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…
Greg Beato, from Reason Magazine Online it attracts more than 2 million readers a week. Type onion into Google, and The Onion pops up first. Type the into Google, and The Onion pops up first. But type “best practices for newspapers” into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At…
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…
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:In an Unpredictable Job Market, How Should People Think About College Majors?I tell my…
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)…
From Language Log: Much of the blame for the public’s poor understanding of science must go to a little studied but culturally pivotal genre: news report headlines. Short snappy headlines provide the lazy reader with just enough information to totally misconstrue a story. There’s a reason why the writing in newspapers doesn’t look like the…
….he looks through the kitchen window and exclaims, “Woah! Those leaves are falling onto the trampoline like Confederate shells on Ft. Sumter in 1861!” (Some context… he hates the fact that leaves get inside the trampoline net, and will furiously throw them out one at a time, guarding the perimeter when he is outside playing.)…
A brief MacWord item on Facebook security changes: Facebook users can now report complaints about pornography, harassment or inappropriate contact either by clicking on links on the Web site or by sending email to the abuse@facebook.com address. The company will respond to these complaints within 24 hours, and it will allow an independent examiner appointed…
Bill “Calvin and Hobbes” Watterson reviews the new Charles “Peanuts” Schultz biography in the Wall Street Journal. Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder’s commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but…
The Associated Press and other news syndicates have long made spot news articles generated by local newspapers, available to other publications. Now the NY Times is reporting on a new outlet that will provide original investigative journalism. As struggling newspapers across the country cut back on investigative reporting, a new kind of journalism venture is…
Blogcosm offers a good round-up of online reaction to a NIH agency’s not-so-useful method of citing a weblog. Several bloggers noticed yesterday that the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, which is part of the NIH: National Institutes of Health) has a style guide for citing blogs… The NLM’s definition of a blog isn’t bad……
TiddlyWiki is a complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server. I played with TiddyWiki a bit, but wasn’t able to edit…
Michael J. Roberts, creator of the TADS interactive fiction system, offers a thoughtful reflection on contemporary interactive fiction. Yes, nostalgia is part of the reason why some people like interactive fiction… But for many of us, that’s not it at all; there’s a lot more to IF than fond memories of classic games on antique…
I got an e-mail this morning from a multimedia developer who found my online version of Emily Short’s Metamorphoses, asking some technical questions about whether it is possible to give web-based users tasks to perform in an interactive fiction game, and have the game notify the outside world when the task is completed. I’m reproducing…
Josh Olsson relates a fascinating tale of internet deception in the LA Weekly. “Audrey, this is Harlan Ellison. It’s imperative that I talk to you and Tania as soon as possible about Josh. I’m very worried. Tania’s on her way to your house right now, and I’d like the two of you to come here.”…
Can you file books according to the Library of Congress classification system? One of two library games in the Library Arcade, from Carnegie Mellon. Similar:Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of controlA thoughtful analysis. Problem-solver…CultureVisiting my parents. Admiring their original Hallmark Enterprise Christmas ornament. I ask…AmusingA certain potions instructor is done with everything after submitting…
A project called StupidFilter is trying to weed out stupid internet comments. Hoax? At any rate, it’s amusing. Do you really expect to be able to detect and filter anything that’s conceivably stupid? No, of course not. You’d need real AI for that, and beyond a certain point it’s simply subjective; after all, a sufficiently…
Newsweek: The assumption that all videogames are toys for children rather than entertainment for a variety of different audiences is one of our pet peeves. It may seem innocuous, but it’s not only the foundation of continued attempts at the state and national level to regulate the sale and marketing of videogames, it’s also an…
Wired’s gaming blog ponders how one might play an official The Princess Bride game. Will you have to defend yourself against ROUSes? Perhaps duel against the six-fingered man? Maybe if you collect a certain number of buttercups you unlock a mini game where you have to figure out what the hell Fezzick is saying. We’ll…
Your grade for the peer-review exercise depends on the quantity and quality of the constructive feedback you provide to your peer. (So smile at the good and frown at the bad, but don’t make your peer feel very sad.) In the process, you will get specific, concrete peer feedback, which you can use to revise…