The Schizoid Man (TNG Rewatch: Season 2, Episode 6)
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. In his final hours, an arrogant, crotchety cybernetics genius takes a liking to Data. After the genius dies, Data starts acting arrogant and crotchety. Hmm. This early in the run of TNG, we’ve already seen the trope of a brilliant, older professional man supported and…
Loud as a Whisper (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 5)
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. A mediator who communicates via a telepathic chorus is a warring planet’s only hope for peace. While the episode isn’t perfect, nothing made me want to facepalm. I cared about Riva (the mediator) and his romantic (but at the same time respectful and professionally empathetic) interest…
Overwhelmed? Start a new to-do list with “1) Breathe; 2) Make ‘to-do’ list”
Felt momentarily overwhelmed by the day’s tasks. Made the following list: 1) Breathe. 2) Make “to do” list. 3) Post blog entry about “to do” list. 4) Go to lunch. 5) Prioritize to-do list. (Break up the intimidating tasks into smaller steps.) 6) Do first important item on list. (Repeat as necessary.) I’m…
Learning How to Love My Daughter
Image description: A teen girl in a spring dress, with her hair up. Text: “You’re so beautiful,” I told my daughter. She rolled her eyes. I asked her what I should say instead. She thought a bit. “You should say, ‘You shall prevail.’” “You shall prevail,” I said. She smiled.
Students say they prefer lectures, but “active learning” is more effective
A recent study measured differences in student learning, comparing the results of traditional lectures (where the students sit passively while the instructor connects all the dots for them) and active learning (where the students get guidance, but have to connect the dots themselves). Students gave lower ratings to instructors who made them think harder and…
Take my feedback if you want to pass.
I won’t be so assertive in the first week of class, but I created this meme out of frustration that some students don’t actually read the feedback that I spend a lot of time writing. (I have experimented with giving more oral feedback. I’ll likely do more of that in my online Shakespeare class.)
Is this why oldsters love nostalgia?
I’m 50. I’m in my office casually sharpening my CGI skills, and I get a huge rush when tweets mention a Usenet thread I joined in 2001 & a video game I played in 1992, and I can see the glittering green matrix code explaining it all.
Finland is Winning the War on Fake News
This is story is from May, but it’s very relevant. Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his way through his PowerPoint presentation. A slide titled “Have you been hit by the Russian troll army?” included a checklist of methods used to deceive readers on social media: image…
Why the trial by ordeal was actually an effective test of guilt
How could an ordeal-administering priest make boiling water innocuous to an innocent defendant’s flesh? By making sure that it wasn’t actually boiling.
The Righteous Mind
I just finished “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion,” a very accessible mainstream (non-academic) book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Takeaways: Our rational minds are to our emotional/instinctual selves like riders on an elephant. When the elephant leans even slightly to one side, the riders look in that direction…
Elmo? Yes, I do mind. I learned far more from Bert.
Like plenty of people my age, I grew up watching Sesame Street. As a parent of kids born in 1998 and 2002, the new-to-me dominance of Elmo was notable (and annoying) when I showed Sesame Street to my kids. We purchased a handful of videos and games, and regularly cycled through the videos and games…
Why teens need live theater in the age of YouTube
A good article from the Boston Globe. The plays I saw with my dad handed us a script on every uncomfortable topic parents and children both painstakingly avoid and desperately need to discuss. If YouTube’s current teenage audience is anything like my teenage self, they won’t take kindly to their parents telling them to get…
What Can Science Tell Us About Dad Jokes?
Beyond making the audience cringe and, hopefully, bring a father a little closer to his son or daughter in a healthy manner, puns have given researchers insight into how the left side of the brain engages with the right side. Researchers showed that the brain’s left hemisphere processes the language of the pun first, while…
Why Student Athletes Continue to Fail
When student athletes were asked how much they care about athletics, they rated their interest a healthy 8.5 on average, on a scale of 1 to 10. But when asked the value they place on academics, the result was higher than 9 on average. If anything, the average student athlete cares more about his studies than his…
Time Might Only Exist in Your Head. And Everyone Else’s
Tired brain can’t quite process this Wired summary of a scholarly paper, but I enjoyed how the good writing helped me peek into a field I know so little about. Time moves as it does because humans are biologically, neurologically, philosophically hardwired to experience it that way. It’s like a macro-scale version of Schrödinger’s cat.…
Twitter and the “Two Minutes Hate”
Another of the many, many reflections on the big story of the weekend. In 1984, George Orwell famously described a totalitarian political order in which people were kept as docile subjects in part by a daily ritual called “Two Minutes Hate” in which the population directs all of its pent up fury at “Goldstein,” a possibly…
Lessons from the Covington Catholic Flashpoint
My social media network includes people who fully supported the narrative voiced by Phillips and magnified by social media outrage, who now feel the shifting narrative proves how hard “the media” work to excuse the misbehavior of smirking, entitled, racist bullies. (But they might agree the Hebrew Israelites went too far.) My social feed also…
CNN sues President Trump and top White House aides for barring Jim Acosta
CNN has filed a lawsuit against President Trump and several of his aides, seeking the immediate restoration of chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s access to the White House. The lawsuit is a response to the White House’s suspension of Acosta’s press pass, known as a Secret Service “hard pass,” last week. The suit alleges that…
Don’t Want to Fall for Fake News? Don’t Be Lazy
Fake news is not a problem caused by those dishonorable people whose political values differ from yours. Misinformation researchers have proposed two competing hypotheses for why people fall for fake news on social media. The popular assumption—supported by research on apathy over climate change and the denial of its existence—is that people are blinded by partisanship,…