No matter how digital the electronics got, the companies that made the gadgets were still stovepiped; suites of devices worked in perfect harmony – as long as they all wore the same corporate logo. If you managed to force a Sony receiver to work with a Panasonic TV, you lived in a rat’s nest of…
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a…
Doctor Who is to get a Buffy-style sidekick when he makes his TV return. His new colleague will be a modern action heroine, according to writer Russell T Davies, who is reviving the sci-fi series for the BBC in 2005. —Buffy ‘inspires Doctor sidekick’ (BBC) While the screaming girly female companion is part of the Dr.…
It’s been an interesting and very rewarding nine months bringing a bit of entertainment to bloggers (and blog lovers). I’d like to thank especially all those people who donated money or their valuable time, those who became premium subscribers, those who worked on cool toys which made use of the fledgling API and all those…
She does say that people who put an apostrophe in the wrong place, when they ought to know better, deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave, but it’s probably mostly in fun. —Oliver Pritchett reviews Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by…
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns –…
If Michael Jackson did not have all his surgery over the years, this is how he might look at the age of 45. —Michael Jackson Aging (ForArtist.com) Click the link to see the images… I’m too lazy to make thumbnails tonight. Similar:Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels If it were possible to build a digit…BooksTexture…
America’s higher education system is facing a crisis. Decades of dramatically increasing costs, in both good economic times and bad, are threatening to push the dream of college out of reach for millions of students and families. —College Cost Central: A Resource for Parents, Students, & Taxpayers Fed Up With the High Cost of Higher…
Dellavalle’s concerns reflect those of a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. | Another study, published…
If students cannot find the answers but must make the answers, they are less apt to pass off others’ ideas as their own. The secret is to pose or ask students to pose questions or problems and decisions which have never been adequately answered. —Jamie McKenzie —The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery…
There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, “just blow us away.” We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different…
Dear Professor Jerz, Associate Vice-President Rodd Webb has forwarded me your concerns about the reproduction of your work on a York based website without proper citation. I am writing first of all to apologize for York’s delay in responding to your concerns. The essay has now been removed from the website, and the issue of plagiarism…
My son wants a plastic pie for Christmas.Literacy Weblog) Our toy kitchen has one plastic pie, but my son Peter wants another one, so that he and I can pretend to have a pie fight like the one in The Great Race. He has asked Santa on two different occasions (once at church, once in…
It’s a peculiarity of scholarly life that everyone is expected to be able to deliver a lecture well, but almost no one is trained to do it….If you put your bulleted ideas up on slides, your audience will look at the slides, not at you. You’ll also be teaching them that What You Have to…
Making Slow Progress on MT ResurrectionLiteracy Weblog) Dave my ISP has made a copy of the whole blogs.setonhill.edu website the way it was this morning, and backed up the last working version of the site (from about five days ago, when comments stopped working). Already I’ve gotten five e-mails from bloggers reporting that they can’t…
Hugh Kenner, the literary critic who died on Monday aged 80, wrote on subjects as diverse as geodesic mathematics, the cartoons of Chuck Jones (creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd) and the effect of modern technology on literary imagery; he was best known, however, as a leading authority on American and Irish…
Our MoveableType Installation Should be Renamed StuckTypeLiteracy Weblog) Drat, drat, drat, and darn! I’m sorry to report that blogs.setonhill.edu is even more busted now; apparently since about noon today it’s been impossible to post new entries. I feel sick to my stomach about the terrible timing — especially for those students whose blogging portfolios are…
In one of the most secretive presidential trips in American history, George W. Bush flew to Baghdad under intense security on Wednesday to spend Thanksgiving with United States troops and to thank them for standing up against the “band of thugs and assassins” they are fighting in Iraq. —Elizabeth Bumiller —On Secret Iraq Trip, Bush…
INTJ – “Mastermind”. Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population. Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test INTJ: Mastermind I think the Myers-Briggs Personality Test is copyrighted material, so I wonder about the legality of this online version. Found via Kate Cielinski…
Tomorrow (Thursday) will be Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S. — a time for turkey feasts and family gatherings. I’ll probably blog a bit when I get the chance, but I’m also preparing syllabi for next semester. I’ll be teaching the second half of “Seminar in Thinking in Writing,” a course in “Media Aesthetics” (the…