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…
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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:The Defector (ST:TNG Rewatch; Season Three, Episode 10) Cold War Brinksmanship, via Shakes…(Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break…CultureThe Speech Eisenhower Never Gave On The Normandy InvasionA fascinating text from an alternate his…CultureWhy Fears…
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:Infographics: the PowerPoint of the 2010sI used to say that PowerPoint slideshows…Cyberculture'We're back': Bushy Run's 2023 battle…