Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain…. “My pain when the nurse is changing my bandages is consistently extreme… But during the time I was in VR, I was pretty much unaware that the nurse was even working on my…
I can still taste the beer. I say this is a whole new kind of tired not because of the physical effects of my hangover. Believe me, that’s not new at all. What’s new is that I’m tired of this kind of tired. I’m tired of being fuzzy for the first half of each day.…
—Star Trek Action Figure Collection (NubiNubsUniverse.com) The really sad thing: I recognize most of these characters. Okay, the aliens from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” sort of blend into one another, but for the classic series, the episodes have been so firmly imprinted on my brain for decades that I can name most of the characters…
The L.A. Times (‘free’ registration required–thus my extensive quoting) has story about how: the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes. Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a “service” and it is illegal to perform services for embargoed…
—Technovelgy: Inventions from Science Fiction Novels and Books There’s no good blurb on this site, but it features news of technological advances that have been predicted in science-fiction. For instance, here’s the listing of real inventions first mentioned in Fahrenheit 451. Pretty cool. Similar:The Nagus (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 11) Quark is named…
[O]n Feb. 20, 1954 — President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to a nearby Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens. Or maybe not. Maybe Ike just went to the dentist. There’s some dispute about this. —Peter Carlson —Ike and the alien ambassadors (M$ NBC)…
Computers and Composition Online is the refereed online companion journal to Computers and Composition: An International Journal, now in its 21st year and published by Elsevier. Our goal is to be a significant online resource for scholar-teachers interested in the impact of new and emerging media upon the teaching of language and literacy in both…
Leadholder can be broadly defined as any durable instrument that is designed to hold and be refillable with consumable pieces of graphite so that the graphite can be conveniently used for drawing or writing. Within this definition there are subsets such as porte-crayons, mechanical pencils, and drafting leadholders. This website is primarily concerned with drafting…
All of this carrying on is fine, but if Spike really wants shows men like to watch, they’ve missed a few great concepts. Here are ten new programs that appeal to real men: The Explosion Show – Every week, the hosts fill some interesting object with black powder and then, well, you get the idea……
A 40-plus-year-old A-list actor pondering whether or not to appear in a game? Heck, even Roger Moore would have been loathe to actively participate in what was once the perceived domain of momma’s boys. “Traditionally, Hollywood signed away rights without any expertise or any idea of the plot lines,” said industry analyst P.J. McNealy. Several…
“Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.” — Rosalind, As You Like ItAs You LIke It @ Seton Hill UniversityJerz’s Literacy Weblog) I asked students in three of my classes to attend Seton Hill University’s production of As You Like It. I thought the casting was very well done. With her hair pulled back in a…
The magnitude of these effects is also somewhat alarming. The best estimate of the effect size of exposure to violent video games on aggressive behaviour is about 0.26 (Fig. 2). This is larger than the effect of condom use on decreased HIV risk, the effect of exposure to passive smoke at work and lung cancer,…
More than 150 Lego builders and collectors converged on Portland over the Presidents Day weekend for BrickFest PDX, a celebration of all things Lego. While plenty of individual work is on display, the big draw is the chance to interact with like-minded folks…. In one of the smaller conference rooms, a team of 10 guys,…
Email newsletters continue to be one of the most important ways to communicate with customers on the Internet. Newsletters build relationships with users, and also offer users an added social benefit in that they can forward relevant newsletters to friends and colleagues. Still, users are highly critical of newsletters that waste their time, and often…
[O]bjective achievements in the arts are demonstrable?and if they can be historically established for the arts, then they are even more clearly identifiable for the sciences. These two spheres of human endeavor represent two kinds of potential objectivity: there is as little chance of the human race giving up Homer or the Beethoven symphonies as…
Conference ConundrumsJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Hooray… I just heard that I got near-full funding for both Princeton videogame conference (where I’ll be presenting a paper on Will Crowther’s original “Adventure”) and the San Antonio 4C-s (where my paper topic is “Forced Blogging: Students’ Emotional Investment in their Academic Weblogs”). Because the 4C’s is a long conference…
Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web, and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the “Dark Web,” the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized. The Library of Congress has about 19 million books…
<> !*”#^”`$$-!*=@$_%*<> ~#4&[]../|{,,SYSTEM HALTED Translation: “Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash, Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash, Bang splat equal at dollar under-score, Percent splat waka waka tilde number four, Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash, Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.” —Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese —Stuck Shift Key Poetry (Net Funny) This interesting bit…
She asked how I was adjusting to the “difficult” corporate world after coming from the “less stressful” academic world. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Let’s see: I’m only working five days a week. At night, I am not furiously preparing a lecture for the next day. And I…
With the media opera R.U.R., we want to appreciate the Czech author Karel Capek (Czechia’s Goethe) and his importance for the European cultural expression. It is he who in R.U.R. used for the first time the expression robot, derivated of the Russian word “robota” = work. R.U.R. is a classic of science fiction literature and…