When I was a kid, and I handed my too-heavy-to-carry Halloween bag to my parents…

…did they steal candy from me while I wasn’t looking, and stuff the empty wrappers into their pockets? If they did, they certainly didn’t confess on their blogs. Similar:Replacing Disputed Flags with Related ArticlesInstead of flagging links to questionabl…BusinessThe Pointlessness of UnpluggingWhat sex was for the Puritans, technolog…Current_EventsVisiting the #scienceofpixar exhibit @kaminsciencecenterPopCultIf You Ever Find…

ear studio

Ear Studio: Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to…

The Science Education Myth

Business Week says there is no science education crisis; that in fact the US is producing more science experts than the market demands. The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international…

reMIX: Interactive Fiction

Structure, Sign, and Play An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida “There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be…

Student Journalism at Religious Colleges

In Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden reports on the National College Media Convention: In his opening remarks, Mattingly, a religion columnist for the Scripps Howard News service and director of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities’ Washington Journalism Center, described six possible models for student newspapers, ranging from a university public relations model (with…

Interview: Adding emotional characteristics to consumer electronics with Pete Froslie

This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention. There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game ‘Adventure!’ to include Booth as the lead antagonist. Similar:Amazon Staff Meetings: “No…

Scratch Tutorials

For the past year or so, my main job in our homeschooling family has been to teach Carolyn (5) how to read. Now I’ve picked up the task of teaching Peter (9) computer programming.  Last week I wrote a few simple BASIC programs to teach a very basic concept that some of my college students…

Karolson & Hobshack

Invisible Games: The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers’ children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime…

Eatmecrunchy

Utterly pointless, and at the same time completely brilliant. You can only eat a few spoonfuls of cereal at a time, so why not keep most of the bowl dry, and soak only a few bites at a time? From eatmecrunchy.com. Similar:A Note to My Remaining Students at the Close of the 2021 Fall SemesterOf…

Word Play

Rock, Paper, Shotgun prints an assessment of the function of text in recent computer games. Some good discussion of the effect of talking movies, the fact that having good voice actors means you don’t need to write as much dialog (which is a good thing since recording dialog is much more expensive than writing text)…