Helvetica Bold Oblique was the big winner at Tuesday’s 73rd Annual Fonty Awards, taking home 11 statues, including those for Best Sans Serif and the highly coveted 2001 Best Font prize. Satire from The Onion —Helvetica Bold Oblique Sweeps Fontys Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.AestheticsNew Kindle Helps Readers Show Off By Shouting…
Dimitri Sklyarov is an unlikely poster boy for American freedom. The Russian programmer was arrested after he spoke at the “Def-Con” hacker convention in Las Vegas about a program, offered for sale by his employer Elcomsoft, which cracks the encryption in Adobe’s e-book software. The Irish Times —Confusion Over Free Speech and Copyright Similar:Shadowplay (#StarTrek…
“While the lack of interest in buying electronic books may baffle some big publishers, the tepid demand comes as no surprise to some bibliophiles.” NY Times (requires free registration) —Forecasts of an E-Book Era Were, It Seems, Premature Similar:In May, 2001 I was blogging about lanuguage, design and Cliffs NotesIn May 2001, I was blogging…
He taught ethics classes in California! LA Times —Law School Dean Fired for Plagiarism Similar:5 of the Fiercest One-Liners in HistoryYes, the Spartans’ one-word response to …CultureProfessor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things”By drawing parallels between things and…AcademiaMedia Bias Chart version 10 — Left / Center / Right; Fact vs Fabrication; (Ad Fontes Medi…The very…
“Handwriting is a basic skill that serves us all our lives. Unfortunately, a problem that primarily affects boys is rarely on anyone’s list of educational priorities.” Christina Hoff Summers —The Write Stuff Similar:Delightful interview with a former Setonian editor-in-chief who's now doing SEOAs a student journalist, Jessie totally …AcademiaOn the Importance of Nonverbal Feedback in…
“[O]nce you have observed that the other is typically portrayed as lazy, dirty, stupid, crafty, womanly, passive, rebellious, sexually rapacious, childlike, enigmatic and a number of other mutually contradictory epithets, it is hard to know what to do next apart from reaching for yet another textual illustration of the fact.” London Review of Books —The…
Too much information? “[T] this weed in our informational landscape has just sprouted–it is only about 50 years old. Up until then, more information was almost always a good thing.” David Shenk —Data Smog Similar:The Post-Coding Generation?I knew the command line well, and very o…CybercultureThe Period, Our Simplest Punctuation Mark, Has Become a Sign of…
“Log onto almost any college Web site and you’ll see the same beautiful students talking about their beautiful campuses and how much they learn. But there are no numbers, no studies, no objective measurements.” —Wash. Monthly —What Do the US News Rankings Measure? Similar:Paper Titles: Inform by Stating your Topic and Position; Grab the Reader’s…
“Hey, all you crafty, capable women wearing chunky, horn-rimmed glasses (this year) and doing your brainy chick thing…” Hank Stuever, Wash. Post —Velma Rules — Jinkies! Similar:Letter to the editor: Why our English department deserves more respectI came very close to accepting an offer …AcademiaQ Who? (ST: TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 16)Rewatching Star Trek:…
Failed to Practise What It Preached The magazine that chronicled the excesses of the dot.com revolution did not spot the extravagances that led to its own downfall. Mark Tran —Industry Standard Similar:Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reducing print edition to 2 days a week; cites plan to go all digi… The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is scaling …BusinessHow Technology Has…
Include Your Children when Baking Cookies New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half —Real Headlines Similar:I am not really sure why I have kept it up this long. I have no immediate or foreseeable p… CultureA Merry Look at Journalism in "The Year Without a Santa…
Despite the technological hoopla, nobody’s paying attention to e-books but the courts. “Digitizing the printed page has put the very nature of books up for grabs, unleashing heated battles among writers, readers, librarians and technologists over who should control electronic books.” Chicago Tribune —E-Books Solving a Problem Consumers Don’t Have. Similar:Ranked First out of 2…
Not-Work: “CNN acts like they’re the network of record in Millennial America, just because of their award-winning Gulf War coverage. That was so 10 years ago, and people only watched because there was no MSNBC back then.” The Onion —CNN Should be Named the Crappy News Similar:MS Paint AdventuresWonderfully silly take on old-school poi…AmusingCollege Professors…
At first, Huck Finn said “as if” instead of “like,” “wasn’t” and not “warn’t,” and described a night sky “sprinkled”–not “speckled”–with stars. A new edition of the American classic traces Mark Twain’s efforts to refine the speech of his most famous character. LA Times —A New Read on Huck Finn’s Distinctive Voice Similar:An afternoon with…
(Watch them instead.) “Create a few alternative designs, show them to a group of users, and ask which one they prefer. Wrong. If the users have not actually tried to use the designs, they’ll base their comments on surface features.” Jakob Nielsen —First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Your Readers. Similar:More than a…
At a graveyard near where Beatrix Potter (author of the “Peter Rabbit” stories) spent her youth: “Names on headstones included Mr Nutkin, Mr McGregor, Jeremiah Fisher, Tommy Brock – and even a Peter Rabbett.” BBC —But what about Jemima Puddle-Duck? Similar:Twitterverse, are we grieving over coder droves now leaving? AmusingSMS Generator SMS Generator.AmusingGathering background objects…
“A modern language changes when we change it, and the metaphor that makes it autonomous only obscures our real task, which is to consider just how and why we change it.” Mark Halpern Similar:Great moments from Pride and PrejudiceI haven’t read Pride and Prejudice in ab…BooksHow Zuckerberg’s Facebook is like Gutenberg’s printing pressHistorian Niall Ferguson…
“Author Jessica Kingley expressed regret Monday that she had ‘pretty much used up all the hardship‘ from her early life in her recent first novel Bitter Root, leaving her nothing to write about for her follow-up book.” The Onion Similar:If You're Getting Walled in a Cellar I Feel Bad for You SonAmusingEvery conversation between a…
That said, we’ve decided to acknowledge our very favorite Web sites—five each in 10 subject areas—with the Scientific American.com Sci/Tech Web Award. It is an eclectic mix—from the practical to the academic to the downright silly. Among this year’s winners are sites that decode computer acronyms, explain group theory, unravel the genome, track chemistry in…
The second most popular form of entertainment after television, video games have rapidly become the largest segment of the entertainment industry. Mounting evidence lends support to what parents have suspected all along — violent videogames encourage violent behavior. Contemporary Pediatrics Similar:In February 2000, I was blogging about "The Heist" (Sorrels); the "Instant Muse Poetry Gen……