Twice in the last 10 minutes, people have interrupted me with telephone calls, once to admonish me for missing a meeting and again to remind me about another one this afternoon. My syllabus isn’t quite done yet but a student has just e-mailed me for a copy of it. The computer in my office is…
Everyone should agree that good AI certainly creates more enjoyable games (see Barney in Half-Life). This is probably a correlative of the fact that bad AI ruins some games. But query: does smart AI create better communities? | Of course, real-life bots are the subject of a vast amount of pop literature. Asimov is a…
Well, after hours and hours and hours and hours and hours….of work, I’ve finally found a css layout that: Allows the weblog content to appear in the html file before the menu. I don’t know if this will actually help – see * below. Is about 60% the size of your original index.jsp file (mostly…
We write on paper, but we write to a magnetic disk (or tape). Part of what the preposition contributes here is a sense of interiority; because we cannot see anything on its surface, the disk is linguistically refigured as a volumetric receptacle, a black box with a closed lid. —Matthew G. Kirshcenbaum —Write To (MGK) Thus…
I add entries to various writing-charts like an accountant keeps a ledger book (and I do keep a ledger or sorts, too, for all my writing income and expenses). Why? Because no one else will…. There are lists that everyone should keep and others that some of just keep because we’re odd. To each his…
1. You think everyone cares about your opinions: They don’t. They care about mine. 8. You will stop having normal conversations with family and friends: Real life conversations will go like this. “Oh, hey, I saw So-And-So in concert and the weirdest thing happened…” Friend, “Yeah, I know, I read about it on your blog.”…
An armed man took students and a teacher hostage Wednesday in a classroom at Dyersburg State Community College in Dyersburg, Tennessee, officials said. | The group is being held in a classroom on the upper floor of the campus administration building… –CNN —Students, teacher taken hostage (CNN) What a nightmare… “The chief said the man claimed…
It wasn’t until the package arrived last week that the secret was revealed. The man who sold Kunath the cookie jar was a brother he has never met. —Quest for cookie jar leads to long-lost brother (Orlando Sentinel) That’s a wonderful story, but that’s one ugh-lee cookie jar. Similar:Another 10 sq cm of details for a…
Media conglomerate AOL Time Warner plans to drop “AOL” from its corporate name on Thursday, according to reports. — Reuters —AOL Time Warner drops ‘AOL’ from name (News.com) One more bit of Internet silliness becomes a subject for a future history lesson. It was a wild ride while it lasted (which was, unfortuantely for AOL Time…
The Buckner brothers had no criminal record or any history of trouble-making. In court last month, they pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. They were sentenced to indefinite detention. District Attorney General Al Schmutzer told the court: “They said they got the idea from a video game called Grand Theft Auto…
I don’t want to just sit here and begin talking about how I have been writing all of my life and how I have kept a diary for years, so I won’t, I will simply begin my first weblog entry, by saying, “I am stepping into new territory, and I do not know the ins…
Dracula was not a misunderstood man, as the Coppola [movie] version, and the Badham/Langella version, and the Palance version, and on, and on, would have us believe. | And the novel suggests no such thesis. Actually, the best proof of this comes from within the novel, as Dracula feeds a baby– a live baby– to…
—Best of ‘Stealth Disco’ (Stealth Disco) “Stealth Disco” is the practice of creeping up behind an unsuspecting co-worker and dancing silently, to imaginary music. It is apparently a rite of passage that takes the form of semi-affectionate mocking — a way of saying “Look at how square that poor working slob is… I’m having fun instead.”…
One famous case involved two pupils who had left 40 death threats on a teacher’s telephone answering machine. After being expelled by the headteacher, they were readmitted on appeal. It is extreme cases such as this, and the fact that a third of newly qualified teachers are leaving the profession after three years, that have…
In other words, Madonna’s just a poor little rich girl, and the rest of us only pick on her because we’re jealous. There may be something to that. But it doesn’t make her first book for children (“even grown-up ones,” she suggests on the jacket — ever the crossover artist) any less meretricious, cynical or…
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a…
Narratives are the border. Nevertheless, as we talk about stories in my college classroom, I find that references to mainstays such as Star Trek and Star Wars are more difficult to sustain. Not because these items are old or out of date, but because the people with whom I speak have such diverse habits and…
People listen to the average CD many more times than they watch a DVD. Yet CDs are languishing in stores and DVDs are flying off the shelves. How to see this other than sheer music industry incompetence? —Michael Booth —Recording Industry’s Missteps (Denver Post) Similar:Teaching Composition with Interactive FictionI’m on a committee that is exploring a…
”Dalton McGuinty: He’s an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet,” said a release from Eves’s campaign headquarters, e-mailed to news organizations across the province on Friday morning in the latest, and oddest, Tory attack on the Liberal leader…. ”I think someone either had way too much coffee this morning or had way too much time,”…
Professor Leif Salford, who headed the research at Sweden’s prestigious Lund University, says “the voluntary exposure of the brain to microwaves from hand-held mobile phones” is “the largest human biological experiment ever”. And he is concerned that, as new wireless technology spreads, people may “drown in a sea of microwaves”. — Geoffrey Lean —Mobiles ‘make…