Carolyn, my five-year-old, wept in the middle of “Owly 2: Just a Little Blue.” The Owly books use no words, just icons and facial expressions to tell some very complex stories. Carolyn likes stories about adventure and friendship, and she’s a visual learner. Once I helped her interpret the first few speech bubble icons, she…
Language Log offers a great post about the comics convention of using typographical symbols to represent swear words. In any case, ! — * @ # $ % & seem to be the characters most commonly used in the U.S. (I suppose £ and € get some play outside the U.S.) At the moment I…
This article from Politico poses some interesting questions. The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe. The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics. Journalists, for instance, have become partners with the Clinton…
I can’t wait to see more of Get Lamp. Similar:Code of Honor (ST:TNG Rewatch — Season 1, Episode 3) Rehashed Amok Time plot that gets ra…Rewatching TNG after almost 20 years. (Y…CultureLighting makes a difference. The officers' pub from the interplanetary cruiser #steampunk … AestheticsThe Xplor Store: The Forgotten Carnegie Science Center Exhibit? (Guest Post…
BoingBoing links to an interesting story about time travel and a self-policing community of time-travelers (modeled on a Wiki community). 11/21/2104 At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote: Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape…
Sky News: The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90, according to an aide. Similar:Updated a handout on writing a process analysis. TechnologyWhen you need to record footsteps on a sidewalk, and the carpeted studio has…
When I was little, I loved a book about a little red lighthouse that was dwarfed by the construction of a new bridge. I was just thinking about that book recently, and made a mental note to ask my mother what the title was so I could get a copy and read it to my…
Scotsman: “I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn’t have fired. Not at him.” — 88-year-old Luftwaffe…
So I’m sitting at Julie’s place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice: So students who can only remix don’t get practice thinking critically about culture — and…
Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s new report: Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day’s newspaper, Rosenstield said. “The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online,” he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to…
Guardian If generations of gloomy boys could pretend they were the next TS Eliot, then there have been plenty of gloomy girls who have their very own role model in Plath. And a very powerful role model: unlike Eliot, she succeeded in killing herself. Cue thousands of lines of self-pitying poetry without the command and…
I thought maybe two or three students would “friend” me out of pity, but I was rather surprised that within about 24 hours I had 35 confirmed “friends” — several of those within the first few minutes of registering for the service. Only half of those contacts are from Seton Hill — the rest are…
Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response. Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue “wing” on the left, and the…
How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil. (Steve Salerno, Skeptic) The mythical Red State/Blue State paradigm is just one of the more telling indications of a general disability the media exhibit in working with data. A cluster of random events…
The Tribune Review published this story about an incident at my local library. The director of the Greensburg Hempfield Area Library was injured Wednesday afternoon while blocking a married couple who allegedly tried to steal a Christmas novel. […] Muccari said he was near the entrance for the 4:22 p.m. incident because he was posting…
They’re definitely stressed. They’re sleep-deprived. They may be furious (at me!). But they’re still riding the intellectual buzz that comes from finishing a research paper. I love what happens in the classroom on the day a major assignment’s due. Students come to class after having wrestled a mess of free-write drafts and marginalia and Post-It-Notalia…
Of course I don’t know what kind of back story there might be between these two, but keep it off camera, okay, boys? Comically unprofessional. glumbert – Anchor vs Reporter (I’d never heard of this site before… at first I thought it had something to do with journalism, but it seems to be a random…
According to Bloomberg, the Vatican has announced a new list of “social sins.” Consistent with much of the church’s social teachings in the modern age, the list is an interesting mix of traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas. It seems to me that 6 and 7 are already contained in 5, but the Bloomberg article…
From Michael White, of Adaptive Complexity: There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the ‘oppressed underdog’ narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it’s usually wrong. The narrative goes like this: 1. The famous, brilliant scientist…
From the introduction to a great list of common errors in English (Paul Brians). The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I’ll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate…