If I’m working on a project, it’s my dream. I’m not toiling away in a dank quarry, hauling blocks across miles of boiling sand to build someone else’s pyramid. If you’re going to grind your life away in a masochistic profession – and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism – I say to…
RUR Cats (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My first (and probably only) contribution to the LOLCats meme. In the 1920s, the Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) introduced the world to a word that quickly displaced older terms such as “automaton.” As author Karel Capek was working out the plot, he fretted that calling them “labori” would be…
It isn’t clear whether Linden Lab simply took the Woodbury island offline, or actually destroyed the software behind it. Dori Littell-Herrick, an assistant professor and chairwoman of the animation department, said she believed it was the latter. If so, the university would need to build another island if it re-established a presence in Second Life.…
It feels somewhat ungrateful to complain in today’s television environment, with so many well-written, superbly acted shows available, that the screen is destroying the page. But it’s true, especially if you pause to consider that reading fiction is something that requires time, time away from a screen. More and more, though, Americans don’t have the…
They were surprised when a magazine article asserted that women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men. If there had been that big a difference, he thought, they should have noticed it. They found that the 20,000-7,000 figures have been used in popular books and magazines for years. But…
The Goldmans own the copyright, media rights and movie rights. They also acquired Simpson’s name, likeness, life story and right of publicity in connection with the book, according to court documents. The Goldmans want to rename the book “Confessions of a Double Murderer” and plan to shop it around, Cook said. —Victim’s family buys rights…
And yet, outside the anthologies and beyond the campus, these outlooks have influenced public policy at the highest levels. Their endurance in public life is a rebuke to the humanities reading list, and it recasts the putative sophistication of the curriculum into its opposite: campus parochialism. The damage it does to humanities students can last…
While the Internet still retains some of the “wild wild west” feel, increasingly Internet activity, and particular blogging, is being shaped and governed by state and federal laws. For US bloggers in particular, blogging has become a veritable land mine of potential legal issues, and the situation isn’t helped by the fact that the law…
I won’t be stuck standardizing verb tenses in business documents my whole life. One day, I will copyedit the Great American Novel. “Sure,” you say, “along with every other detail-oriented grammarian in the country.” Yes, I know how many idealistic young people dream of taking a manuscript that captures the spirit of 21st-century America and…
The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago. Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack. —Ben Clerkin —Thousands of rubber ducks…
Among other tactics, middlemen for the countries misrepresented themselves to gain access to the Defense Department’s surplus sales or bought sensitive surplus from U.S. companies that had acquired it from Pentagon auctions and weren’t supposed to allow its export. —Sharon Theimer —Jets shredded, kept away from ‘bad guys’ (Yahoo! | AP (will expire)) My kids were…
Behavioural experts have found that infants begin to lie from as young as six months. Simple fibs help to train them for more complex deceptions in later life. Infants quickly learnt that using tactics such as fake crying and pretend laughing could win them attention. By eight months, more difficult deceptions became apparent, such as…
—Text to Speech (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s…
What is it for? Why is it there? Did whoever put it up realize that if there were no sign, there would be no need to warn about it? Is this a joke from the developers? Is it a lesson in recursiveness? Is it a philosophical prop? —Bizarre Sign (Lushlush) Does it mean “Don’t forget to…
The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-storey building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel. | On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect–Jeremy Cooke —Vertical farming in the big Apple (BBC) What will they think of next — maybe, taking an urban residential skyscraper, tilting it…
Back in the projector room, five hairy men wearing nothing but overalls, hardhats, and grime were toiling away, trying to get things under control. “It’s too powerful! It can’t take no more!” they yell as they hopefully pull levers and turn valves. “The movie is living up to the franchise! We’re going down!” Meanwhile, in…
Investigators are looking into who altered pro wrestler Chris Benoit’s Wikipedia entry to mention his wife’s death hours before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their 7-year-old son. —Dead wrestler’s Web page was altered (Yahoo! | AP (will expire)) I wasn’t particularly following this story, but this is an interesting wrinkle. When I first…
However, perhaps this is not a simple matter of cause and effect. Perhaps it‘swrong to assume that the availability of good graphics technology caused the decline of games like Zork. If “interactive fiction” has migrated to the margins of the computer gaming industry, it could be due simply to a lack of good marketing, not…
Doctors backed away on Sunday from a controversial proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alcoholism, saying psychiatrists should study the issue more. —Experts oppose video game addiction designation (Reuters | C|Net) Similar:My 13yo homeschooler had no idea how to open a little milk carton. I had to show her.CultureShattered Mirror…
The books Amazon will offer will include many rare volumes — some that are hundreds of years old and others that are too brittle to be handled by people day after day. With digital scanning and printing technology, such books can be reproduced for anyone who wants to buy them. —Dan Carnevale —Amazon Will Digitize…