Wired examines a side-effect of the long-awaited life-creation game Spore: Role-playing games have trained millions of gamers in highly complex resource and inventory control. Basically, they’ve made screwing around with databases fun. Or think about conducting a big raid in World of Warcraft, where you need to deploy virtual team-management skills and diplomacy worthy of…
This morning in my mail I found an attractive printing of the proceedings from a January summit on journalism. All in all, this is a good print document that suffered when it was shoveled online. I have no idea what kind of time constraints or “it came to the boss in a dream so do…
At Hypertextopia. I found an interesting, but incomplete and unsigned (update — according to some mouseover text, it’s by Brian Yearling) hypertext that maps out part of the plot of Death of a Salesman. I was interested in the subject matter, but I’m not sure about what value this particular hypertext arrangement offers. If it…
The line between blogging and journalism is fuzzy, and bloggers have been sued for making statements that a trained journalist would know not to make. The Society of Professional Journalists offers training sessions for bloggers who want to know what journalists know. People are practicing journalism through blogs, Web site production and interaction with sites…
“Florida, Florida, Florida,” wrote Tim Russert on his famous whiteboard during the 2000 presidential election. In know the news cycle is moving on to other stories by now, but it’s a shame we’ll never know what he would have done for Election 2008. (Previously.) Similar:Progress on a customizable "[E] to Activate" system (Visual Scripting, Unity3D)https://youtube.com/shorts/-X8eBT5QoPY…
At night, no one can hear you do a happy dance. And I must stifle my victory whoops, so as not to wake up the rest of the family. But I can still pronounce my geeky successes through my blog. A computer that was dead lives again. I don’t usually do hardware.But last weekend, I…
Chronicle Kristin Roovers, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Health Research Institute who was found by U.S. investigators last year to have wrongfully doctored images published with her scientific research while at the University of Pennsylvania, was suspended last week pending an investigation into her work at the Canadian institution. Similar:Jack Rollins-Frosty the Snowman I…
Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic: As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation….…
An excerpt from the book Grand Theft Childhood, which is being marketed as a message to parents that video games aren’t the problem. As one of several supporting points, the artists argue in the following passage that it’s not videogames that teach teenagers to think of the world as a place where violence and fear…
The UK Guardian offers this great interview with interactive fiction author and theorist Emily Short. I think the renaissance happened about 15 years ago, during the mid-90s, when much better design systems for IF were suddenly available and a community coalesced devoted to writing IF seriously, if non-commercially. There’s been plenty of development since then:…
An amusing bit of neo-folklore. Well, Paul Bunyan was always a sucker for a bet, and anyhow lumber futures were down, all the rivers he knew of had been tamed, there was no room for new Great Lakes, and frankly, life had been boring of late. So with a gigantic laugh that was heard as…
As long as those pesky neighborhood kids stay off of Joseph Epstein’s lawn, the rest of us can read his Weekly Standard essay about the generation gap in education. I went to a Catholic high school, where I figured out that the whole point of requiring uniforms and “Yes, Sister… No, Sister” was to give…
A fascinating exploration of learning at a very early stage. Thanks for the link, Robert. (BBC) Usually, cuttlefish eggs lie in an envelope full of black ink. But this clears as the embryos grow older, leaving them growing within translucent eggs. These unborn cuttlefish also have fully developed eyes. That leads the researchers to conclude…
Schneier on Security: Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required. Except that…
I haven’t read through the whole (dorkily named) article, but I’m blogging it so I can find it later when I update the “Writing for the Internet” course I’ll be teaching this fall. I try to include at least a little history, since most students are surprised to learn the internet is about as old…
An amusing post from Language Log, about the ill wind that blows for people who trust their spell checkers too much. As you might have guessed, what Edwards actually said in the debate was “Highfalutin language is not enough.” The word highfalutin should be in any decent spellchecker’s wordlist, but if it is written as…
My kids are playing on the floor as I carry out my online routine. Carolyn is mixing and matching from different Lego sets in order to create characters from the “Magnificent Blimpship” steampunk bedtime stories I’ve been telling her. She aims Captain Rod Gearhart’s gun at her brother’s minifigure. “I just killed you.” “No, I…
From Inside Higher Ed, an article about a Facebook app designed for college recruiters: The solution they came up with essentially offers a series of “challenges” to students interested in SUNY Plattsburgh. Each challenge requires them to upload video or photographic evidence that they fulfilled their mission, so to speak — anything from attending a…
Here’s a great idea to annoy your online readers while generating ad impressions. Take a random idea, come up with about 10 examples, find random stock images to illustrate the examples, and put one idea on each page, to force readers to click through each one. Boston.com has a collection posted under the title “Business…
The article made sure not to phrase the poetry lessons as punishment — the one who actually bought the beer served a few days in jail. This sounds like a creative and proportional way to respond to the problem. USA Today (Thanks for the tip, Rosemary.) More than two dozen young people who broke into…