NASA’s Mars rovers have completed their long cross-country quests and are now at two very different sites that scientists have been restlessly waiting to reach. —Mars rovers arrive at long-awaited sites (New Scientist) Similar:The bots are coming. And they have poems. Yet in a circle pallid as it f…CybercultureIn October 2001, I was blogging about…
Oxford and Cambridge interviews have long been the stuff of legend, or more probably, urban myth. Most people have heard the story of the candidate who is supposed to have set fire to his interviewer’s newspaper when asked to surprise him, or the student who, when asked to describe bravery, said “this” before walking out…
Several thousand Dubliners, tourists and literary experts filled the capital’s major boulevard Sunday to celebrate the fictional anniversary of “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s famously complex epic set on a single Dublin day 100 years ago. —Thousands in Dublin celebrate ‘Ulysses’ (AP|Seattle Post-Intelligencer) June 16, 2004 is Bloomsday. The mad cow disease scare means the thousands re-creating Leopold…
When Sandy called to tell me that she had been fired over the essay she had written for class, I felt like Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial?arrested without charge, guilty of something, but uncertain of what. I had been teaching writing since 1971, and to my knowledge a student had never before been fired…
After six years of regulations and restrictions that have cost builders, local governments and landowners on the western fringe of the Great Plains as much as $100 million by some estimates, new research suggests the Preble’s mouse in fact never existed. It instead seems to be genetically identical to one of its cousins, the Bear…
When young writers describe characters, they almost universally make them flat goodie-goodies who might have problems, but little psychological depth. Or they don’t have enough conflict at all. Waggoner has students first write a character description, then pass that description to a neighbor. The neighbor is told to “do something mean to the character.” Then…
The Sound and the Fury. 75 years ago, William Faulkner finished his fourth novel. It was published later in the fall (October 7, 1929), and for the first fifteen years sales totaled just over 3,300 copies (an appendix was added in 1946, when most of Faulkner’s books were out of print. Of course, a few…
But when a piece of derivative fiction starts with a premise along the lines of “all the characters on Buffy are human EMTs in New York and vampires don’t exist” — or, less creatively, “in this story Angel dies in Season One and Buffy gets together with Xander because I always liked him better anyway”…
The grading system for courses offered by CCS is focused on accomplishment, a combination of Pass/No Record grading and variable unit credit. For each course taken in the College, the student enrolls for a specific number of units of work that he or she plans to do during the quarter, from 1 – 6 units.…
Men and papers who had opposed his policy and vilified him personally, now vied with his adherents and friends in lauding the rare wisdom and goodness which marked his conduct and character. —The Death of Lincoln (Harper’s) From an 1865 article. Similar:Russian trolls 'spreading discord' over vaccine safety onlineThe good news is that there are fewer…
Alzheimer’s had done what many feminist leaders fantasized about doing themselves, if only they could get away with it. Today, I am still pro-choice, and I still support fetal tissue research. But I now realize that those who disagree with me also have good points. I hope they reflect on their position as often as…
This is a school with no set hours, no required classes, no grades, no parent-teacher meetings, and no rules except for the ones the people here make up and vote on themselves. It’s a school where youngsters have a say on everything – from whether sipping soda should be allowed in the sound-proofed music room…
Microsoft, amid an IP spree that has won the company patent protection for everything from XML dialects to video game storage methods, mistakenly received a patent on Tuesday for a new variety of apple tree. —Microsoft patents an apple (ZD Net) Hooray for ZDNet for not using the alarmist headline, “Microsoft Receives Patent for Apple”. This…
The National Crime Squad announced today that it is working with the FBI, the Canadian Mounties and the Australian Federal Police to set up what they call “patrols” on the internet. Officers will actively monitor chat rooms used by children where they think paedophiles are likely to be. A logo will come up in the…
ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. —ImageText 1:1 (University of Florida) Via join-the-dots. Bobby, take note! Similar:Details from the author's life are not the magic ticket to "correct" interpretations in li…Students who are new to college literatu…AcademiaHard Time #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch…
Huckleberry Finn opens with a warning from its author that misinterpreting readers will be shot. Despite the danger, readers have been approaching the novel from such diverse critical perspectives for 120 years that it is both commonly taught and frequently banned, for a variety of reasons. Studying both the novel and its critics with an…
The York Corpus Christi Cycle, a collection of brief plays that together tell Biblical history from Creation to Doomsday, was the most complex of the medieval mystery cycles. The surviving manuscript of 48 plays (with a combined length four times that of the longest Hamlet text) and the civic and guild records of the town…
We have often noticed, as we stroll down the hallways of academic buildings, how the doors of the faculty beckon to us — with whispers and insinuations, exhortations and declamations, jeers and jests — via a motley collection of decorations: cartoons, articles, quotations, posters, advertisements, photographs, and artwork. What motivates such postings by that increasingly…
Mr Crystal, a professor of linguistics at Reading University for 20 years, said Yoda – a Jedi master in the Star Wars films – was a good way to get children interested in how preferences in English word order changed from the Anglo-Saxon era to that of Middle English. —Finlo Rohrer —Yoda ‘speaks like Anglo-Saxon’ (BBC)…
Now, I’m really not interested in just complaining about the fact that LeapFrog hasn’t made this move. It’s a massive strategic issue for them, and they do have shareholders to answer to. At the same time, I refuse to accept one justification I heard at the conference, namely that shelf space pressure was one reason…