Blogged as a reference, for the next time I have to introduce students to semiotics (ytmnd.com). Similar:At Computers and Writing #cwcon for the weekend.Am I wise now? At an event for encouragi…AcademiaJeff Bezos Plan for News: The Washington Post Becomes an Amazon ProductFor the past few months, a group inside …BooksPresenting at #NEMLA session 8.1…
Why does this happen? For some reason, perhaps the oddity of ordering milk from an online bookseller, has attracted a large number of spoof reviews — Lovecraft, Coleridge, romances, haiku. Here’s a bit of Tuscan Whole Milk flash fiction: This milk was so good, I passed out. When I woke up 3 weeks later, apes…
movabletype.org As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. This is a good thing. MT had previously had a policy that you could make changes to the code but you couldn’t redistribute those changes. MT has…
Yahoo! | AFP: The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday. Like the myth about lemmings hurling themselves to their death, this new detail, found from a study of bones found iat the base of the…
News.com.au Det-Sgt Jeff Maher of the homicide squad confirmed that a Google Earth satellite mapping van had been filming the area for up to a week. He said the images captured by satellite could hold some clues to the gruesome murder. “They (Google Earth) have had a van in the area for the last week,”…
Yahoo | Reuters “w00t,” an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary. Similar:Just remember: what you’re seeing and what you're reading is not what’s happening.Words apparently spoken by the President…Current_EventsMicrosoft's Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It: "If…
Karissa sent me this story from Macworld: Eight consumer and public-interest groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, saying mobile phone providers should not be able to block text messages from political groups and advertisers. […] If the FCC grants the petition, it would open up mobile phone networks to millions of…
Footage from a NASA camera, via CBS: Similar:Crime coverage on Fox News halved once US midterms were over In the weeks leading up to the US midt…Current_EventsYes, I do feel rather awesome right now.Lost brand-new earbuds. Reached in pocke…PersonalToday's Computer Displays Distort Pixel Art Designed for 1980s CRTsAs a kid, I remember studying my CRT…
Doris Lessing doesn’t like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica: Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn’t believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. “And…
After watching the children until about 2pm today, I rousted my wife from the bedroom so she could give them a late lunch. While I was fiddling with my blogging templates and sort of puttering around until it was time to go to campus (I’m volunteering to serve dinner to the students during the big…
Adam Parrish: The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player’s path through the game. A Frotzophone “performance” looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you’re also playing music. Here’s a…
This morning when my nine-year-old son got up, he buried his nose in a book on the War of 1812, and every so often he shared some detail: “Did you know the British liked to shoot together? They would say, ‘Ready! Aim! Fire!’” He knew that the Battle of New Orleans was a decisive American…
ZDNet explores the public reaction to Amazon’s new e-book reader. I don’t usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit…
From a speculative essay by Richard M. Stallman: In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next…
Times Online: The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial. No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner. (If you want to…
Heh. Lightweight. That’s funny. Via Information Week. Zuckerberg said that when Facebook considered Beacon it hoped to let people share information across sites with their friends. He said it had to be clear and easy to control, while also being “lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the Web.” Similar:As part…
Information Week: One of the most prestigious U.K. universities has begun to scan the social networking sites seeking snapshots and other evidence of misbehavior that qualifies for formal disciplinary action. Students at Oxford University are outraged that school leaders are scanning Facebook and disciplining students based on what they find there. Similar:Dozens of Colleges’ Upward…
Similar:Facebook will Emphasize News Articles; De-emphasize Non-Facebook Meme PhotosFacebook wants you to see more serious n…Business The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley Because what he never managed to grok …BusinessThe Hut Where the Internet Began – Atlantic MobileLet’s start at the end point: what you’r…CybercultureThe Life and Times of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯But, in addition to…
Macworld has new info on the scope of the information Beacon gathers on Facebook users: While users’ activities on the Web are tracked in various ways for different purposes, most commonly with tracking cookies in banner ads, the Beacon implementation is one Berteau has never come across before in terms of the details of users’…
Via CNN. Here’s a heartbreaking detail I hadn’t noticed in previous coverage. When Megan’s mother returned home, she found her daughter crying at the computer. After reading the messages, she criticized her daughter for using inappropriate language, Banas said. Telling her mom that “I can’t believe you’re not on my side,” Megan ran upstairs and…