If you’re in the news business you see this stuff all the time. I mean, when a corproate CEO is quoted as saying, “I am gratified by the performance of our frabjab-widget business unit during the quarter, when the trajectory of widget sales continued to move in a favorable direction,” you can be fairly sure…
For the most part, we are blind to the mediated nature of desire. But the great writers, according to Girard, are more lucid about this. They reveal the inner logic of desire, including its tendency to spread — and, in spreading, to generate conflict. When several hands reach for the same object, some of them…
Taken in isolation, NO always means NO. But in a conversation, there is always a surrounding context for the use of the word “No.” In a routine conversation, we extrapolate or infer a ton of non-verbal information and automatically apply it to attempt to determine the “real” meaning. For example, let’s say I offer you…
“Look,” I said. “I happen to know that the address www.abc.com has not been registered. Go down to your basement, find your most technical computer guy, and have him register www.abc.com immediately. Don’t even think about it. It will be a good thing to do.” They thanked me vacantly. I checked a week later. The…
My brother, a political scientist at a Scottish university, has always worn a coat and tie to class. “Why do you dress up like that?” I asked him once. I knew it didn’t relate to his teaching; he runs a very interactive classroom, with plenty of discussion and argument. He’s also a nice, laid-back guy.…
While gangsta rap is seen as celebrating the violence and aggression that claimed two of its brightest stars, “geeksta” rap is a hip-hop genre celebrating coding skills and school grades. Also dubbed “nerdcore,” this branch of hip-hop is for geeks, by geeks. —Robert Andrews —Rap Marketing Comes to Nerdcore (Wired) Similar:Yahoo, You Nagged Me Too…
Fazio said there are only eight people left trained to hammer the stones into place, a task that requires considerable skill and, he says, “no little muscle,” while supplies of the cobblestones themselves have been stretched in recent years as the last workshops producing them closed down. The stones were produced from deposits of volcanic…
—United States of America: Geography — Level 6 (Sheppard Software) This is a Flash game that asks you to place each of the states on a map. My average error was 14 miles. (Hint: look at the rivers.) If you put a state in the right location, it disappears — which means it’s not visible to…
Discovery and seven astronauts blasted into orbit Tuesday on America’s first manned space shot since the 2003 Columbia disaster, ending a painful, 2 1/2-year shutdown devoted to making the shuttle less risky and NASA more safety-conscious. —Shuttle Discovery Blasts Into Orbit (AP|MyWay) Similar:The Sentence That Knocked Down the Berlin Wall (But Almost Didn’t)Words that defined Ronald…
Thursday on Oprah they were talking to bereaved parents and they had a mother on whose son swallowed a nail when he was two, but no one saw him do it, and I guess the thing just ripped him up from the inside over the course of a few days, and by the time she…
?Hello Georgie,? Condi said. ?Did you come to see Condi?? Condi rubbed my hair and it tickled. ?Dont go messing up his hair,? Dick said. ?Hes got a press conference in a few minutes.? Condi wiped some spit on her hand and patted down my hair. Her hand was soft and she smelled like Xerox…
The happiest and most peaceful parts of the World Wide Web are the places where people are buying things. The nasty parts of the Web are where people are doing what the Founding Surfers intended: expressing themselves and forming communities. […] Having spent a decade working at the devil Microsoft and then at a big…
In this essay, we will explore the idea of emergence. We will examine how objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive. We will present examples with simple squares that turn on and off, but the underlying ideas will provide you with a new perspective for thinking about…
There are already educational and psychotherapeutic treatments for writer’s block, some fairly effective. But remember, not many people want to be treated for hypergraphia. Their writing is usually very important to them. That raises an important point: What right do I have to give a medical name to a character trait that people value in…
I’m Humbler than You Are! Na na-na na-naah! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve been thinking a lot about improvization in education, thanks in part to recent posts on Pedablogue, but also due to Mike Rubino’s occasional blog entries about The Cellar Dwellers. Kids offer great material for improvisation. I’m immune to the “Are we there yet?” question,…
I began pondering what life would be like if zombies came around. How would I react? What would my use be to society (because nearly everyone in a zombie movie has a distinct purpose)? How would I survive? What would I be like as a zombie if I did get bitten? There are obviously a…
The evolution of the Internet as collective, public dream via electronic interfaces, and the evolution of human beings into civilizations, has many striking parallels. The earliest networks were often protected by their owners, and communities were relatively secretive or ?cave-dwelling.? The wiki, on the other hand, is out in the open field, where its vulnerability…
As I write, I am one week into my retirement from six years as assistant to the president of a Research I university. In many ways, this was a great job. To gain a perch on the heights of academic responsibility while being responsible for very little; to learn the ropes without having to pull…
In Indiana, the $9.6 million railroad project funded by state, federal and railroad monies is a cooperative effort that is the “product of a great partnership of private and public officials,” according to David J. Collins, president of B&P. “It was truly a railroad lost to the wilderness,” Collins said, explaining the track had been…
Yes, the news is less entertaining than Friends, so we need other reasons to watch. But those reasons — including voter participation, party affiliation, and educational expectations about following the news — have weakened in the past three decades. We need to turn the tide. But what can we do? Plenty. First, we must raise…