Other than one trip to the grocery store, I haven’t been in public since March 13, so I haven’t noticed if people in my community have started wearing masks. But I’ve wondered how I’ll be able to respond to people’s voices when I can’t see their mouths. In the past few years, I have…
A few interesting bits I found interesting to explore: There are two different ways to view the exact same data: The logarithmic scale shows a great comparison of the magnitude of growth between countries, but less of the human impact. The linear scale shows the real human impact — a growth twice the size is twice the number of…
My weekend coronavirus lockdown project was writing up a new handout devoted to Graham’s “Disagreement Hierarchy” for academic arguments. Does the word “argument” make you think of angry people yelling? This document presents Graham’s “disagreement hierarchy,” which catalogs multiple stages between juvenile name-calling and carefully refuting an error in your opponent’s central point. Siblings might…
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. After a member of a landing party dies an accidental, senseless death, Picard must break the news to her young son. “Jeremy, on the starship Enterprise, no one is alone,” says Picard. “No one.” Numerous times on my rewatch, I’ve wished episodes would devote less time to scanning and probing…
Public officials misspeak all the time. Journalists make mistakes all the time. Ordinary citizens over-react to headlines without reading the full article all the time. We are all of us human. It’s unfair for any of us to treat every gaffe as evidence of malice or incompetence. For example, critics of President Trump are stretching…
The Shape of the World, According to Old Maps Similar:Your Letters Helped Challenger Shuttle Engineer Shed 30 Years Of GuiltOn Jan. 27, 1986, the former engineer fo…CultureFreelance Writing Online: What Are You Worth?Freelance writers have to be entrepreneu…BusinessAn Unexpecting MinorityTruthfully, I expected my new department…AcademiaUnderstanding Shakespeare: "Pick a play. Click a line…"Pick a play. Click…
In March 2000, I was blogging about Palm V handheld computers for Navy officers Teaching with bells and whistles Stephen King selling a short story online NCAA banning online journalists Great moments in bureaucratic history Diploma mills Maps of imaginary lands Similar:Ross deserves better "Friends": a defense of nerdsI was not a fan of…
Similar:Paleo-Future: robotsThis is from the robots category of Pale…AestheticsWriting Computer Games with InklewriterIf brass lanterns or slathering-fanged g…CybercultureWhat You Get When 30 People Draw a World Map From Memory Tasked with creating “a piece of art…AestheticsLen Deighton’s Bomber, the first book ever written on a word processor.The talented and insightful scholar Matt…BooksNASA! Mars!! Panorama!!! Video!!!! Audio!!!!!New…
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. After a primitive, rationalist society mistakes Federation technology for supernatural power, Picard must do whatever it takes to undo the resulting cultural contamination. Fortunately for Picard, that involves lots of talking. A grim scene in sickbay memorably demonstrates that humans in the 24th century can sometimes delay but cannot…
Similar:NASA Calls It A Mission As Curiosity Rover Fills Up Whole 2-Gigabyte Memory CardMore great satire from The Onion. PASAD…AmusingIt's been a Dwarf Fortress afternoon. AwesomeHenry Bemis waited his whole life to finally read a book. Listen to Lynn Venable’s story,…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc3DHCiz…BooksEnglish Teacher Re-Titles Classic Poems As Clickbait In Last-Ditch Effort To Trick Student…Funny and clever.…
Similar:Behind the art: The Westmoreland's 'Death of Elaine' beloved of staff and visitorsI always slow down and spend some time w…AestheticsThe Library Adjacent to My Ethership Control Room Needed BooksFor me, summer vacation means spending h…AestheticsTop deck of a #neovictorian #steampunk cruiser needs an airlock at the top of the spiral s… AestheticsEditorial: Video…
Not fake news. Not the enemy of the American people. “Nobody ever thought a thing like this could have happened,” said the the president at Thursday’s press event. Feb 27: “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” [Narrator: “Cases were not going down.”] Feb 26: “The 15 [documented cases of COVID-19 in the USA] within…
Similar:The Cabaret Theatre (Latrobe) presents Shakespeare's popular Midsummer Supernatural pranksters! mismatched …CultureSpring 2023 Midterm Grades: Submitted!PersonalStill More FaceTime FunI realize that video-chatting teenagers …MediaSome editing and cropping makes this cartoon a perennial. EthicsThe Most Disastrous Typos In Western History The Most Disastrous Typos In Western H…BooksQ-Less (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 6) Shenanigans with…
I haven’t done any audio theatre recordings in a while (thanks, coronavirus) and I miss it. Here’s my interpretation (recorded some time ago) of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Nightingale.” The nightingale is considered the most beautiful thing in the kingdom… until a mechanical nightingale wins over the citizens, and the true nightingale is banished. But…
Similar:Russian troll factory paid US activists to help fund protests during electionRussian trolls posing as Americans made …CybercultureReading a Classic American Play to My Daughter BooksMagnetic Scrolls Original Games Source Code Recovered!Here we have possibly the only surviving…CybercultureThe Most Disastrous Typos In Western History The Most Disastrous Typos In Western H…BooksFCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules…
The Society of Professional Journalists links to an interview with an MIT professor who’s studying misinformation on social media (which is not the same thing as bad journalism — some bad actors take journalism out of context in order to deceive). Responsible journalists are aware that sensational headlines can harm the public. The truth is…
Similar:McCain's 2008 Concession Speech: Republicans interrupt their candidate's concession speech…That moment during McCain’s concession s…CultureIn 2019, I have a college student who annotates readings like this!I asked students in my online “Dystopia …AcademiaPracticing with materials and geometry. The lamps and chair require hundreds of times as m… AestheticsEducators approve national campaign to halt high stakes,…
Similar:A question I find myself thinking all the time.PersonalNovel defined: a term used by some students to mean “any text we study in English class”AcademiaRepresenting the Humanities at Accepted Students Day.Representing the Humanities at Accepted …PersonalSomeone I know very well is in the trailer for Midnight (2020)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5BczlGs…CultureThe Tempest, According to My 9yo DaughterShe’s 10 now,…
In light of current events, I’m dropping the bleak Waiting for Godot from my World Drama class (actually I’m making it optional; students could drop a different play) and adding Thornton Wilder’s absurdist but optimistic The Skin of Our Teeth. Writing while World War II was still raging, Wilder depicts a representative American family…
The blurb for a 2011 English version of the 1999 Chinese play I’m teaching this week: China’s most popular and provocative drama. A modern story of love and obsession, Rhinoceros in Love tells the story of a rhinoceros-keeper who develops a dangerous romantic fascination with the woman of his dreams: the uncompromising, unobtainable Mingming. Hear…