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…
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Great series from The Globe and Mail. I seem to recall that articles from this paper disappear behind a pay-per-view firewall after a few weeks, so print these out now if you think you’ll ever get old. Part one Fast times at Senior High The cliques, the gossip, the hot guy with a car: A…
The BBC offers a pleasant bit of retrophilia. (Thanks for the link, Robert.) Mrs Huggins tried using a computer about 15 years ago and the memory is still raw. “I had four pages of instructions I had to learn, to send [my previous employers] the stories. Then the blooming thing blew up and they told…
Prospect Magazine: When Mogwai isn’t online, he’s called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line “The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an internet…
“Celebrities in rehab, political punditry and a mauling at the zoo – this is what we’re calling news these days” at JibJab. Similar:Why Do So Many People on YouTube Sound the Same?So it turns out the “YouTube voice” is j…CultureMy simulated city has 1000 capsule inhabitants that are just smart enough to gather around…My simulated…
On Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum invites readers to send in the earliest citation of the use of periods to indicate slow, intense speech. On page 28 of Robert Harris’s novel Archangel (Hutchinson, London, 1998, hardback edition), a character who was tortured for a long time to get information out of him says with pride,…
From NASA: NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body. From a distance of…
Good news from the NYT: Just before 8 p.m. Eastern time, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here received a radio signal from the Phoenix on the ground in the icy plains north of Mars’ Arctic circle. Similar:What Modern Humans Can Learn From The Neanderthals' Extinction“You don’t like to think about a holocau…CultureEpiscopal bishop…
Great little tool from bookrags. Use a drop-down list to construct your own sonnet, using lines from Shakespeare’s corpus. This might be a good tool to ease students into constructing their own sonnets. Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-Up (start a new sonnet) A B A B C D C D E F E F G G To…
A good overview of the context and significance of the Sokal Hoax (New York Sun). (Thanks for the link, Robert.) Most of us, most of the time, arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons that have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most of our…
I just took the kids outside to watch the International Space Station fly overhead. It was visible for about five minutes, and at its brightest I thought I could see some details (the solar panels?), but it was mostly just a bright dot. It rose from the southwest, went by almost overhead, and disappeared to…
From an article I published in 1997, back when I thought I was pretty hot stuff to include postage-stamp-sized video clips on a website. The website also featured a Java simulation of the outdoor pageant that celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi (which is today). The outdoor theatrical event in the medieval city of York,…
The family took in a matinee showing of Prince Caspian. I’d heard mediocre reviews, so I had low expectations. I knew they’d have to add some subplot because the book is pretty thin, and the long narration of Caspian’s boyhood would have been out of place in an action/adventure movie (which is how they’re billing…