Taking our previous analogies for punctuation, what happens when it isn’t used? Well, if punctuation is the stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead…. The reason to stand up for punctuation is…
Think back to John Henry racing a steam drill and forward to Garry Kasparov trying to outmaneuver IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997 to the Onion tweaking the genre with its accountant battles Excel story. But the latest twist on the meme takes it to the meta-level by raising the question: in the future, will you…
When former Gizmondo executive Stefan Eriksson wrecked his million-dollar Ferrari on the Pacific Coast Highway last month, it simply seemed like a fitting metaphor for the death of his hapless handheld – the destruction of one expensive piece of machinery to mark the end of another. —Gizmondo Bizarro (Game Revolution) If all the news reports are…
Thanks to a comment a former student added to last week’s post, I found some pleasant, lush models of trees, along with numerous other realistic residential items. I’ve added the fluorescent light fixtures and wall sconces inside, and some pretty trees outside. I also started working with a street model (curbs and sidewalks), but ran…
“We also wanted your cubicle to give you a little shred of dignity and recognition and acknowledge you exist because you’re probably not getting that from your co-workers or your boss. So we’ve built in a mechanical flower that’s acoustically activated. When you’re gone, it’s wilted. But when you come in, it’s acoustically activated and…
The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. —Julie Schlosser —Cubicles: The Great Mistake (CNN Money.com) Similar:A #steampunk control panel in context. #blender3d #design #aesthetics #blender3dartAestheticsIn August 1999 I was blogging about Poohsticks Bridge, penmanship, Archimedes, and ebooksIn August 1999, I was blogging about …BooksBehind the art:…
Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure. You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. There is an elf with an exclamation point above her head here. >Talk elf “Alas,” she…
The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers. —Wonder Drug Inspires Deep, Unwavering Love Of Pharmaceutical Companies (The Onion (Satire)) Similar:Getting to the Point in Academic Writing Don’t spend three pages establishing…DesignEx-Pope Benedict says the Selfish Gene…
Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration. —Patrick Welsh —For once, blame the student (Yahoo!/USAToday (will probably expire)) This essay is written by a high school teacher frustrated by the lack of…
In complex reading passages, organization may be elaborate, messages may be implicit, interactions among ideas or characters may be subtle and the vocabulary is demanding and intricate. The ACT isolated reading complexity as a critical factor by analyzing the results of the 1.2 million high school seniors in 2005 who took the well-known ACT college…
In late 1982, my best friend had a Sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder. Audio cassette tape was the affordable recording media at the time and one wintery November day while on our way to the arcade ‘Just Fun’ in Ithaca, NY, we came up with the idea to record video game sounds. —Daniel P. Hower…
The first fully-automated performance of the 1924 Futurist/Dadaist/Cubist composition “Ballet mécanique” by George Antheil takes place this weekend in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, on the Mall in Washington, DC–in conjunction with the larges exhibit in history on Dadaist art. Programmed by composer/author/music technologist Paul Lehrman, and using robots built by…
My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) A week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I’ve made some good progress. Early last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. I’d been going crazy…
“He’d tell us, ‘Now, 20 rows down, the accounting’s hard as granite — it’s the hardest thing an office man can stand,’” said Huddie Ledbetter, one of Peters’ former trainees, “‘but you keep your pencil sharp, and you keep your pencil working. It’s the life of a numbers-crunchin’ man.’” Sources say Peters, who was born…
To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner, who signed some of the subgenre’s biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, “it’s got to be really, really guttural. It should sound like they’re gargling glass.” —Jim Fusilli —That’s Good Enough for Me: Cookie Monsters of death-metal music. (Opinion Journal) New to me. Similar:Mother…
By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia’s latest information on the storm and recovery efforts…
The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms. —Study: Few Americans Know 1st AmendmentYahoo!|AP) I’m blogging this with my students in mind (*fake cough sounding like…
I have noticed many people at fest, such as shopkeepers, pull out what they believe is their most formal language when the royalty visits them. This often means they struggle along with “thee/thou” in addressing the King & Queen when they should properly be using “you” (the phrase “Thy Majesty” doesn’t make sense, does it?…
According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males. —Roger Dobson and Abul Taher —Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun (Times Online) The authors conclude by stating,…
Judith Moran, director of the Math Center at Trinity College in Connecticut, “started life,” she said, as an art major. Now, like several of the faculty members questioned, Moran said she wants all students to be able to assess numbers in The New York Times. Trinity students also get their quantitative feet held to the…