CBS makes up for canceling Star Trek almost 40 years ago, by publishing the full video of every episode on their website. (Sigh. Yet another cool thing I won’t have time for.) Similar:Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviewsAn amazing story of hope and dignity. T…BooksThe Measure of a Man…
Lisa Zyga, Physorg.com: The basis of the 2×4-inch “Digital Tattoo Interface” is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the…
Aardvarchaeology has a fascinating piece on abandoned suburban treehouses. These sites and their formation processes reflect children’s psychological characteristics. Kids have little sense of order, short memories and strange rationality. They also have no idea that childhood is brief and transient. They will happily fill their treehouses with junk without any thought that they might…
Politico: Wolfson made the explosive charge in an interview with Politico after suggesting as much in a conference call with reporters. On the call, Wolfson said: “Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he’s breaking…
Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed: What plays into coverage of violence, both on campus and elsewhere? The answer, most experts agree, is a confluence of factors. The obvious starting point — and one that media analysts say weighs heavily on the minds of editors in all tragedies, not just school shootings — tends to be…
American Literature.com The Short Story of the Day features works by Anton Chekhov, Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, H.H. Munro (SAKI), Guy de Maupassant, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, and many others. An archive of all the stories featured to date can be found here. Similar:Mixed ReceptionThis activity is…
From The Boston Globe:= College administrators say that intense pressure to gain acceptance to selective schools has compelled parents to turn to high-priced essay editors and coaches. “The euphemism we use is polished,” said Parke Muth, an admissions dean at the University of Virginia. “If you’re paying someone that much money, there shouldn’t be fingerprints.…
The BBC appended this to its coverage of the Mexico City explosion: Are you in Mexico City? Were you in the area when the explosion happened? Send us your comments using the form below: Send your pictures to yourpics@bbc.co.uk or text them to +44 7725 100 100. If you have a large file you can…
NPR’s In Character treatment of Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman). “I can tell you anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of men — men, 50-year-old pinstripe-suited men dissolved in tears and shaking,” Dennehy says. “And telling me story after story about themselves, about their relationship with their sons, and so forth.” I…
Christian Science Monitor: During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company. Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in…
Up Right Down already features over a dozen versions of the same story. What’s yours? (Via) THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn’t. It’s been over…
A great series hosted by Heidi Ruby Miller, a recent graduate of Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program. She has asked writers of genre fiction (fantasy, crime, etc.) to tell the story of their first publication. I’m just starting a career track unit in Introduction to Literary Study, and several of the students want to…
I just noticed that Google Maps has added Greensburg to its street view service. How long has this been available? Here’s a look up Seton Hill’s lovely sycamore-lined driveway.View Larger Map Similar:Another delightful section of a #steampunk control panel. #blender3d #design #aesthetics #…AestheticsWhat have my students learned about creative nonfiction writing? During class they are…
Interactive fiction author Emily Short offers a thoughtful analysis of the function of designing puzzles that permit the player to come up with original solutions. She refers to her game Metamorphoses, which includes a complex physical world model that includes such concepts as size, shape, weight, etc. For instance, you can beat down a door…
From the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online: “Poems to be memorized and spoken to your sweetheart.” They came to tell your faults to me, They named them over one by one; I laughed aloud when they were done, I knew them all so well before, — Oh, they were blind, too blind to see…
Frighteningly sad story from a San Diego TV station. For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher’s assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students. “What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn’t…
Boing Boing interviews Bjarne P. Tveskov, a Lego designer who created many of the classic Space sets from the 80s. I still have all my space legos, and my kids and I regularly play with them. My LEGO career started when I was 17 years old; I saw an ad in the Sunday newspaper, they…
A somewhat silly, but still amusing piece from Live Science: Given that blondes generally have about 140,000 hairs on their heads, her hair should easily support the weight of many, many princes. However, there is more to this story. If Rapunzel simply let down her hair and the prince started climbing immediately, her hair would…
From the AP: Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested three people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago. Similar:The Homecoming (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 1) War hero rescued by Kira has …Rewatching…
From the AP: The estate of “Lord of the Rings” creator J.R.R. Tolkien is suing the film studio that released the trilogy based on his books, claiming the company hasn’t paid it a penny from the estimated $6 billion the films have grossed worldwide. Similar:The cultural implications of the myth that English majors end up…