“[M]y first reaction was to abdicate and let the editor wield the knife. But that impulse quickly passed. If anyone was going to cut my story, it was going to be me, as painful as I knew it was going to be.” Chip Scanlan learns about brevity. —Surgery Without Pain: A Tale of RevisionPoynter Online)…
Trent Lott comes to mind, when we consider the permanence of a celebrity/politician’s statements, of course. Few of us who were alive in 1980 have to be concerned that any of our statements from that year will come back to haunt us, let alone some of our more obscure comments, aimed at audiences that we…
“But since many bloggers have no background in publishing, they often come to the medium unaware of the rules that apply, and complaints are becoming more common. Many people publish [weblogs] as if they were untouchable, assuming that because what they write appears in a virtual world, it won’t come back to burn them in…
“In the real world, everything you put into space is going to be visible to visitors by default. The designer of the space has to choose to hide something. With an information space, everything is hidden by default. The only parts of the space visitors can see are those the designer has chosen to reveal.”…
Charley XWell-punished laughter,Token of a child’s longing:Beehive disappoints. —Star Trek HaikuWeasel Breweries) This page presents every episode of classic Star Trek, reduced to a single haiku. Thanks for the link, Rosemary. Hey… there’s no haiku for “Turnabout Intruder”. I’ll fix that… His gold-tunic’d bodEnraptures Dr. JaniceShe swaps hers for his Similar:This is about half of…
“Freshman Bobby Berg says he sought out UW-Stout this year because he knew he would be assigned a laptop computer. What he didn’t know is that most of his freshman classes aren’t structured around the computers as Berg initially thought. ‘We don’t use them hardly at all,’ Berg said.” —UW-Stout students find laptops helpful, but…
“The future is now. My pocket video camera stores hundreds of images on a single plastic stick of gum. My mobile phone means I’m reachable virtually anywhere I go. I have hundreds of digital TV channels beamed to me from space. I can communicate with millions of people in one go through this weblog –…
“Now, before you call me Ebeneezer Scrooge or jump all over my my seeming lack of Christmas spirit, let me just say that Christmas is far and away my favorite holiday and the source of some of my best memories. But these are just plain bad….” Place your children’s stuffed animals under the tree as…
“They noticed in a citation database that misprints in references are fairly common, and that a lot of the mistakes are identical. This suggests that many scientists take short cuts, simply copying a reference from someone else’s paper rather than reading the original source.” —Scientists Exposed as Sloppy ReportersNew Scientist) This one is going to…
“Like Shakespeare, or many of the greatest writers, [P. G.] Wodehouse is violently cavalier with English grammar. The dictionary will tell you that ‘window’ is a noun, ‘small’ is an adjective, ‘Fred’ is a proper noun. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra sees herself ‘window’d in great Rome’; Hardy has a figure which ‘smalls into the distance’; a character…
You may have heard that an early version of computer translation software took the input “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” and changed it to “The whisky is strong, but the meat is foul.” Or maybe it was “Out of sight, out of mind” translated to “Invisible idiot.” Or maybe the mistranlsated…
“Internet-based surveys, although still in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail methods. Based on evidence in the literature and real-life case studies, this book examines the validity of those claims.” Matthias Schonlau, Ronald D. Fricker,…
“[T]he command bridge of the Enterprise? Give me a break. Does it have to look like the control room of low-wattage Midwestern TV station? All those little blinking lights? What, is there a fly-into-space knob that has to be set to ON to get the thing to move? Then the fly-into-space light lights up, so…
“The unlikely chain of circumstances that would make Braille possible began during the Crusades with King Louis the Ninth of France. Already a religious man, Louis met a crushing defeat in the Crusades, barely escaping death. He returned to Paris certain that God was trying to teach him humility. This belief intensified his interest in…
“Submit late. This is the basic rule in having your abstract ejected. Don’t even start writing it until the deadine for submission is long past. Prove trivial results in exhaustive detail, breaking your proofs into as many lemmas as ou can and disrupting the line of reasoning with notes, remarks, and asides. On the other…
A series of pictures describing how usability professionals would handle the “blinking 12:00” VCR problem. Quite amusing. —Usability Review of a VCRUsabilityMustDie.com) Similar:Overheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool …AcademiaYork Corpus Christi Play Simulator Screencast (PSim 2.1; D.G. Jerz)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwNv1lx3…AcademiaOh, No. YouTube is Deleting Videos.Oh…
“[E]very word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Mary McCarthy’s famous quip about Lillian Hellman is the inspiration for Nora Ephron’s play “Imaginary Friends.” Dick Cavett suggests that the wrath of Hellman eventually destroyed the health of both women. —Lillian, Mary and MeNew Yorker) Similar:On Office Hours and Student Contact at…
“For the first hour, all the opening doors on the Enterprise are accompanied by a nice door-opening sound effect stolen from Star Trek. But by this point in the movie, the Turkish audio engineers have lost interest. Now whenever someone walks into a room, somebody off camera makes the sound ‘swwwsh!’ with their mouth two…
“We recognize the capacity of digital instruments to simulate so many of our elements and forms of living, and thinking, and imagining. But just because the book has been our simulation machine of choice for centuries, we need to study and understand it now more than ever — not as a place of retreat, but…
I admit it… once I started stumbling across my own name on the Internet, I began using Google to find out who has linked to me and how my visibility compares to that of other people whose names I come across. Now Userati automates all that pesky ego-surfing, and even quantifies the result. Userati uses…