“Writing requires quiet and reflection, and that’s something that quite scares most people anymore. They’ll do almost anything to avoid being alone with their own thoughts. | It also takes a familiarity, a facility, with the written language which many people lack because they’ve never learned to read very well, if at all…. I’ve had…
“Myst is not a novel or a feature film, it is instead a different sort of creation whose nearest non-electronic relative may be diorama. Any approach to this work must take account of this fundamental difference from familiar forms. World matters more here than characters or conflict, and in Myst the world is suffused with,…
“No doubt the English language, which survived “groovy,” is sturdy enough to withstand this. | But are the kids? | If they don’t learn how to use the written word to communicate the kind of complex concepts that the colonists wanted to convey to King George, they may well find themselves speechless when the course…
“I was in an ideal location at an observatory in Hampshire, England, where in the pale light of the pre-dawn, I gathered with a few other enthusiasts to watch the event. | A transit of Mercury is a rare thing. These days it is of no great scientific importance, but it is fascinating to watch…
“Okay, now the big question: Do we turn this student in? (has anyone already?) I think the idea of having your work reviewed by a large viewing public is cool, especially if it helps enforce better scholarly standards. That is one thing no one ever mentions when they talk about online journals–the ease with which…
“Infogrames bought the right to the Atari name when it bought toy maker Hasbro’s Hasbro Interactive division. Hasbro got it from JTS in 1998. JTS, in turn, bought Atari in 1996. Before then, Atari had many owners, including AOL Time Warner, known as Warner Communications back then. Warner bought Atari in the early 1980s, splitting…
“I suppose from my perspective I don’t really care what people think. If I say it’s not fiction, then that’s just part of the hoax. If I say it is, I’m just covering up to stay safe (both of these possibilities have been suggested). If I don’t give details it’s because this is an elaborate…
“Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It’s easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers. | Unfortunately, beautiful things…
“Hannas draws on a raft of data about Asian scientific research practices, technology piracy and graduate study abroad, all intended to show that Asians are brilliant imitators but poor innovators, adept at borrowing and improving on Western science but not so skilled at making advances themselves…. he cites a Japanese Nobel laureate in medicine, Susumu…
“Regardless of motive, the race to patent the SARS virus has revived the debate about the ethics of a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1980 that cleared the way for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to award patents for living things, most notably individual human genes.” —Researchers Race to Patent SARS VirusAP/Daily Press)…
“Instead of firing hundreds of deadly .223-caliber bullets, the soldiers fired sponge-tipped rounds?40mm-wide canisters capped with green high- density foam, shot from rifle-mounted launchers. One of these hit the man who threw the rock at Brown. He screamed, threw his hands to his face, and bolted in the opposite direction. ‘The nonlethal rounds achieved a…
“Through the interlocked network of weblogs, information can spread like wildfire. Very few blogs have a large audience – the largest, Instapundit, attracts only some tens of thousands of readers. But the network of weblogs forms a set of interlocking communities, so that on the whole, a new idea or a link to a new…
“The facilitator wasn’t giving up on her blame-the-white-Republicans theme, however. ‘But why should we have to go to prison to get help?’ she asked petulantly. The sex convict stood his ground. ‘I was one of those that got rescued,’ he replied. ‘I was raised twisted: raping women, stealing?that was normal. I had to go to…
“The 3-year-old website offers dozens of love letter templates covering various aspects of relationships, including love at first sight, Internet courtship, apologies, long-distance, drifting apart, breakups and even secret romances. | Subscribers to the site, who pay an annual rate of $40, can download a letter, add their own personal touches and send it to…
“The drill follows a similar exercise three years ago that focused on how well authorities would respond to the release of a deadly disease like smallpox, and whether putting entire cities under quarantine would lead to national panic. | But that drill came a year before the attacks of September 11. This exercise is intended…
“Today, United States district court judge, Florence-Marie Cooper, will hear the latest arguments in one of the most drawn out cases in show business legal history. On the result of the case hang billions of dollars in revenue for Walt Disney Co in what has become the case of the Mouse – Disney’s nickname in…
Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it’s still hard to grasp just how much a “billion” really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer…
“‘Have you ever noticed how much Hillary Clinton looks like [Star Trek’s] Nurse Chapel?!!!’ Beagle, our ironically-named gopher, was dispatched to find photo evidence. When it came back there was sure, incontrovertable proof of the rightness of this designation.” —BILL AND….. HILLARY!Astrea) Rosemary Frezza writes: “I saw a picture of Nurse Chapel from the animated…
“For more than a decade, the consumer electronics and technology industries have awaited the collision of media that would bring television, the computer, the video-game console and the stereo into one tidy convergence box.|Turns out, we’ve been looking in the wrong place. Convergence has already happened — inside the minds of kids who’ve grown up…
“Writing for the Web requires careful planning. Your content needs to fit well within the context of your website. When a reader finds your content, they need to be able to scan it quickly. That’s what metadata is about. In order for your website to be found, you need to write for how people search.”…