Rewatching ST:DS9 Odo walks stiffly into the infirmary, where Bashir scolds him for not taking better care of his recently-acquired humanoid body. Quark presents a bottle with what he says is a dead changeling. Odo, entranced, says it’s alive. Bashir manages to mostly unflabbergast the creature’s cellular jimberjams, and there is certainly no plot significance…
Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and even people who intentionally break the law, are less likely to kill people with their cars. On 22 May 1997, the Swedish government presented Bill 1996/97:137 to parliament. It cemented zero deaths as a long-term goal for road fatalities. It reiterated that…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…
As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about Marshall McLuhan here, a bit of Harold Innis there… Blogging this so I keep this in mind the next time I teach a course like The History and Future of the Book. (There’s so much out there!) [S]ome media are…
Rewatching ST:DS9 In a cave (again with the caves), a pleasant-looking Bajoran monk welcomes guests to a “days of atonement” retreat, and is zapped by a beam of light. In the infirmary, the very pregnant Kira, griping comically that the herbs she’s been prescribed mean sedatives don’t work, learns that Latha, formerly a violent member…
This morning, after students submitted a homework assignment (a 200-word evidence-based argument paragraph), I asked them to annotate a printout of the instructions (including a rubric), had them peer-review their own submission, and then had them write additional annotations on the assignment sheet, in which they stated what changes they now realized they needed to…
Given that they need to write multiple stories a day, while also appearing on podcasts and 24-hour news channels, lobby journalists cannot plausibly understand policy detail or how financial markets work. It’s also not what they’re good at. Their skillset is to nose around and cause trouble. If you want a scandal covered or to…
About 20 of us are here in Brooklyn to play a large-scale war game — think Risk — but we’re also each assigned a character, which is a bit like Dungeons & Dragons. We’re told it’s Jan. 6, 2021. We’re given rows and rows of hand-painted mini-figures, a bowl of dice, and a measuring stick showing how far…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira is moved by the interest Sisko shows in an artifact recently recovered from the Cardassians. After a classic “zoom in and enhance” scene where Sisko uses a reflection to unlock an archaeological mystery, a technobabble accident flabbergasts Sisko’s neural jimberjams, which Bashir says will likely give him heightened sensory experiences for a…
I had fun recording this in the studio — with live foley artists! Similar:Playwright #AugustWilson Takes Center Stage on U.S. Postal Service Commemorative Forever …https://twitter.com/USPS/status/13548292…CultureOn the spiral staircase that leads from the top deck down to the officers' pub and wa…AestheticsI felt a great disturbance in the Fandom”…as if millions of voices suddenly cr…AestheticsA few…
Here’s my letter responding to an recent article about the future of the student newspaper I advised for over two decades. A pause. The Seton Hill University student paper is on what my English department colleagues described in a recent email as “indefinite hiatus.” At the time, we didn’t know for how long. I was…
Full version Similar:Advice for My Conservative StudentsA professor who had been a conservative …AcademiaEnterprise-D Blueprints As a newlywed, when my in-laws were …BooksIf in question, have more GOOD than BAD? University of Georgia Student Journalists Walk Ou…My students and colleagues sometimes won…AcademiaTrump, halting his own policy: "I didn’t like sight of families being separated."…
Similar:Do you get your news mostly from social media? I check NPR, Drudge, and news.google.com.Do you have a regular news-consumption r…CultureEveryone wants to save the world, but no one wants to help Mom do the dishes.CultureCNN fires Chris CuomoThis is what an ethical news organizatio…Current_EventsGetting in the Christmas spirit.PersonalA college tells faculty it's illegal to…
I felt like a capitalist, buying in bulk on the cheap and selling individual books for $2 (about a 20-cent profit, per book, but I’m really rounding up so I don’t have to deal with change). Students will spend time in class annotating printouts and writing in their copybooks. They’ll still do online activities but…
Similar:Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, dies aged 89Harper Lee, whose 1961 novel To Kill a M…BooksThe Emma Watson nude pictures hoax shames our ‘news’ cultureDid you hear that a shady group of antis…CultureDress rehearsal of The NutcrackerPersonalAbove the Forward Ops conference platform we see the chief engineer's station and a glimps…AestheticsGreen /…
In the halls of power at Amazon, busy executives have no time for PowerPoints. At the start of a meeting, everyone gets a printed 6-page memo, and spends 20-25 minutes reading it silently and marking it up. After the discussion, the printouts (typically with detailed hand-written comments) are handed back to the person who called…
This sort of thing was funnier back in 2017. Similar:Haiku'da Been a Spam FilterLatest weapon against junk e-mail: poetr…CybercultureIn education, Apple must augment the reality of the cheap notebookIn 2012, Apple tried to position iPads a…CybercultureMultimodal Composing, Sketchnotes, and Idea GenerationUsing the mixed media of sketch notes, a…AcademiaHow Literature Became Word Perfect There can be…
Carving out some time to enjoy this show as I prep to teach the Pittsburgh Cycle @SetonHill Similar:Fox lawyers Convince Judge that Fox's Tucker Carlson is "not stating actual facts" and "an…To defend Fox personality Tucker Carlson…CultureWhat to Do With a B.A. in English?Some good tips on what to say about your…AcademiaThe Skin of Our…
I’m also thinking of the cost to the students who have to repeat a course or fail out of a demanding program because they couldn’t AI their way to a passing grade. “People use it much more than we expected,” the cofounder wrote, later adding in response to another user that he “personally chose the price and…
It was not that hard to leave Twitter. I removed the app from my phone and followed a lot of journalists and professionals on Bluesky. I still checked Twitter on my laptop, but not every day. Then one day when X asked me for my password to log back in, I decided not to bother.…