This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For months I’ve been looking at my own simulated crowds from a similar angle and I was a bit disoriented.

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My crowd simulation handles 2000 capsule NPCs at 130fps. I’m really pushing my coding skills.

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Jesus Christ Superstar

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For the Uniform #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 13) Sisko pursues former Federation officer Eddington

Rewatching ST:DS9 In a cave (again with the caves) Sisko, in civilian clothes, seeks an informer, but is instead met by the rogue security officer Eddington, who uses the plight of the refugees in the cave to justify his treason against Starfleet. Eddington claims the moral high ground, but Sisko is unimpressed. Eddington beams away…

Midterm Grades Spring 2025: Posted!

I planned ahead pretty well this term. I like the pace in all my classes.

The Dog and the Oyster (Aesop Fable)

I always enjoy my visits to the studio. This recording was a quick one!

MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibility

After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading. I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat…

The Begotten #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 12) Kira and Odo face surrogacy

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…

More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent them

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…

Stapler jam during a midterm exam.

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…

The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)

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…

The Darkness and the Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 11) A serial killer targets Kira’s former resistance colleagues

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…

Is AI making us less intelligent?

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…

The press lobby is going feral—ignore it

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…

January 6th … the board game?

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…

Rapture #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 10) Sisko’s “visions” complicate politics, faith and family

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…

Selling Point (Audio Drama)

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Letter to the editor: Setting record straight on Seton Hill newspaper

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…

Don’t Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)

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Hey there, chaotic world in academia and beyond, could you settle down just a bit so I can mark these papers on August Wilson? Thanks!

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