Writers have always used the net to distribute novels and poems that could appear in print. But there’s a tradition of experimenting with online forms such as email and chatrooms to tell stories that could only work online. Writers are taking this further by working with blogs. Indeed, with their short daily entries, reader feedback…
“He has never hurt anyone and he desperately needs help with his obsession,” his wife said. “If he was a pedophile or a mugger they would be falling over backwards to help him, but because he is fascinated with taking cars and cleaning them nobody wants to know.” —Jail sentence for Englishman who stole and…
If you hope to accomplish anything, you will inevitably need all of the people you hated in high school. I once attended a very prestigious design school where the idea was ?If you are here, you are so important, the rest of the world doesn’t count.? Not a single person from that school that I…
Thousands of patients in NHS hospitals are being forced to watch television for up to 15 hours a day… Matt Durcan, an IT specialist, said he complained to staff at North Hampshire Hospital after he was unable to turn off the TV set beside his son’s bed. —NHS patients ‘forced to watch TV’ (BBC) Didn’t these…
Saint-Exupéry disappeared on a solo flight in July 1944 while photographing southern France in preparation for an Allied landing there. Just one year before, the 44-year-old veteran pilot had published The Little Prince, which went on to become one of the best-loved books of all time. —‘Little Prince’ author’s plane wreck found after 6 decades…
Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games…. Rosser has developed a course called Top Gun, in which surgical trainees warm up their…
Infocom is long gone, but never mind. The original Infocom games are available for download at www.latz.org, and also for free play through AIM. A Web programmer named Andrew Baio has written an “AIM bot” that makes it possible. Bots are simple programs that act like a human being who’s subscribed to an instant messaging…
The hand is the great symbol of man the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes text files.…
“You feel like you’re the guy wearing the red shirt on Star Trek,” says Kirwin, referring to characters who often died on the TV show. He helped train his replacements in 2002. “It’s a very unpleasant situation. It’s unfair. These people appeared, and they’d sit and shadow us and watch what we do.” —Stephanie Armour…
Unfortunately the economics of journalism push it into entertainment. Opinions (called columns) are cheaper than news as on columnist can crank out an opinion (based on the news of others) every day without leaving the office. Editorials ditto. Big colour pictures are cheap. Add a few token journalists that crawl around writing “in depth” stories…
Now the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, Brinker is the E.F. Hutton of the breast-cancer world. When she speaks, anyone who’sanyone listens. Brinker relies on the blockbuster PR value of the 5K Race for the Cure. The year-round calendar of cancer walks that draw grief-stricken yet hopeful patients and their loved ones, along with a fawning…
Here at work, one of my co-workers captured a screenshot of the blue screen of death and made that his screensaver. I’m wondering if it is to make people feel bad for him, because if he is behind on a project and his screensaver comes on, then you think ‘poor guy is going to lose…
Lawley is not alone in looking to blogs as a potential escape from the “course as online powerpoint slide” stranglehold of today’s commercial course management systems. Charles Lowe of Cyberdash.com recently published an account of his own experience using open source weblogs (PostNuke) to support his online writing class; in a companion piece he compares…
Say, how do you feel about ice cream? Fan of the ice cream? Maybe it’ll help soften the punch of Quality Inn’s video game assortment. You’ve got three different kinds of ice cream bars to choose from, and they’ll only cost you a buck and a half each. Finally, Atlantic City has a stereotypical bargain…
Looking back I am amazed that Mary and I have made it this far, both of us laboring as freelance writers, and nothing but. There is the constant danger of work running out, and from time to time it has. Once due to the harassment of the aforementioned child support authorities. However, we’ve always found…
The study raised new questions about the teaching of history after it found that 11 per cent of the British population believed Hitler did not exist and 9 per cent said Winston Churchill was fictional. A further 33 per cent believed Mussolini was not a real historical figure…. Some 27 per cent of people interviewed…
What I Need The power cord for my rechargeable razor didn’t make it back from my last trip. The shaver has lost the last of its charge, and I will be quite stubbly for the forseeable future. Wal-Mart and Sears are no help… It’s time to make a trip to the dollar store. Similar:We Got…
Blanche tells Mitch about her husband. They were only teenagers when they married. The boy was beautiful, sensitive, and talented. She eloped with him, not realizing that the boy needed her help. She “discovered” his secret in the worst possible way: she found him in bed with someone else. Afterward, everyone pretended that nothing had…
All of these tracks were then installed into a device known as, appropriately enough, a laugh machine. | This 28-inch-high apparatus resembles an organ, having 10 horizontal and four vertical keys and a foot pedal. The engineer “orchestrates” the laugh track by using the keyboard to select the type, sex, and age of the laugh,…
Stan Wagon, a mathematician at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has a bicycle with square wheels. It’s a weird contraption, but he can ride it perfectly smoothly. His secret is the shape of the road over which the wheels roll. Stan Wagon rides his square-wheeled trike over a special roadway. Courtesy of Stan —Riding…