Having suffered a heart attack back in September, Allen had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor. “At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life,” said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon. “We would…
Revision 88 / Serial number 54892 Oval Office You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you. There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of…
Am I mad? Possibly. But, at one level these are just a bunch of “high-flown” questions that really only matter to artists and cynical bastards like me :D. At another level, these issues are critical to advancing the art (that’s right, art) of game design and making a game that Strongbad said were for “intellectual…
Franklin believed men were equal, in a certain way, but he was consistently reluctant to endorse Thomas Jefferson’s notion of human equality, informed by John Locke, that all men are equal in a state of nature, and he rejected the idea that all men are equally loved in the eyes of God. It was manifestly…
— The Carnival of Homeschooling: week 3 (Why Homeschool) Parents’ reasons for home schooling are as varied as their children. A post I wrote about video games is part of this carnival. In the blogosphere, a “carnival” is a collection of links, usually contributed by participants, and then publicized on the blogs of those participants. Usually…
Besides the most obvious danger — adult stalkers enticing teenagers into face-to-face meetings — Cole warned that personal information posted online can also be read by college admissions officers and future employers. “We are trying to figure out how do our school rules relate to this type of behavior,” Cole said. Some colleges have expelled…
He had a nervous breakdown, spent time in hospitals and had to submit to shock therapy. And in 1947, as if he were being punished for having invented television, his house in Maine burned to the ground. One wishes it could be said that this was the final indignity Farnsworth had to suffer, but it…
The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has dismissed entertainment reporter Tim Ryan following an investigation into stories he wrote during the past several years. The stories contained phrases or sentences that appeared elsewhere before being included, un-attributed, in stories that ran in the Star-Bulletin. The stories did not include inaccurate information or any fabrications. —Frank Bridgewater —Inquiry prompts…
NASA’s Stardust sample return capsule has returned to Earth today, floating to the ground under billowing parachute. A helicopter team has successfully located the capsule under desert dark conditions. —Leonard David —Mission Completed: Stardust Capsule Lands in Utah (Space) Similar:Should the AP Really Have Fired This Pulitzer-Prize War Photographer?The original shot caught a Syrian rebel …AestheticsThat…
The Missouri native fought briefly for the Confederacy but idolized U.S. Grant for preserving the Union (he eventually published the statesman‘sbest-selling memoirs); wrote in favor of rights for African Americans but was fond of telling racist jokes (and co-authored with Bret Harte the grotesquely anti-Chinese play Ah Sin); assailed the Gilded Age yet formed a…
At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much…
1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them. 2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good…
Looking at the show from a political standpoint, it‘shard to press it to one side or the other. While the show is far from ?centrist? or ?moderate? it instead stands to the far left and right virtually at the same time. On some issues, it stands firmly in the realm of the new Democratic ideals,…
We never talked about his impending death, Dad and I. For all the time I spent with him these last five months, we never had a single conversation about it. We talked about the present. We spoke carefully, avoiding verbs such as “will be” and mention of 2006. When the future insisted upon conversation, it…
I won’t receive a grade, but otherwise I’ll be a full participant in English 439. (The other students haven’t been told of my secret identity, and because so many studies show that the under-30 demographic never reads newspapers, they’ll surely remain in the dark all quarter long, even as the stories appear.) Such folly —…
On the handheld front, Sony and Nintendo continue their fight for the minds and backpacks of the nation’s gamers by releasing ever-larger portable consoles. The Nintendo XL features six screens, a folding seat and a selection of overpriced candy bars, while the PlayStation Still Ostensibly Portable can now play all known forms of media, including…
Consumerist Pac-Man and Socialist Tetris (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) “Pac-Man” is a game about gathering resources while fleeing from predators. It gives pleasure to those areas of our brain that remember what it was like being a tiny but clever mammal, surrounded by threats that are deadly but not too bright. Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde pass…
Here we are, faced with all sorts of new challenges, stuck in a system that seem unable or unwilling to change. We’ve mastered this assembly line method of teaching, programming all of our students in basically the same way throughout their time in school because that was the easiest way to do it. We didn’t…
Challenged to retrieve the powerful Amulet of Yendor from a fathomless, monster-plagued dungeon, you’ll discover that the dungeon is actually a randomly-generated configuration of brackets, asterisks and periods; the villainous pit beasts are an assortment of letters (“O” for Orcs, “D” for dragons and so on); and your heroic avatar is nothing more than a…
You stroll outside and are delighted to see the sun just clearing the eastern horizon. It is a beautiful autumn morning and the air feels brisk as you take a deep breath. Across the way, you spot a jogger just before they disappear into a grove of tall ash trees. —Mike Tolar —Clink: A Clickable…