As I grow older, new years don’t feel so new any more. Take this year for instance, it is totally packed with teaching and other tasks until the 10th of February. In the first 7 weeks of the semester I will be doing all my teaching this semester and next (until 1st of October). I…
The tragic miscommunication began when rescue workers deep in the mine called the rescue command center at the surface at 11:45 p.m. to report that the other 12 miners had been found alive. Gene Kitts, senior vice president at International Coal, said the call came into the command center over an open speaker and was…
An Associated Press dispatch first carried the news at 11:52 pm: “Twelve miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive Tuesday night, more than 41 hours after the blast, family members said. Bells at a church where relatives had been gathering rang out as family members ran out screaming in jubilation.”…
Google News snapshot preserves good, but inaccurate, news (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Google can’t tell the difference between all the different West Virginia mining stories that are popping up online. It may take a while for Google to adjust its focus, as the human editors post updates and Google gets around to re-indexing news sites. While I…
Family members learned early Wednesday that 11 of the 12 coal miners who were initially thought to have survived an explosion in a coal mine have died. —Allen G. Breed —Families Say 11 of 12 W.Va. Miners Dead (AP|MyWay) This is horrible. The lead of Breed’s original story says the miners “were found,” but does not…
There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: “God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought.” His editor cabled back: “Forget flood. Interview God.” —Roger Ebert —Herbie Fully Loaded (Sun Times) Yes, I admit I…
I have the most difficult time interviewing people affected by tragedy. I find it hard to keep my composure. You’ve probably seen Nick Helms on CNN. He’s 25 and his father, Terry, is one of the men trapped. He’s one of the mine’s fire bosses and based on the scant information we have right now,…
In an extraordinary twist of fate, 12 miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive late Tuesday, more than 41 hours after the blast. —12 Trapped W.Va. Miners Found Alive (AP|MyWay) Wow. One miner was found dead earlier, so a family is still in mourning. Update: A few hours later, a new…
I’ve just finished making a video about the similarities between the ancient Hindu art of spiritual discipline and the rather more modern art of online gaming. Watch the higher self rack up high scores getting to the next level of consciousness in the transcendentally physical world of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch! —Jim Munroe —Yoga Deathmatch (No Media…
More than men, women are enthusiastic online communicators, and they use email in a more robust way. Women are more likely than men to use email to write to friends and family about a variety of topics: sharing news and worries, planning events, forwarding jokes and funny stories. Women are more likely to feel satisfied…
The magic of movies, for so many in our increasingly visual society, is a far more stimulating and efficient storytelling experience than the labor intensity of reading. —Thane Rosenbaum —Yeah, but the Book Is Better (Forward) Not an elitist rant, but a thoughtful essay by an author who has written the screenplay of his own novel.…
Your objectives for this course are to explore definitions of important concepts such as game and fun
The Hard Way to Learn and Program Aggression is the only way to accomplish anything. If you want a port, grab it, if you want a channel, fight for it, if you want a channel off, flood it, if you want a MOO, make yourself uncomfortably toaded over and over again. If you want a…
Subjective journalism does NOT mean glorifying the writer. Notice how, by the end of “Bow, Nigger” we know everything about the player’s experiences, the thoughts, feelings and theories that emerge during the short light saber battle, but we know nothing about the author him/herself. It’s subjective, but it isn’t self-publicising. It isn’t autobiography. Hunter S…
The story was “Boston,” Sinclair’s 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory. Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair…
WashingtonPost.com will now offer articles for free for 60 days, instead of the previous 14, before putting them behind the paid for subscription wall. —Pamela Parker —WashingtonPost.com Extends Free Content Window (ClickZ News) Hooray! I have in the past few years consciously avoided blogging many good Washington Post stories because 2 weeks is simply not long…
The idea that religion can bring material advantages has a distinguished history. A century ago Max Weber argued that the Protestant work ethic lay behind Europe’s prosperity. More recently Robert Barro, a professor at Harvard, has been examining the links between religion and economic growth (his work was reviewed here in November 2003). At the…
We have gone from the Sermon on the Mount to the Slammin’ on the Mat. — commenter Marshall —Revelation wrestling (Apocalyptics) Similar:Here’s What Happens in the Hour After You Drink a Can of Coke (and What Happened to Me Whe…As a kid, I remember liking the famous “…EthicsBeatrix Potter-pinching and Žižekian swipes: the strange world of…
The race to transmit a simple message, staged by an Australian museum, was won — at a dash — by a 93-year-old telegraph operator who tapped it out using the simple system which was devised by Samuel Morse in 1832 and was the mainstay of maritime communication up until 1997. Gordon Hill, who learnt to…
In the game, you listen to a story about someone’s death and the events leading up to it. There are five characters in the story; your job is to rank them from most culpable for the death to least culpable. The trick is that the story should be balanced in such a way that any…