Viruses, Worms: What's in a Name?

There are the always-in-fashion temptresses — DeepThroat, Hooker, FunLove, Love Letter, NakedWife, Paradise — and the ones that seem to refer to the person who created the worm: Annoying, Brat, Coma, Faker, Glitch, SadHound, Slacker, Small, TheThing and Yo Momma. And there are also names that seem to make no sense at all: Gokar, Klez,…

Teen's Felony Case Thrown Out

The case of an Oklahoma teen who was charged with a felony for writing a violent short story about attacking his school has been dismissed by a judge who ruled that prosecutors failed to prove the teen actually intended to commit the act. —Kim Zetter —Teen’s Felony Case Thrown Out  (Wired) A turning point in…

A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism

Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of “cut-and-paste” plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior…

The Secret Life of Bees: A Reflection

The Secret Life of Bees: A Reflection This year the incoming freshman class was asked to read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel set in the deep south during the summer of 1964. Faculty, staff, resident assistants, and anyone else who wanted to lead a discussion was given a free…

Two Years of Gibberish: The garbled utterances of the left after 9/11 merely flattered the arguments of warmongers.

The Enlightenment knew what to say about religions, all of them: “Écrasez l?infame!” In the 19th century, the progressive party believed that one of the reasons for European superiority over the benighted regions of Asia and Africa was the conquest of superstition. | Today, credulous doting on Islam is not just an expression of western…

What Does a Professor Do All Day, Anyway?

We hear it echoed in recent debates over the ways professors spend their time. What do we do all that time when we’re not pontificating? Surely it can’t take all that time to write the lectures we deliver. Surely there can’t be that many books in our fields worth reading. The only logical solution that some people can draw…

Cave-Exploring Couple Nearly Eaten by Grues

Hadar, whose age wasn’t available, and DeCrow, 49, went into Hubbards Cave in Glenwood Canyon on the afternoon of Aug. 24 with flashlights but no food or water, said DeCrow’s daughter, Ramiah DeCrow. | Their flashlight batteries died and the pair couldn’t find their way out, the daughter said. —Cave-Exploring Couple Nearly Eaten by Grues (Wired…

I Dreamed about Mama Last Night

I watched my mom — a woman with three Master’s degrees, in library science, comparative literature, and management and public policy; a woman who was fluent in French and German and did her Stanford undergraduate senior thesis on Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger — lose her mind over the course of two years. She was…

Building a Time Machine by Spam

The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message’s author were an “Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement” and an “AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor.” —Brian…

Rescuing My Manuscript

With great anticipation, I contacted the project manager — let’s call him A.H. — who would copy-edit my manuscript and, I genuinely hoped, find ways to improve it. I had no idea things could go so wrong. as he kept the schedule. … For the book to be published on schedule, I would have needed…

“I moved away bravely because I did not want to be blown up.” –Peter Jerz, age 5, playing “Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter.” Similar:I am not in the splash zone but still definitely out of my comfort zone. Support the arts …I am not in the splash zone but still de…AmusingWhy I Still BlogI…

Nerds and Geeks

—Nerds and Geeks (Kairosnews) Over on KairosNews, blacklily8 playfully taunts editor Charlie, “Can you tell me what the difference is between a geek a nerd? You seem to be the expert!“ I had a minute before heading home for the day, and thus spake Google: http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=geek http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=nerd The Jargon Lexicon notes that the word “nerd” probably…