Experience: I escaped from a death camp

Stark, unadorned writing. No melodramatic flourishes or sentiment. Just the truth. Powerful. Fewer than 100 survived Treblinka. I am the last one. The will to live is stronger than anything else; I never gave up. Maybe I’m meant to be alive to tell the story. This is the last generation to hear first-hand from survivors.…

"Star Wars" – an a capella tribute to John Williams

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The Incredible Vanishing Book

Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are…

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google’s search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for “Mark” ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No…

The Unfinished Swan

Via The FPP — first-person painter! I wish the creator hadn’t chosen to go eerie with the mood, that seems like cheating a little… it’s so easy to go scary. Still, it’s beautiful And it’s an XNA-developed title. Interesting. The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo. Similar:Looking up an elevator…

E-mail error ends up on road sign

Thanks, Mike, for pointing out this one, which is a close second to “Translate Server Error.” The English is clear enough to lorry drivers – but the Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road…

Chronicle and HBO Win Excellence in Sports Journalism Awards

Some award-winning sports journalism. Filing it away for future reference. Similar:What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About LivingThis is not only powerful material for t…AwesomeJournalism by the Numbers (a pedagogical play in one scene) #math (Lights up on a college journa…CultureThe science of fake news: Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effortThe rise of fake news…

A Self-Referential Story

One of my freshmen recently submitted a paper about how to overcome writer’s block.  It reminded me of this story, which I came across many years ago and was able to find again fairly quickly with Google. Fun stuff. The purpose of this sentence (which can also serve as a paragraph) is to speculate that…

Our Readers' Coolest Geek-o'-Lanterns

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Technology Review: Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth

My colleague David Stanley links to this article. Many people, especially academic experts, have argued that Wikipedia’s articles can’t be trusted, because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted. Nevertheless, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. The reason is that Wikipedia’s community of more than seven million…

10 Ways to Get Your Writing Out There

Jim  Munroe, a Toronto indie new media author whose work I’ve been following for some time, recently published this useful article on building an audience. Of course he mentions self-published print zines and blogs, but he also mentions another subject I’ve been introducing my students to this term… 6. TEXT ADVENTURE VIDEOGAMESAnyone out there play…