About 300 eighth-graders at South Valley Junior High in Liberty, Mo., are blogging this fall about Guerrilla Season, a book about a 15-year-old living in Civil War-era Missouri. The book’s author, Pat Hughes, is joining in the online discussion from her home in Philadelphia. “I love being able to communicate with the author because it…
NASA scientists conceded on Tuesday that the 10-year-old Mars Global Surveyor is probably lost in space after the U.S. agency tried unsuccessfully for two weeks to contact the probe. —NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor believed lost in space (Reuters) This link will probably expire soon, so here’s Wikipedia’s Mars Global Surveyor page. Similar:Equilibrium (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season…
—Leonard Nimoy (Spock) – Music Video (YouTube) Watching this video caused me so much deep pain that the only way I could relieve it was to share it with you. You will probably feel either filthy or angry after watching it. Similar:The Last Jedi: Oh, the Feels.No spoilers here. (I managed to avoid al…MediaThe Collaborator (#StarTrek…
We got to go there – but not back again … Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (who directed/wrote the Lord of the Rings films) —Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh Talk THE HOBBIT (The One Ring.net) Jackson and Walsh won’t be involved in The Hobbit movie or a planned prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Similar:Predatory…
[Image showing a few paragraphs from a story spoofing the “Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective” book series.] >>> —Adam Cadre —The Case of the Captured Koala (adamcadre) Make sure you stick with it until you get to the solution, which is where you’ll find the gimmick that makes this story worth blogging — especially if you know…
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act may give shopkeepers the power to force Linden Labs to delete copied items, but it will not provide financial compensation to the victims of infringement unless they file a federal lawsuit. Given the cost of these virtual goods, there aren’t going to be many infringements worth the expense of suing.…
My robot came configured to make 384 donuts per hour automatically. —Donut Robot of Love 2000 (adw3345) How can you not read something that includes a lead like that? Via MeFi. Similar:Another section of a #steampunk control panel for a texture atlas. #blender3d #blender3dar…AestheticsThe Days of Microsoft Internet Explorer Are Numbered—But Its Sorry Legacy Will Live…
A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende. The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia.…
You have a billion potential teachers. You have an opportunity to learn in ways that you or I could not even have dreamed of when we were in school. And you have an opportunity to shepherd your students into a much more complex, much messier, and much more profound world of learning in ways that…
Miss Weaser, from Tufnell Park, began testing gadgets for the blogging website Shiny Media, which posted the one-minute video clips on YouTube. The films included her demonstrating mobile phones, laptops, a GPS and even a Cyberman head. In September, they were spotted by producers from TV company Princess Productions, which had been commissioned to make…
—Dumb Azz Burglars, A MUST SEE WMV (YouTube) Do not — I repeat, NOT — drink milk while watching this, for it will shoot out your nose. This one is also kind of cute, though it’s too long. Similar:Musician uses computer algorithm to compose every melody possible in C, releases them for … A lawyer and…
You know, I’ve loved Firefox for a long, long time. I can’t live without my tabbed browsing, I’m literally lost without it, but with Firefox 2.0 someone at Mozilla has totally dropped the ball when it comes to the most compelling feature I use Firefox for, and that’s the tabs feature. —Duncan Riley —2 things…
Writers are always beaten over the head with the admontion “Show, don’t tell.” It’s not bad advice by any means. Often it’s pretty good advice. But, I know there are times when you should tell instead. For instance, in my Nanowrimo, I appreciate the word inflation, but I’m well aware that no one actually wants…
EL405 Students Tackle Blender’s ”Gus” Tutorial (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My New Media Projects students got into small groups and walked through my Flash version of Blender’s “Gus” animation tutorial. It looks like Blender3D saves some temporary files in such a way that the lab computer’s security restrictions cause some issues, because two of the student groups…
LARRY KING: On your blog you write, “Bush is going to declare war on China next, I swear.” ROSEANNE BARR: I was so scared because I woke up and there was the Drudge, you know. I always read the Drudge Report and it said on there that the Chinese were like, you know, spying on…
Video games are a viable storytelling medium, but the trouble is that video games always have the same protagonist, which is the player. And he always has the same set of motivations, which is to kill and don’t die. That’s not conducive to great novels. We have a character with this negative motivation and that…
Video news releases are pre-packaged broadcast segments designed to look like television news stories, that are funded by and scripted for corporate or government clients. (See “Fake TV News: Introduction.”) On April 6, 2006, the Center for Media and Democracy released a comprehensive report detailing TV newsrooms’ use of VNRs. The report, “Fake TV News:…
Plunge should appear in the hed; the piece should be only a couple of sentences long; and it should “include the number feared dead, the identity of any group on board”?a soccer team, church choir, or students?”as well as the distance of the plunge from the capital city.” The words ravine or gorge should appear.…
Having started with a single video of a trip to the zoo in April of last year, YouTube now airs 100 million videos–and its users add 70,000 more–every day. What happened? YouTube’s creators had stumbled onto the intersection of three revolutions. First, the revolution in video production made possible by cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video…
Whack-A-Moliere (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I made this with cleverpig.com’s Whack-A-Pig tutorial. Similar:Media Bias Chart version 11 — Journalism sorted by bias (Left / Center / Right), reliabili…The very useful “media bias chart” is on…CultureStop trying to figure out if screentime is good for studentsPro-technology response to the NYT “No C…AcademiaWriting a news story calls on different…