Somebody who apparently doesn’t care much about copyright laws scanned in all the pages from the first appearance of the comic book hero Superman. —Action Comics #1, 1938 Similar:What Jonson meant by Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek" Jonson famously eulogized Shakespeare …CultureCrowther's Adventure: Tough Memes to Squash Will Crowther, an RPG-er, created th…CultureCrying Myself…
"John Robb, Userland president and COO, has coined a new term for the business blog — K-log, the ‘K’ denoting knowledge. It is so named because it is a tool for capturing and leveraging the knowledge contained in the minds of individual employees…" George Partington —Blogging: Electronic postings and links…nbsp; (WorldCom) Yes, that WorldCom.…
Google has reversed the economy of links; linking to a document makes that document more valuable to page-ranking systems. “The link has a clearer value to B than the content of Bs page has to me or to my readers. I pay B for Bs content with my link.” Jill Walker —Links and Power: The…
"Realizing he hadn’t eaten since lunch, the Ph.D candidate picked up the Burrito Bandito menu. Before he could decide on an order, he instinctively reduced the flyer to a set of shifting, mutable interpretations informed by the set of ideological biases—cultural, racial, economic, and political—that infect all ethnographic and commercial ‘histories.’" —Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out…
"[W]omen have been systematically misled into overestimating their chances of dying of breast cancer in order to prepare them to accept mammography." [A review of the book Reckoning with Risk.] —Crunched by Numbers (The Spectator) Similar:Trump administration gave Courage Award to a woman who criticized Trump, then rescinded th… The State Department revoked a pre…CultureLGN…
Bulwer-Lytton wrote a novel that infamously began, "It was a dark and stormy night." His name lives on in the title of an annual bad fiction contest. This year’s winner: "On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll…
"Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience." (Jon Pareles) —Folklorist Alan Lomax Dies (NY Times) Similar:Victorian Literature for Accounting MajorsIf I can get the English majors…
“Weblogs are growing up…. They’re not yet fully utilized in the news industry, but elsewhere weblogs are a common and widely used new piece in the Internet publishing puzzle.” Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your Newsroom (Poynter Inst.) The social and literary importance of the weblog phenomenon extends far beyond commenting on the news,…
“Usability expertise is mainly an issue of talent and experience rather than theory. Much of usability work requires pattern matching, which is why it’s so dependent on brain power and past experience: Once you observe slight traces of a usability issue in users’ behavior, you must deduce the underlying implications for design.” Jakob Nielsen —Becoming…
Yahoo has admitted that it has been changing some of the words inside attachments accompanying messages sent to users of its web-based e-mail system. —Yahoo Admits Mangling E-MailBBC) Similar:In November 1999, I was blogging about books, camomile tea and Skylon 4, the death of Star…In November 1999, I was blogging about …Cyberculture12 Mistakes Nearly Everyone…
"The Internet makes it ungodly easy now for people who wish to be lazy," says a librarian in this article about the pitfalls of relying on the Internet for research. —Point. Click. Think? (WashPost) You can often find good information online, but novices should know how to recognize a peer-reviewed journal. Similar:What's a namber? (archived)Update,…
"In an age of big-budget titles and state-of-the-art technology, Skotos wants to revive the old text genre." Brad King [See also the sidebar: "Games Started Off Without a Bang."] —No Bells, No Whistles: Just Games (Wired) Similar:The Course of True Fun Never Did Run Smooth: A Midsummer Night's Dwarf Fortress ReflectionI am in rehearsals to…
"In an amazingly short time, software has become critical to almost every aspect of modern life… Yet much software simply doesn’t work reliably." Charles C. Mann —Why is Software So Bad? (MIT Tech Review) Similar:Non-Euclidean Doom, where the value of pi is not 3.14159Weirdly beautiful. Wonderful bit of game…CybercultureRebound Rumble, FIRST Robotics 2012 GameIn the…
"Seniors in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, with mild to moderate memory loss, are writing Web logs to help them make sense of their daily lives. And the activity, they say, is slowing the onset of their symptoms." Mark Baard —Blog to Cope With Alzheimer’s Fog (Wired) Similar:The LA Times deletes tweets that used…
“Design matters, but which design is preferable depends upon the occasion, the context, and above all, upon my mood… Why do I own several teapots? Because I like them.” Don Norman —Emotion and Design: Attractive Things Work Better (jnd.org) Similar:John Speed’s 1611 map of #medievalyork features a “scale of paces.” My #unity3d placeholde…AestheticsMy virtual army…
"The phrase ‘Half the world has never made a phone call’ or some variation thereof has become an urban legend, a widely believed but unsubstantiated story about the nature of the world." Clay Shirky —Half the World shirky.com) Similar:FaceTime Fun: iPod Touch Rides in Jedi FighterThrough the magic of FaceTime and the ve…AmusingThe First Programmer…
"This site is a repository for pictures of do not enter signs. Since this is one of many international roadsigns the collection is diverse in geographical context." James Canavan —Do Not Enter!donotenter.com) Similar:In June, 2002, I was blogging about… a female autistic scholars lament, Dr. Seuss, Ortho…In June, 2002, I was blogging about …AcademiaThat Class…
(The Economist) “…goes roughly as follows. The QWERTY design (patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873) aimed to solve a mechanical problem of early typewriters. When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed.” But the real problem is that “economists seem to adopt bogus anecdotal…
"n d beginning God creatD d heaven & d earth. & d earth wz w/o form, & void; & darkness wz upon d face of d deep. & d Spirit of God moved upon d face of d H2Oz. & God z, Let der b light: & der wz light." [See Wired article on the…
"[T]hey ship 45,000 copies, and only 15,000 of the games allow you to proceed past the beach. That’s it. No refunds, either. You get off the landing craft; your screen goes black; your computer seizes up and cannot be rebooted. Game over, man." James Lileks —Good Definition of a “Realistic” War Game (The Bleat) Similar:My…