So much for the evolutionary advantage of love. As to the proximate, immediate cause of love, scientists have found that the mother-offspring bond in humans and other animals is mediated by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin. What researchers at University College London have now found is that romantic and maternal love activate many of the…
Instead of starring a busty young woman or a porn stud with rock-hard abs, the Flash-powered site features an actor in a chicken suit, dressed in lingerie. And unlike previous big-business attempts to cash in on an Internet trend, the Subservient Chicken site quickly became an Internet hit. —Chris Ulbrich —Porno Hen Hawks for Burger…
There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging — but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the…
The 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition has opened for business. The yearly competition, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is for short pieces of interactive fiction. At this point IF authors can sign up to take part in the competition, and everyone can learn how to judge the games when they are released in October of this…
Testing my new RSS feed I am having some trouble coding up my new RSS feed. If you’ve got a content aggregator, and you’d like to let me know how my feed works for you, please let me know. BTW… What’s a content aggregator? Similar:Apple Watch is ugly and boring (and Steve Jobs would have…
Diaries and journals are a longstanding fixture of writing and foreign language classes. Journals are also commonly employed in other subjects, including lab notebooks in the sciences, and sketch books and portfolios for teaching the arts. Teachers often encourage students to keep notes of their own, and sometimes use these notes as an additional indicator…
It’s been almost thirty years since young Laura and Sandy Crowther sat down at a Teletype and took their first steps into the mysterious subterranean world their father, Will, created for them. Now, if Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction is any indication, Crowther and Woods’s pioneering computer game Adventure and…
I’m sitting in class and it hurts my ass I stare at the clock and watch the time pass. Tick tock; Tick tock the professor; I mock. The class is like hell, unfortunately no bell to ring to ring to let me be free I can’t wait I have to pee! —Amanda Hoffer —Cover slam…whaaaaat (Hoffer’s…
Prison officials destroyed computer files containing inmates’ personal writing days after a prisoner won a national writing award, best-selling author Wally Lamb said. Lamb, who teaches a creative writing workshop at the York Correctional Facility in East Lyme, said Wednesday that 15 women inmates lost up to five years of work when officials at the…
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, Punk Rock, Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airlines —Billy Joel —Annotated ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ I once thought about doing this kind of thing in a class, but I couldn’t find the right environment. Similar:Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Rewatching ST:DS9…
In order to gather sufficient resources to support my self, my spouse, and my offspring, I must augment my vision with externally mounted lenses, which I wear on the bridge of my nose. My glasses make me feel professorial; without them, I still feel like an ordinary person pretending to be qualified to teach. But…
A long overdue Grand Finale to the celebrated ‘Peanuts’ cartoon strip. By Raymond J. Dartsch. With apologies to Schulz. —Rest in Peace, Charlie Brown Really horrible. I mean it. Sick, sick, sick. I couldn’t stop clicking. The artwork is decent, but the lettering is hard to read… I hadn’t realized just how much Shultz’s wobbly…
Researchers are finding players can make sharper soldiers, drivers and surgeons. Their reaction time is better, their peripheral vision more acute. They are taking risks, finding themselves at ease in a demanding environment that requires paying attention on several levels at once. While there are countless examples of children vegetating in front of the box,…
If you use Google to search for “Judaism”, “Jewish” or “Jewish people”, the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of…
Part attention to detail, part science, part Vulcan mind meld, exegesis allows a critic to enter and extend the context of a work of art, whether it be through the useful reductions of Sunday book reviews, the half millennium of minutiae that have accumulated to make Shakespeare ?The Bard? or revelatory reappraisals in the manner…
Much of the Blogosphere’s current claim to fame, of course, has to do with its outward criticism of already established individuals and institutions. Blogs have been responsible for keeping Big Media on its toes and correcting common errors, misjudgments and mischaracterizations that have been spread by Big Media regarding various important stories and issues. Blogs…
You may feel excitement or dread — or a combination of the two — if you have been charged with creating a new course about online journalism. It’s a tall order, and as you try to decide what to include in the course, you’re likely to wish you had at least three semesters in which…
A Greensburg woman who celebrated her 21st birthday at a Hempfield Township bar and later broke seven teeth after falling from a vehicle in a drunken stupor filed a lawsuit Monday against the bar. —Woman sues bar (Tribune-Review) According to her lawyer, “At one point, she asked for water, and they gave her another (alcoholic) drink.…
Better Dialog BoxJerz’s Literacy Weblog) I recently wrote about a survey with a confusing dialog box… while trying to download a Microsoft update, I came across this dialog box, which does a much better job. Similar:My simulated city has 1000 capsule inhabitants that are just smart enough to gather around…My simulated city has 1000 capsule…
Voice recognition systems have come a long way in the last decade and are used in places like call centres, home PCs and even mobile phones. Dashboards are becoming the hub of the car But over the next 10 years, we could even be holding virtual conversations with the car dashboard. —Richard Taylor —Talking to…