A road trip with someone you’ve never met—more specifically, a road trip across a prison-clogged desert with an English professor you’ve never met—is a delicate thing, and we both want this to go well, because he’s about to be my guide and interpreter for four days at the 119th Annual Modern Language Association Convention. Gideon…
Warner Brothers is developing a film based on the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Newcomer Matthew Sand will write the script for the film version of the story, about a knight who takes up the sword against a monster. The eighth-century tale centers on Beowulf of the Geats, who is called…
Bill Stevenson, 79, and Sten Gerfast, 74, both retired 3M employees, were eating at the Sun Ray Shopping Center Bruegger’s Bagels when they heard a man cursing loudly on his cell phone, they said Friday. “You know, there were about 15 people in there and some children and this person, if he stood in the…
Once people overhear some pale guy with wizard hair explaining how a light saber simply isn’t possible, as the exposed plasma from the device would irradiate every living organism with a 5-kilometer radius, what are people supposed to think? “Sexy?” Yet, part of being a sci-fi fan is being its harshest critic, and so we…
The father of the World Wide Web was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on Friday, and said his revolutionary invention was the result of being in the right place at the right time. —A royal occasion as Web inventor is knighted (Independent) Similar:Opinion: Don't link video games with mass shootingsContrary to Dr. Bushman’s suggestion, vi…AcademiaMonsters are…
At the start of the final exam for “Principles of Accounting I,” the team of professors who taught the popular course posted on its Web site an answer key loaded with false responses to the 30 multiple-choice questions. As some 400 students deliberated over their answers, the exam proctors sat and watched — ignoring occasionally…
Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Guitar (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It’s 20 minutes after we’re supposed to have started, and there’s no instructor here. When you consider how rapidly a Suzuki lesson goes, I figured that didn’t bode well for today. My son Peter and the other student in the class, Georgie,…
The study followed about 1,000 people from the age of three into adulthood, and found that those who had consistently spent more than two hours a day watching TV between the ages of five and 15 were at increased risk of being overweight, having high cholesterol, and poor cardiovascular fitness. —James Meikle —Limit child TV…
Webloggers are turning a profit, sometimes unexpectedly, reports the Chicago Tribune Online. Blogs such as TalkingPointsMemo, Wonkette, and RightWingNews are securing enough advertising to turn a profit. A firm called Blogads has been connecting advertisers with bloggers and enabling them to reach an 18 to 34-year-old demographic that is dwindling from traditional media outlets. Recent…
Hawking has always stuck resolutely to the idea that once information goes into a black hole, there is no way out. Until now. When news@nature.com asked about his change of heart, Hawking smiled and wrote: “My views have evolved.” —Mark Peplow —Hawking changes his mind about black holes (Nature) Similar:Why scientists should care about artMy artsy…
[Translated from Italian, by Google.] More interesting, above all for the informative content, are instead articles of historical character like “The scientist on the stage: to survey “of M. To Orthofer, a review of teatrali witnesses from the classic antiquity today with a more rather wide deepening on the dramas of the atomic “era “,…
When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper. —Adam L. Penenberg —Searching for the New York Times (Wired) The NY Times…
Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Violin (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Monday was cello, Tuesday was piano, today is violin. Miss Ramona starts with the usual chit-chat that one can count on going over well with young kids.. how old are you? She asks them how old they think she is. Peter thinks.…
Elisha Gray (born in Barnesville, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1835, died Newtonville, Mass., on Jan. 21, 1901) would have been known to us as the inventor of the telephone if Alexander Graham bell hadn’t got to the patent office one hour before him. Instead, he goes down in history as the accidental creator of one…
With assertiveness, we’re looking at the extent to which the question is designed to favor or invite a particular answer. For example, if a journalist asks the president, “Are you going to run for reelection?”—that’s relatively neutral. Another way is to say: “Mr. President, many of your supporters are calling for you to run again.…
Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Piano (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) The piano lesson was a little more stressful than yesterday’s cello lesson, in part because we have a few toy and electric piano keyboards around the house. While playing with the cello, and even smelling it, was a new and exotic sensation,…
In traditional print journalism, the imperative is to filter, then to publish. The filtering is possible because of a daily printing cycle and large editorial and production staffs. With large, capital-intensive printing presses and a prohibitively expensive distribution system, newspapers in fact require large staffs. Organized hierarchically, these staffs funnel the information out from a…
Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Cello (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) In the first few moments of his first Suzuki music lesson, my six-year-old son is sitting on the floor with Miss Rann, who is introducing him to the parts of a cello. The instructor sings a very simple melody: “This is the…
Yesterday (July 8, 2004) I took the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. It was the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau’s book “Walden.” The Thoreau Society had a dawn to dusk reading. After an hour of having readers print and take away free copies of “Walden,” I was asked by the Walden…
I’d try to peek through the gaps between his fingers, attempting to piece together images through the tiny trickles of light and color that broke through the gaps between his knuckles. But that didn’t work very well, so I’d have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks. And this is how I was…