PITTSBURGH—Audience members at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts are reporting that, oh God, no, approximately 20 extremely enthusiastic actors are approaching the edge of the stage and appear determined to continue their current musical number in the main seating area. — The Onion Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and…
After the 20th item I kind of got the guy’s point and started skimming, but these are pretty good: Don’t run away from things; run toward them. – The best way to move away from something negative is to move toward something positive. Nothing is as bad as it seems. Nothing. – There’s a benefit…
“What answer do you want?” “Just tell me what you want me to write, and I’ll write it for you!” I once had a student in a literature class who almost had a panic attack when she found out, from the mock final exam, that the final exam would contain poems and prose passages that…
Normally, students and teachers in Finland take a 15-minute break after every 45 minutes of instruction. During a typical break, students head outside to play and socialize with friends while teachers disappear to the lounge to chat over coffee. I didn’t see the point of these frequent pit stops. As a teacher in the United…
Fascinating video journalism from the New York Times. They didn’t shed, chew the sofa or bite the postman, but for thousands of people Sony’s Aibo robotic dog was the closest thing to a real canine companion. So when the Japanese company stopped servicing the robots last year, eight years after it ended production, owners faced…
When your mind wanders, its like P. T. Barnum putting on a sideshow while the stage is being rebuilt….[P]articipants who did more mind wandering got more creative on the repeated unusual uses tasks; they came up with more creative solutions to the problems presented to them after they had some time to let their brains…
At GDC 2015, noted interactive fiction game designer Emily Short (Galatea, Counterfeit Monkey) gave a microtalk on how to create a protagonist that is interesting, engaging and will stimulate your players. —Gamasutra Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Things…
Two people who saw a police encounter on Wednesday reported different details; surveillance videotape showed that both of them were wrong. —NYT Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations…
There are plenty of folks happy to tell you how to write better, just as any doctor will tell you to “eat right and exercise.” But changing your writing (or eating) habits only happens when you understand why you do what you do. I can help you with that. | That proposal or email you wrote…
Perhaps the most common mistake of any business marketing itself, is believing that it understands its audience, knows what they like, and what they expect from the company. This should be made clear to all businesses: you always love your product too much, and think that others must love it, too. The only way to achieve…
Most of our brain’s patterns are solidified by our mid-20s, but it’s possible to change your brain’s pathways and patterns with these methods. Source: What It Takes To Change Your Brain’s Patterns After Age 25 Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Visiting the #scienceofpixar exhibit…
We didn’t start the flame war. Scandalous satirical pamphlets were once cranked out by writers and sold at train stations, like so many primordial blog posts. Political cartoons have a long and vicious history. Incivility is our legacy, not our invention. It is part, but only part, of who we are. And have always been.…
Talked too much during a meeting today. Somehow ended up making two good suggestions. Guess who has two more items on his to-do list. Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.The daughter missed her graduation ceremony because she…
Wired summarizes an egghead study for the rest of us. Parents may benefit from understanding that when they criticize their adolescents, adolescents may experience strong negative emotional reaction, may have difficulty cognitively controlling this emotion and may also find it challenging to understand the parent’s perspective or mental state. (From a study summarized in Wired.) Similar:The…
No, Daylight Saving Time was not created to help farmers (actually, they hate it) and no, it doesn’t save energy (running the air conditioner longer in the evenings costs more than we save by turning on fewer lights in the morning). And why are we on “Daylight Standard Time” just four months out of the…
Test subjects whose test papers “accidentally” included the answer key had an inflated sense of how well they would do on a follow-up test that did not include answers, suggesting that the cheaters were not aware how much their performance on the first test was dependent on their access to answers. The people who’d had…
Research suggests we neeed to be bored sometimes in order to be creative. The constant distraction offered by a smartphone keeps the brain from entering the boredom phase that often sparks creativity. Delete a time-killling app on your phone today! (I haven’t played Candy Crush in months, but it’s still there on my OS device.…
Reading each other’s facial expressions is so important to our survival as a species that our brains are hardwired to respond to expressions on faces that aren’t even there. This adorable image — in which the galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 seems to be smiling at the camera — comes courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was spotted…
In a study, over 1000 gamers were surveyed to see how the average player interacts with a game system that allows the player to choose a “good” or “evil” path through a game story. The finding was that the average gamer prefers to be good or heroic in such games. Gamers are most interested in…
Okay, I confess, I was once in the audience at an MLA session about medieval drama, when someone brought up a relevant computer simulation, and there was a disagreement over how to interpret the results. I raised my hand and said, “I created that simulation,” and weighed in on one side of the debate. It all…