Obi-Wan Kenobi is pretty weak. His articulation is minimal with a limited ball-jointed neck, ball shoulders, angled cut joints at the elbows, cut wrists, waist, and hinged hips. I know Sir Alec wasn’t exactly leaping around like a ninja, but c’mon! Speaking of Alec Guiness, Hasbro still hasn’t nailed a likeness with this figure, although…
Traditional gender binaries such as male/female, science/nature, mind/body, are replayed and reinforced again and again in sci-fi films, in which (male) scientific creativity is continually represented as a dangerous affront to “natural” human (female) values. Supercomputers in film are created by male scientists–I can think of no exceptions–and what makes them valuable (according to their…
Eve[r] wondered how low-tech we can seem in a high-tech society? Three words: wire punching tool. —Karissa Kilgore —Fancy Absenteeism (Sugarpacket) “Definetly NOT a hoax! I was there when the picture was taken!!!” says Karissa. See “Why Usability Testing Matters — Palm Beach County Ballot Design Raises Questions about Election 2000“ Similar:Combined, base color, roughness and…
“Like all games, computer and video games entertain while promoting social development, and playing and talking about games is an important part of young people’s lives,” said project manager Caroline Pelletier. “Games literacy is a way of investigating how games are means of expression and representation, just like writing or drawing,” she said. —Games ‘deserve…
A typical male search query uses just two words, compared with three for women. Women are also more patient about investigating different potential routes. While women are happy to look through six or seven results returned by a search query, men typically only refer to two or three before becoming impatient and refining their search…
The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment’s cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec’s Health Department announced this week that in the last…
[P]rogressive American educators at the beginning of the twentieth century instituted a utilitarian system of education that had its roots in the anti- intellectualism of the American frontier. This funnelled large numbers of students into vocational training programmes, depriving them of the benefits of a liberal education. The Language Police offers a kind of sequel…
German archeologists say they have discovered the toilet on which Martin Luther wrote the 95 Theses that launched the Protestant Reformation…. “This is a great find,” Stefan Rhein, director of the Luther Memorial Foundation, said. “Particularly because we’re talking about someone whose texts we have concentrated on for years, while little attention has been paid…
The flourishing community of Web-based blogmeisters – some of them skilled journalists, many of them fervent partisans – is transforming the climate in which ideas are floated and tested…. One recurring theme in Internet comment targets the unwillingness of journalists in mainstream media (known as MSM, generally a pejorative) to admit to having opinions of…
A University of Florida scientist has grown a living ?brain? that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network. —UF Scientist: ?Brain? in a Dish Acts as Autopilot, Living Computer Similar:Hypertext as a Teaching Tool — Brown University Poetry Classroom 1974This short film documents…
Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view. (the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the “back” button…) —Neal Stephenson —Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor (Slashdot) Link found via MGK. Similar:Soldiers and Sailors Memorial and Museum Another visit to Pittsburgh with my his…CultureFlipped Classes: Omit…
Evil, Evil, Evil (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) For the past few days, this blog has been getting comment-spammed one or two times per hour, and my network of student blogs is getting hit with spams that contain URLs with increasingly crude language. I’ve spent over an hour today, and between the two different sites (and two different…
The key to a successful defense is not answering the questions they ask you, but figuring out how to give them the answers you have prepared, no matter what questions they ask. The same, I understand now, is true of television or radio interviews. If they aren’t soliciting the answers you’ve rehearsed, you have to…
At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh … who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation. Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated…
The health plan Wellpoint earlier this year provided $42 million worth of free PDAs or PCs to help entice doctors to adopt E-prescriptions or reduce paperwork by submitting claims electronically. Although WellPoint contracts with 25,000 doctors, only 19,000 physicians participated–one in four passed on the free gear. A big part of the problem is keeping…
There’s a hot concept called “stealth education” that says it’s possible for people to play a game because they enjoy it and “accidentally” learn stuff along the way. Unfortunately, the concept has yet to prove its worth with the pre-teen and teen community. But what if educational games rivaled the quality and game-play of today’s…
Iraqi militants who kidnapped an Australian reporter in Baghdad and threatened to kill him Googled his name on the Internet to investigate his work before deciding to release him unharmed, the journalist’s executive producer said Tuesday. —Mike Corder —Militants who kidnapped Australian reporter in Baghdad “Googled” him before deciding to release him unharmed (SF Gate) Similar:Keyboard…
Jim Dunnigan’s Serious Games Keynote (Serious Games) Jim Dunnigan is a talented speaker who rushed through a entertaining narrative of his own long involvement in serious games. I’ll blog more extensive notes later, but two things that struck me were his reference to geeks as people who can make fortunes for other people, and his mention…
—Serious Games Summit (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Apparently The Washington Post has an article on the Serious Games summit, but I haven’t read it. The conference is scheduled to start in a half hour. I’m glad I got here early. The printed program is alphabetized by title — that’s the stupidest organization technique I’ve seen. The events…
The NASA spacecraft that smashed into the Utah desert last month while bringing home fragile samples of the sun may have been doomed by engineering drawings that had been done backwards, an investigating board said Friday. —Drawings Blamed for Genesis Crash (Wired) Similar:Toiletries for a steampunk villain who needs to look dapper. Straight razor and…