In the spirit of endism, here’s a list of all the forms of major media and how they’re trending. Make of it what you will. Flat to Down to Way Down: Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999 Television: network TV’s audience share has fallen by a third since 1985…
When people don’t fill out forms, they often use the excuse that it’s too much work. Consider how to encourage them with negative or positive incentives. The IRS appears to have entirely solved this problem, too. Once again, the key comes from the close relationship with the criminal justice system that the IRS enjoys. Willful…
Although a failed business enterprise, Laurel‘sPurple Moon seemed to do exactly what it had planned — hit it off with girls. Her idea that games should consist of relationships, values such as loyalty, love, and courage, and conflicts such as jealousy, cheating, exclusion, racism, materialism, and broken homes seems worthwhile, but as a young girl…
The moon base landing dome opens in pie slices like eye muscles, or the jagged mouth of a cyclops. Pods are not designed strictly for function but thematic meaning: who would fly one without side ports? Tunnel vision. The dark port in the white pod body is very eye-ballish. Similar also is the deep socket…
The implications of scalable theory have been far-reaching and pervasive. In fact, few end-users would disagree with the deployment of expert systems, which embodies the private principles of artificial intelligence. We explore new introspective configurations, which we call KindlerDop.–Shatner, Elmo, Jerz and Nye —An Improvement of XML (SciGen) Read the backstory behind this random CS paper…
“Just think about it,” I would tell them with as straight a face as I could muster, “next Tuesday the Royal Shakespeare Company will be on campus to give their rendition of King Lear.” I left time for that news to sink in, and then added: “I’m told that their production is absolutely world class.”…
—Star Trek Personality Test Apparently I’m the middle-aged, toupee-sporting movie-era Kirk, though I’m 36 now, which is about the age of the TV-era Kirk. Ah, well… I’m still Shatner, and to be Shatner is good! My wife picked up two more Star Trek paperbacks for me at the library booksale… one tells of Spock’s first…
The senior wireless operator was John “Jack” Phillips, age 25, and the junior operator was 21 year old Harold Bride. The radio transmitter was of the “spark” type, and the radio operator used a telegraph key to transmit a “Continental” version of code, which is slightly different from the American “Morse” code. The ship’s radio…
If something needs to be prettier, they just add a few lines of description (or remove some – “beautiful” could challenge your mind to create an entirely different image than “beautiful blonde”) instead of spending hours rendering. In fact, there’s so much content, Mihaly says it would just be too difficult to convert his game…
That’s your lot. That’s the movie we’ve been waiting 26 years for. And let me tell you, it was not worth the wait, not for this. The whole film is true to neither the letter nor the spirit of Douglas Adams’ books and scripts. And it really seems that many of the changes have been…
In all honesty, how many informed analysts in the early 1980s believed that Soviet Communism would evaporate within a decade, or that Reagan’s confrontational nuclear policies would really lead to a massive reduction of global tensions? Yet Reagan believed these ridiculous things, and on both points, he was ridiculously right. Troy’s readable book is impressive…
In the service, a penitent Charles will acknowledge and solemnly bewail his “manifold sins and wickedness” and promise to be faithful to Camilla. —Paul Majendie —Charles, Camilla Finally Tie Knot After 35 Years (Yahoo!) Awkward grammar. While the author obviously meant “promise” as a verb, if you take “promise” as a noun, it seems to be…
It’s easy to propose edits to Encarta. To start editing, just click the Edit this article link on any article page. After you enter your changes to the article, summarize them in a brief sentence in the Summary of Changes field. Then cite your sources of information in the Sources and Comments field. After you…
This year, the prize went to the Associated Press staff for, as the Pulitzer organization’s site says, “its stunning series of photographs of bloody yearlong combat inside Iraqi cities.” I looked at the twenty photographs and broke them into groups on the basis of content. Here are my results: U.S. troops injured, dead, or mourning:…
The picture of gravitational collapse provided by classical general relativity cannot be physically correct because it conflicts with ordinary quantum mechanics. For example, an event horizon makes it impossible to everywhere synchronize atomic clocks. As an alternative it has been proposed that the vacuum state has off-diagonal order, and that space-time undergoes a continuous phase…
Another project, called Second Future, was undertaken by nine adults with cerebral palsy, and seeks to provide a forum in which they can share in the everyday personal interactions that most people take for granted. The group of nine, who share a single Second Life avatar known as Wilde Cunningham, get to experience being around…
It is important that you understand that the concept of Toothing – beaming a sexual text message to a random phone on a commuter-packed tube train – is a bit like going into a crowded nightclub, throwing a brick at the dancefloor with a love letter attached, and hoping that the person it hits will…
I fancy myself a pretty good sadist when it comes to generating shame and self-loathing in the tardy. If I spot a repeat offender in the hallway before class, and find that they’re not in attendance even after I’ve given them a comfortable buffer of time, I might push trashcans and desks in front of…
US scientists have designed a bionic eye to allow blind people to see again. It comprises a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual’s eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear. Images captured by the camera are beamed to the chip, which translates them into…
11. We are faced with three fundamental options: formation, participation and dialogue. In the first place, a vast work of formation is needed to assure that the mass media be known and used intelligently and appropriately. The new vocabulary they introduce into society modifies both learning processes and the quality of human relations, so that,…