I’ve been scanning the online coverage of the MIT student who caused a bomb scare when she walked into an airport wearing a blinking circuit board on her sweatshirt. I’m dismayed by the number of headlines that unquestioningly repeat the authorities’ line that she was wearing a “fake bomb.” Several headlines at least put the…
I’ve been laid up in sick all weekend, mostly drifting in and out of sleep. I started getting chills Friday afternoon at work. I zipped up my jacket and put the heater on in the car to keep the chills under control, went to the couch in the basement (where my wife banished me) and…
aibohphobia The irrational fear of palindromes (words that read the same forwards and backwards). Dude 1: Hey, what’s your name? Dude 2: Bob. Dude 1: AAAAAAAAAAH! *Runs and hides behind sofa* Bob: Wow. Dude 1: AAAAAAAAAAH! *Runs away and falls down stairs* This completely stupid fauxbia made me laugh for some reason. There appears to…
Great Zork map. Similar:Theory Trading CardsThis set of 21 Theory Trading Cards, pub…AcademiaHow "Hail Mary" Became Inextricably Linked to American FootballI am revamping an existing “News Writing…CultureTook the whole day off and spent part of it making #greebles with #Blender3D because reaso…AestheticsGoogle's Super Bowl Ad: A Romance in SearchI didn’t watch the game, but I…
The Walls are Closing In  It’s all my fault that now I hear their death – their screams of pain within their final breath. No, we are alive. And thanks to you, we’ll get out. A whole song about such a literal event? Songs in musicals, even if they are showpiece numbers attached closely…
Language Log offers a thorough discussion of the real story of the emoticon. Before seeing the Google Books page image, I had thought that Bierce’s suggested punctuation looked like this: \___/. That’s how it appears in a footnote to Andrew Graham’s online essay, “Forked Tongue: The Language of Serpent in the Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary of…
The LA Times pulls no punches in this column on the aftermath of Dan Rather’s pathetic defense of a slipshod story alleging Bush weaseled his way out of his military duties. Now, if you once had thought of yourself as situated at the heart of the journalistic universe for nearly half a century, and suddenly…
Emily Short reviews a game that tries to make a point: While I sympathize with the message of the game, it didn’t really work for me, for two reasons. First, the game is irritating to play. It’s impossible to undo mistakes (if you accidentally confiscate someone’s pants instead of his shoes, for instance, as I…
Wired’s Threat Level: Just two days after it was yelled out in a University of Florida lecture hall, “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” has become the newest cultural touchstone of our pop-cultural lexicon. Similar:A Christmas Carol (WAOB Audio Theatre)Marley was dead. (I voice the narrato…BooksNew rules governing drone journalism are on the way — and there’s…
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Miki Louch. When he was a boy, Dr. Pausch said, he had a concrete set of dreams: He wanted to experience the weightlessness of zero gravity; he wanted to play football in the NFL; he wanted to write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia (“You can tell the nerds early…
Words fail me. The LA Times is among many sources reporting that… Longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather filed a $70-million lawsuit today against his former employer, alleging that executives at the broadcast network broke the terms of his contract by marginalizing him in his final days at CBS News and forcing him to retire early.…
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-),” wrote Fahlman. “Read it…
The New York Musical Theater Festival has some tidbits about an upcoming showing of a musical based on The Last Starfighter. Too bad I’m not really within day-trip distance of New York… this one would tempt me. My nine-year-old son would probably enjoy it, but the trip would be hard on my five-year-old daughter. Oh…
David Cornelson, interviewed in Gamasutra about his plans for marketing text-adventure games to young readers: One of the reasons IF is so fascinating is that you have this junction of programming, game design, and writing. It’s great to toy around with all three of those aspects and try to merge them into something beautiful. The…
Andy Guess (Inside Higher Ed): So technology’s utility in the classroom comes down to how it is used. The question, then, is: How can educators adapt their teaching methods to emerging technologies? And should they? Skeptics might point out that even students themselves are ambivalent when it comes to using the Internet and other digital…
New York Times: In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986,…
Melissa Terras writes in the introduction to Digital Humanities Quarterly v1 n2 (2007): We at DHQ hope that we will eventually reach a wider audience (and trust our readers will help us do so), introducing the type and range of activities the digital humanities community is interested in, and featuring energetic, novel, and interesting articles…
Kaj Sand-Jensen: Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to write consistently…
A 13-page PDF. I wish I could excerpt some of the tables, but I’d have to do a screengrab, and I can’t be bothered this morning. In my “News Writing” class the other day, I had the students take out a piece of paper and write down the names of the five family members from…
In Texas, spiders have learned to cooperate. And I, for one, salute our new arachnid overlords. But Tuesday afternoon, thousands of Texas spiders were back at it, working to rebuild an immense spider web at Lake Tawakoni State Park that at one time stretched about 200 yards, covering bushes and trees to create a creepy…