—Playmobil Security Checkpoint (Playmobil||Metafilter) I’m not sure what I think of this. It’s far better than plastic grenades to strap around your waist. By the way, the site designers make it extremely hard to link to an internal page… I guess they don’t want much inbound traffic. Link goes to MetaFilter’s page on the subject. Similar:My…
Back in the 1960s a model of color vision propounded by the late Russell L. De Valois, a Berkeley psychologist, had been interpreted as establishing that the categories red, yellow, green and blue were hardwired into the brain. That interpretation, however, fell apart after the model failed to predict the mix of frequencies that the…
Computer games represent one of the fastest-growing, most profitable entertainment businesses. Making movies, by contrast, is getting tougher and more expensive, now costing, with marketing fees, an average of $103 million a film. That is one reason, among others, that those with power in Hollywood are avidly seeking to get into the game business while…
You are a GRAMMAR GOD! —How Grammatically Sound Are You? (Quizilla) The image is supposed to be of God from Monty Python’s “Holy Grail.” Update: Snagged the image from Amanda‘s copy. Similar:Henry Bemis waited his whole life to finally read a book. Listen to Lynn Venable’s story,…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc3DHCiz…BooksI Regret to Inform You That My Wedding to Captain…
“Capable of navigating the billions of thoughts, experiences, and emotions that make up the human psyche, the new Yahoo soul-search engine helps users find what’s deep inside them quickly and easily,” Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said. “All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past.” —Yahoo…
—After some discussion all the outstanding issues in game studies had been settled. (Barry Atkins | Yahoo! Photos) A great collection of cartoons… I do wish the captions were searchable. This one about a deep space anomaly is also good. Atkins is the video game scholar whose talk at the Princeton video game conference, amplified by…
Most of what is being said regarding blogs in composition has been said before. Looking at the ?Guidelines for Using Journals in School Settings? approved by the NCTE on Commission on Composition on November 28, 1986 drafted by [Toby] Fulwiler, it seems that the basic assumptions of learning through blogging have been stamped as legitimate.…
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…