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:My brother set my parents up for a Mother's Day video call.AmusingChess robot grabs and breaks finger…
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…
Who would think of working a casual reference to Aliens into a blog entry about a trip to Disneyland. Nobody but James Lileks, that is. Usually I hate turbulence, but I was too tired to care, and I slept through it like Hicks on the drop down to LV-426. Similar:Vandal scratches Poe phrase into car…
Seton Hill recently unveiled a new home page. The internal pages all seem to be unchanged, so the changes were not radical, but they were welcome. I have a little quibble with this semi-transparent fold-up menu. The menu itself is a good idea, which lets the designers re-use the artwork created for our print and billboard…
My first day back in the office since submitting final grades last Tuesday. Part of it I spent familiarizing myself with some new features in Blender3D, such as an easy way to give objects fur (or grass). I never noticed the wave modifier before — that’s how I got the purple cube to start jumping…
The open-source 3D design too, Blender, has just been updated. I was up until well past midnight last night checking the website every half hour or so, waiting for this release… now I notice it’s up just as I’m on my way out the door. Oh well, I can look forward to using it tonight…
Mike Musgrove, Post I.T. (Washington Post) One computer historian joked that the game’s release “set the entire computer industry back two weeks” when it appeared on Arpanet, the U.S. government-designed Internet precursor, about 30 years ago. That link, by the way, connects to the page of associate English professor Dennis G. Jerz, of Seton Hill…
#6 is devoted to Infocom text adventures: And the fact is, the classic Infocom games (I have left it to the reader to pick his or her favorite, as there were so many of such a high quality that it is folly to pick one for this list) were just tremendous entertainment, mainly for two…
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities: I’ve had a longstanding, friendly debate with a colleague about whether it is sufficient to provide page images of books, or whether text should be converted to a machine- and human-readable format such as XML. She argues that converting scanned books to text is expensive and that the primary goal…
I saw a teaser that’s got me wondering what’s going on at NASA… WASHINGTON — NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years. This finding was made by combining data from…
Thank you, Rosemary, for sending me this interesting visual essay on the persistence of digital memory, from Instructables.com: Want to make a flash drive that nobody in a modern office would even think about taking? Hide it in a pink eraser and it’s secure in this digital age. Install windows 7 from USB Similar:How Will…
Blender3D is an awesome, insanely powerful, and completely free 3D design tool. I’ve been playing with it for about two years now, and while it took me a while to get used to the interface, I’m getting very comfortable in it. I’ve already posted blog entries about designing cabinets and a walking hectopus, but I…
Boston Globe: Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition – no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, “the natural history of our species” is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and…
A thoughtful post about the fate of film criticism. Much of this boils down what happens when film criticism leaves the world of print journalism and adapts to the TV — not only in the content of the review but the context of celebrity/insider/gossip in which movies are presented to the public. (Armond White, New…
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities: “You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.” Recognize these lines? They’re from the opening screen of Will Crowther’s ADVENTURE (1975), the first example of…