We ReadIt was pleasurable to encounter a famili…BooksIs it okay to say clanker?Clanker is a derogatory term used to ins…CybercultureYou are standing in a field. There…
I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for years. It’s a very efficient tool for sorting, cropping, and otherwise tweaking images, and it’s integrated with Google’s online photo album and Google’s YouTube service, so it’s very convenient. It’s also behaving very strangely. After I updated recently to Picass 3, I notice that, every second the program is…
Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009). My kids know him as the grandfather in Spy Kids 2 and 3. Let’s hope they lay him to rest dressed in a spotless white suit, in a casket lined in soft, Corinthian leather. He will always be Captain Kirk’s finest foe, the would-be conqueror who first tried to steal the Enterprise…
There are no real details on the official site, but this is still worth watching. Legends of Zork, which is being published by Activision, is currently in beta with no official release date yet disclosed. Prospective players can join the beta at the game’s official website, as well as sign up for automated updates on…
Three teenage girls who allegedly sent nude or semi-nude cell phone pictures of themselves, and three male classmates in a Greensburg Salem High School who received them, are charged with child pornography. WPXI I’ve got nothing much to say about this, other than Seton Hill University is in Greensburg, so it’s likely some of my…
This past year has been catastrophic for the New York Times. Advertising dropped off a cliff. The stock sank by 60 percent, and by fall, the paper had been rated a junk investment, announced plans to mortgage its new building, slashed dividends, and, as of last week, was printing ads on the front page. So…
Forget WALL-E and GORT. Forget sexy Summer Glau and Tricia Helfer in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica. OK, don’t forget them. But check it out: Long before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot, PGA SF authors obsessed over electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or “robots” (a term introduced in 1921) that might free…
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants,…
As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print. The Printed Blog, a startup founded and funded by former business productivity software entrepreneur Joshua Karp, is launching a twice-daily free print newspaper in…
Some great writing and insightful observations in this review. The story’s arc is like that of a football thrown lazily against a crisp autumn sky: Even a dog can figure out where it’s going to land. Hell, I could accurately predict individual lines of the game’s dialogue. I’m not saying the narrative in Gears of…
Naturally, as an English professor, I’ve got a vested interest in the future of reading. But you can’t have an intellectually healthy society without literacy. I had a high school physics teacher — Admiral Peebles (a retired nuclear submarine expert) who praised literacy as a core skill. “Give me students who can read and write,”…
It seems that a recent ‘reply-all storm’ at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users “reply-all” to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies…
Not if, but when. The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our…
GlobalNerdy, via. You’ve probably seen many articles on companies and organizations saying that they take social media seriously. Here’s one such organization that you might not expect: the United States Air Force. Take a look at the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, reproduced below: Click the diagram to download the PDF version (455K). The “rules…
Thanks for the silly, wonderful suggestion, Josh. Similar:Infrared photo confirms Munch wrote "madman" inscription first noticed in 1904“Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!” (“C…AestheticsLong Live the LARPers — My daughter plays the antagonist in this award-winning 48 Hour Fi…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku7wzUtO…AestheticsAnd Now for This Breaking News Report “Police have cornered the suspect wh…Amusing"I don't view Shakespeare's…
While the Church gets a lot of guff for its skeptical responses to Galileo’s astronomical findings, some Jesuit astronomers not only listened to his ideas but repeated his observations, and some university faculty members flatly refused to look through a telescope. Simplistic representations of scientific issues, with heroes and villains, make good stories, but rarely…
Spring 2009 LA101: Seminar in Thinking & Writing EL200: Media Lab & Setonian EL267: American Literature 1915-Present EL312: Literary Criticism Fall, 2008 LA100: Basic Composition EL200: Media Lab & Advising of The Setonian EL236: Writing for the Internet EL405: Mew Media Projects Spring, 2008 EL150: Intro to Literary Study EL200: Media Lab & Advising of…
The “serious gaming” community is abuzz over Raid Gaza: in which you take on the role of the Israeli military, building tanks, fighter planes and missiles in order to pummel the Palestinian territory and kill as many people as possible within three minutes. Bonus points are awarded for hitting hospitals and police stations. Meanwhile, the…
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project announced Wednesday that it plans to downsize half of its staff and reduce the salary of the remaining employees. OLPC will also halt its development of the open source Sugar environment and focus on building its next-generation hardware device. These plans are part of a major restructuring effort…
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has released a major study that aims to establish benchmarks for assessing the humanities. Assessment was one of the major issues that arose during last year’s English program review, so this is worth a view. Here’s a quote from the press release: “Until now the nation has lacked…