I see students calling me over to their desks to ask about a word problem, and half the time me reading the word problem aloud to them is enough to answer their question. I see students skimming over paragraphs of text (not that I blame them) and then asking me what they really needed to…
While blogging has real intellectual payoffs, it is not conventional academic writing and shouldn’t be an academic’s main focus if he or she wants to get tenure. But to dismiss blogging as a bad idea altogether is to make an enormous mistake. Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or…
We expect them to be able to follow us around the house, picking up after us, chattering with us like C-3PO, reading our emotions with the accuracy, if not the intent, of HAL. While robots have proved indispensable in narrow kinds of work, like assembly lines, when it comes to interactions with unpredictable, flesh-and-blood humans,…
The average American is a ravenous media junkie, consuming up to nine hours a day of television, web time or cellphone minutes, according to new research which raises fresh questions about how technology is revolutionising society. From iPods filling commuters’ ears, the screens scrolling headlines in the elevator at work to proliferating on-the-move tools like…
Astronomers at the Palo Alto Observatory are citing “lunar error” as the cause of the three-moon pileup that totalled Ganymede and severely dented Callisto and Europa Monday, causing an estimated $700 quadrillion in damage. —Ganymede Totalled In Three-Moon Pileup (The Onion (Satire)) An oldie. Similar:That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.Aesthetics87,000…
There’s no question that certain things are lost when documents are prepared and transmitted in electronic formats. The texture, heft, even smell of the paper, the coffee cup’s stain, the crinkled edges and dog-eared pages, the physical abrasions of marks and erasures. Let’s think for a moment about what’s gained though. By opening my word…
There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us – so seemingly obvious – that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here’s a case in point – the weblog post’s permalink. I mean – let’s think about it. The problem was that a weblog’s front page is by far…
Basically, I remember being afraid a lot of the time. I felt incredibly unsafe. I remember a couple of trips to the hospital after being in freezing water for long periods of time, losing quite a bit of my hearing for days at a time due to explosives, having my heart monitored when one went…
Welcome to IFComp 2005, the competition for short text adventures. —Interactive Fiction Competition 2005 (ifcomp.org) Free text-adventure games, written specifically for this annual competition. Anyone can be a judge. Similar:Memo to faculty: AI is not your friend (opinion)I was approached on LinkedIn with the op…AcademiaIf you like to play with words, good newsI wish there were…
Adam Jacot de Boinod first became entranced by language when he discovered 27 words for “moustache” in an Albanian dictionary – and another 27 for “eyebrows”. A world of bushy machismo and stolid dignity sprang to life before his eyes. He began hanging out in second-hand bookshops, looking for foreign dictionaries and the tiny revelations…
Did anyone have the right to be so little changed by the voyage as Armstrong seems to have been? “How long must it take before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” he asked a reporter seven years after coming home. —Thomas Mallon reviews James R. Hansen’s First Man. —Moon Walker: How Neil Armstrong…
PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Retail Chains! —Manifesto Games Grek Gostikyan, science fiction author and game developer, resigned from Nokia in order to invest his energies in the indie game development movement. He blogs at Games * Art * Design * Culture. Similar:Brothers (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season…
No individual has made billions off Star Trek—although that franchise, too, has its own mountains of merchandise, including toys, video games, and hundreds of books. More impressive than its merchandise and its profits, though, is its monumental amount of screen-time. Since the first broadcast of the first episode on September 8, 1966, there have been…
—MLA Citation Style (Long Island University) It’s got Star Trek. It’s got Flash Gordon. It’s in MLA style. What could be better? Similar:The Myth of the Unemployed Humanities MajorStudents who work their way up to leader…AcademiaHow to Think Like ShakespeareSaving this for the next time I teach Sh…AcademiaAnd the People of the Book of Face Were…
—‘NY Times’ Retracts John Roberts Memo Story (Editor & Publisher) So the paper publishes false information, in a story about a memo critiquing a court case involving a newspaper that published false information. The court case ruled that a newspaper could only be found libelous if the paper published the false information with actual malice.…
The shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight in 1982. Roger Pielke Jr., a space policy expert at the University of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space station by the time it’s finished…
WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. “The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. “But when so-called ‘contributors’ began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought…
“Don’t panic over the latest techno jargon like … peer-to-peer, wi-max, 80211, bittorrent … the only thing that gives purpose to all these remarkable delivery systems is the kind of creative content we all produce,” Eisner said. —Eisner’s parting words to Hollywood: “Don’t panic” (Breitbart.com) I don’t feel much pity for the hordes of netizens who…
I wonder what they call it when you can’t think of what to write in a weblog? Writer’s Blog, weblock? —Anna-Marie —Comfortably Numb (ilex) One of Mike Vitia‘s students coins a term. Students in several of my classes are engaging in drive-by blogging, which is the flurry of entries that one posts just before the blogging…
The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant’s body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement. “It doesn’t take anything to start a…