From the New Yorker: It may seem strange that this last observation could have surprised anyone, but in Galileo’s time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid–our word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk–and it was so bright that it…
The Denver Post: The Colorado State University editor who used the F-word in the student newspaper will keep his job. My biggest reaction to the editorial was not simply that it used the F-word, it’s that the editorial was so poorly framed — it consisted entirely of four words, “Taser this … F*** BUSH.” I’m…
While doing some advanced preparation for an upcoming unit on statistics in my news writing class, I learned something new today (from Wikipedia). When coming across a statistic that looks like slam-dunk evidence of bias or wrongdoing, an activist will have a motivation to present that data to journalists in order to advance a particular…
Game Career Guide has an interview with some writers who work in the games industry. Hurrah for the liberal arts! I already knew in high school I wanted to work in entertainment, so I attended some special workshops called the Media Workshops in Hollywood. There I was advised to major in whatever I wanted in…
The New Yorker has an article about a bookstore that supplies custom-made libraries for purchase or, for comercial displays and movie sets, rental. Although prop books are meant to be seen and not read, they have to evoke a mise en scène, inside and out. For Indiana Jones, the filmmakers specified that the books cover…
I created a new handout that focuses on the efficient use of quoted material in MLA-style papers. Some of this material used to be part of a more general handout on using sources, but I think it will be more useful if I pull it out and create a new handout. An MLA-style paper does…
Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun imagining what an early, early draft of the Google home page might have looked like. Similar:Where is the comma in "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" supposed to go?https://youtu.be/sxfxy-3dGz0AmusingWhat Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2015?If the pre-1978 laws were still in effec…BooksThe super-rich…
Engadget: That’s right, the first 2600 units rolled off the assembly line in October of 1977, delighting both children and kids at heart with games like Pitfall and Pole Position, and helping distract the nation after the untimely death of the King, the tragic crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane, and Pele’s retirement. So here’s to…
Space.com: Fifty years ago this week, Sputnik Chief Designer Sergei Korolyov watched as a modified Russian missile launched into space from Kazakhstan’s lonely steppes carrying a very special payload. Sputnik 1 (“traveling companion” in Russian) was about the size of a basketball and weighed about 180 pounds. It was equipped with two radio transmitters and…
http://ifcomp.org/comp07/download.html Similar:Why Did Dial-Up Modems Make So Much Noise?Screeeech . . . hisss . . . squaawk. The…CybercultureThis 8-Year-Old Chess Champion Will Make You SmileIn a homeless shelter in Manhattan, an 8…CultureChilling analysis of organized, anonymous disinformation campaign against Parkland survivo…Forty-seven minutes after news broke of …CultureFormer Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed [a Certain Political…
ArsTechnica: Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps. I…
Daniel Radosh brings to the mainstream press (New York Times) an argument that games researchers have been making for years. If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay — giving players challenges to work through and choices to make — in entirely new ways. The…
The marketers and programmers at Google’s Blogger.com are not speaking with each other much, or so it would seem. The folks in charge of the home page love verbs. Here’s a thumbnail I cropped from the blogger.com home page. Verbs, verbs, everywhere verbs! Create! Publish! Go! Post! Interact! Take a tour! Name your blog! Okay,…
For me, that was the laugh-out-loud moment in this clip. Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex Similar:This English major will walk off the graduation platform this weekend, and into a full-tim…Be yourself. If have you a bad attitude,…CultureAngry 10yo Edits the Paper Heart She Gave Her MotherAestheticsDebunking the newspapers are dying ideaDon’t count on viral…
This editorial from Pepperdine shows good, clear writing, unlike the four-word CSU editorial that has been in the news recently. It emphasizes the fact that the editorial does not simply contain a vulgar charge aimed at the president, but that… When students at Colorado State University in Front Collins opened the Sept. 24 issue of…
A scene from Ridley Scott’s youth, via Wired: The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it’s steel, and it’s probably particles, it’s not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you’d be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire.…
Wired teases a bit, so that the ending is actually kind of anti-climactic, but it’s a wonderfully geeky puzzle. From ISS, orbiting 220 miles above the surface of the Earth, the qibla (an Arabic word meaning the direction a Muslim should pray toward Mecca) changes from second to second. During some parts of the space…
AP | Guardian The morgue scene couldn’t have been more grim: As doctors worked to retrieve evidence from 33 bodies riddled with gunshots, they were unnerved by the ringing of victims’ cell phones, signaling loved ones seeking reassurance they would never get. This haunting detail offers, after several months, a fresh perspective on the VA…
NYT: a student helps a security guard tackle a student carrying a rifle: The scene at the university yesterday underlined how campus security has been rethought in this country since April, when a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. Instead of fleeing out of classrooms and onto the street, students at St. John’s were…
Full transcript, the very end of which is Columbia’s Bollinger having the last word: I’m sorry that President Ahmadinejad’s schedule makes it necessary for him to leave before he’s been able to answer many of the questions that we have or even answer some of the ones that we posed to him. (Laughter, applause.) But…