Facebook’s advertisers in ur feed, annoying ur friends. (Wired) Undeterred by the setbacks with its Beacon platform last year, Facebook is rolling out more advertising that uses your friends to sell you stuff. Similar:Ultimate Infographic Design Guide + Design Tricks – VenngageThis website is selling something. You c…AestheticsI’m a 12-year-old girl. Why don’t the characters…
Excellent example of effective journalistic use of a striking detail. This made my morning. The gnome, about a foot tall, wore a hat, a blue shirt over a bulging stomach and a wide grin as it sat on a table in open court throughout the two-day trial. Morrison and the weapon were separated by about…
An Ohio State press release discusses how a student’s psychological profile correlates to academic integrity. An interesting study in rhetoric, focusing on promoting a cultural identity for the “academic heroes” who do honest work, rather than hunting and trapping those whose behavior is less exemplary: The students completed measures that examined their bravery, honesty and…
The latest Pew report: Since 2006, the proportion of Americans who say they get news online at least three days a week has increased from 31% to 37%. About as many people now say they go online for news regularly (at least three days a week) as say they regularly watch cable news (39%); substantially…
Josh suggest this story. Experimental software now under development can automatically swap eyes and facial expressions from one face to another, and the software is being tested as a way to anonymize faces that appear in Google Maps. This story is about more personal, more targeted, use of image-processing software. (NYT) Ellen Robinson, a volunteer…
Wondermark Similar:Lotteries: America's $70 Billion ShameCan this be true? People spend more mone…BooksWhat Can Science Tell Us About Dad Jokes?Beyond making the audience cringe and, h…CultureHow the printing press changed “you”: when reading changed, so did writingThis was before the printing press, so b…BooksSome fairy tales may be 6000 years oldFairy tales are transmitted…
I need a new office chair. Similar:The Random Pulp Science Fiction Title Generator from Cornelius Zappencackler's DERANGE-O-L…From Thrilling Tales (where the future i…AmusingSelf-referential capitalism; paradoxical fusion of idealized pop culture and mass-produced…AestheticsDescent, Part 1 (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 26) Data experiences disturbing…Rewatching ST:TNG Data plays poker wi…CultureAnother 10 sq cm of #steampunk control…
It’s hard to believe that the word “hello” entered common discourse so recently, and that an inventor suggested it in a conscious attempt to develop a protocol for using the telephone. (Wired, apparently borrowing heavily from Wikipedia.) Bell’s famous first words spoken over what we now call the telephone — “Mr. Watson, come here. I…
An iPhone is too expensive for my budget, but I’m still happy to see this, from Wired: Open iPhone. Go to App Store. Download Frotz. The classic text adventures from Infocom made us all learn the shortest possible way to write responses, and this brevity of input seems perfectly suited for iPhone use. Similar:The Period,…
I’ve gone underground to finish off a few projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure, so the blogging has been light. But I’m surfacing in order to blog about this poll, which shows that a majority of respondents said that the government should not force bloggers to give equal time to opposing views, some 31% disagreed. …
A short comedy sketch that emphasizes the importance of finding the right editor. Similar:Details drive the news (new handout)I have nothing against essays, but not e…EssaysOh No, Performers Coming Into AudiencePITTSBURGH—Audience members at the Bened…AmusingCommonly Misused Words: THAN and THEN AmusingKLINGON STYLE (Star Trek Parody of PSY – GANGNAM STYLE)Silly fun, just in time…
From The Washington Post: It hit Mark Gruntz all at once, while he was sitting flat-broke in an airport in Greece: He had lost credit for three summer courses, wasted $11,474 in student loans and gotten kicked off a boat. All because he hadn’t cited Wikipedia enough in a paper about a movie. Last week,…
Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling. Aren’t we all!? But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply…
A thirteen-year-old girl posing as a record executive on MySpace has lured several bands to Los Angeles with promises of a record contract. — BBspot The concept is good, but the writing doesn’t sustain the joke. The reason The Onion is so good is that the articles not only make the joke, but they do it completely within…
David Brooks, NYT: Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art. This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers…
Mark Bruno offers his version of the “Remember text adventure games? People are not only still playing them, they’re writing new ones!” essay. I thought his discussion of the relationship between IF and electronic literature showed some insight. I also discovered that while text adventure games where born into the family of computer games, they…
Once when I needed to entertain my daughter while we were driving somewhere, I said, “Let’s pretend that, rolling along outside the window, there was a little ball that would pick up trash and boxes and trash cans, and that as it collected items it got bigger and bigger, until it was picking up houses…
Chris Brogan just posted a horror story that made me make backups of everything I’ve ever uploaded to Google Docs. Note to self: use Google Apps as a redundant backup only. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get…
McSweeney’s: Horatio thinks he saw a ghost. Hamlet thinks it’s annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies. The king thinks Hamlet’s annoying. Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better. Hamlet’s father is now a zombie. Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. (Twitter would probably catch the back-and-forth spirit of a drama a…
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think the lack of respect for math and science is one of the largest unacknowledged problems in today’s society. And it starts in the academy — somehow, we have moved to a place where people can consider themselves educated while remaining ignorant of remarkably basic facts of…