“We have recently become aware of the fact that our previous list management service erroneously failed to oversee certain remove requests. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and would like to offer all of our valuable customers another chance to unsubscribe from our services.” A Second Helping of Spam That message…
“Poised between media, blogs can be as nuanced and well-sourced as traditional journalism, but they have the immediacy of talk radio. Amid it all, this much is clear: The phenomenon is real. Blogging is changing the media world…” Andrew Sullivan —Weblogs Are to Words What Napster Was to Music (Wired) Similar:The reluctant wisdom of a…
“A number of concerned British Harry Potter fans have spoken out against the Bible, claiming that the holy text of the Christian Church can cause serious damage to children…. The tales of Jesus turning water into wine are fairly harmless, but there is a serious risk of children drowning if they try to walk on…
The geekiest, most elite programming language, UNIX, seems to be associated with a love of words. “Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some…
“Everything. A few minutes after we began last time a shaft of light descended and an angel or other heavenly being appeared and revealed to us what each woman or man must do to attain divine wisdom in this life and the hereafter…” Tom Wayman —Did I Miss Anything? (Question frequently asked by students after…
“[A]t the University of Virginia today I regularly teach the introductory comparative literature survey, which begins with the Iliad and the Odyssey and runs through all the traditional great authors, such as Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Austen, and Dostoevsky… why am I now writing about Gilligan´s Island and Star Trek?” Paul Cantor —The Art in…
“Babies are leaning their native language before birth. This is made possible by the development of hearing as early as 16 weeks gestational age. A mother’s voice reaches the uterus with very little distortion as the sound waves pass directly through her body.” David Chamberlain —Life Before Birth (birthpsychology.com) Similar:How children lost the right to…
Review of a production of Hamlet told with no dialogue: "like a beautifully choreographed nightmare, it fuses movement, music and light into a haunting series of images that summon the very heartbeat of the story." —Sinetic’s Hamlet: The Rest Is Silence (WashPost) Similar:Couples in successful relationships always use these 6 phrases: 'You'll grow stronger both…”If…
"There are two kinds of science-fiction reader, who in their extreme forms constitute disjoint reading populations. A pure Population One reader wants scientific ideas and will be tolerant of other flaws provided those ideas are present. A pure Population Two reader will tolerate (or fail to notice) scientific errors but insist on literary virtues. You…
Don’t let the harsh title turn you off — Gerry McGovern is absolutely right when he points out that the Internet needs simpler design: "[T]here is a much greater need for simple web design today than there was in 1996. Back then we had pioneers and early adopters who tended to hunger for the new…
For a print columnist who writes, oh, say, twice a week to sniff at those who pump out ten tons of spirited commentary for free reminds me of some baggy-pants third-rate vaudevillian rolling his eyes at the people streaming into a nickelodeon. Oh, sure, they have moving pictures of a train robbery, but nothing beats…
"Welcome to Blogistan, the Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow ”blogger,” no matter how outre, goes unpraised." Alex Beam —In the world of Web logs, talk is cheapb> (Boston Globe) Similar:I worked in a video store for 25 years. Here’s what I learned as my…
"’Ah, it was a bunch of boring stuff,’ said a slouching, mumbling Geremek, 17, at a press conference shortly after his return from the future Monday. ‘It totally blew.’" —Sullen Time-traveling Teen Reports 23rd Century Sucks (The Onion) Similar:August Wilson House officially opens in Pittsburgh's Hill DistrictThe August Wilson House officially opene…CultureNew NASA Astronaut Wrote…
(Wired) Multiplayer online games face a barrier in Europe and Asia: many people who live in the same time zone don’t speak the same language, so it’s hard for them to interact with each other. A universal translator may be the solution. (I linked to this article mostly because I was amused that, this article…
"EthnoQuest takes students to Amopan, a fictional eastern Mexican village… The game starts with students’ assuming the roles of grant-writing ethnographers and follows them as they complete reports detailing their anthropological research." Similar:The Period, Our Simplest Punctuation Mark, Has Become a Sign of AngerYou text your girlfriend: “I know we mad…CybercultureWindows 3.1 Turns 30: Here’s…
“Every now and then, though, pieces like ‘Fun is Hard to Find‘ arrive, like anachronistic throwbacks, to remind us that some writers and editors in the newsrooms of America still can’t get the Web straight, still think it’s a passing fad — and still, in some cases, can’t wait to dig its grave.” Scott Rosenberg…
I spent some time today getting reacquainted with some old friends: the Texas Instruments 99/4a (1979), the Atari 800 (1980), and the Commodore C 64 (that I took to college with me my freshman year, 1986). (Thanks for the link, Bruce.) —OldComputers.com Similar:Crazy-looking keyboards that never caught on As the typewriter become popular, it w…Aesthetics30…
“When all is said and done, what is the role of journalists in breaking news? Are journalists relics of a golden era, now useful only as a conduit to pass along the whispers of the hive-mind to the unplugged masses? Or have we been reduced to Stamps of Approval, as we validate blog-based trends with…
"Storytellers – specialists in the art of conveying human emotions — rule this future. And in this future, everyone is a storyteller. Everyone creates the collective experience. Everyone creates the collective intelligence." Dale Peskin —Preparing for the Coming Era of Participatory News (Online Journalism Review) Similar:Why liberal arts and the humanities are as important as…
“Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it became popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved about surfing from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing with other online chores, like checking the In box.” —As the Web Matures, Fun is Hard to Find…