Just watch it. You’ll get it. Similar:#PPTPlaytime Tartuffe @thepublicpgh (Looking forward to Part 2 of this live videoconferenc…CultureEye of Sauron, Hobbit Door, Palantir and One Ring Easter Eggs.AestheticsIn April, 2002, I was blogging about an autistic person's guide to asking a girl on a date…In April, 2002, I was blogging about …BooksOn Stephen Hawking, Vader…
Mike Edwards describes his first time teaching Bartleby the Scrivener: I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who’d used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I’d asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead…
For my “History and Future of the Book” course, I’ve been using a Kindle that my university library purchased on my request. Gizmodo has a good article on the digital rights associated with Kindle e-books. In the fine print that you “agree” to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books–you’re…
The Australian publishes an interesting detail about coverage of climate change: Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?” She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not whethat you’d…
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:New CarWednesday morning my resourceful brother…BusinessThere are two factions working to prevent AI dangers. Here’s why they’re deeply divided. We are assigning more societal decisio…AcademiaHappy Father’s Day One of my favorite pictures of my fa…Current_EventsWhy Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering FreshmenScience writer Jon Horgan writes:…
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:35% of my site visitors right now are using mobile devicesThis year I have seen an uptick in the p…CybercultureAnother delightful…
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…