You are pleased to find scientific evidence of a phenomenon that you had been familiar with all along through your love of interactive fiction. You check BoingBoing, where you find exactly the same lame second-person intro gimmick. When the volunteers read statements that began, “You are…” they pictured the scene through their own eyes. However,…
News about a free-speech dust-up in the department where I used to work at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire: This fall, the English department, the publication’s then “administrative home,” voted unanimously to sever its ties to Flip Side, citing, in a statement, interest in “fostering the responsible use of free speech and the mutually respectful community…
“The Zoo and the Carnegie Science Center are my two favorite places in the world!” chirps my daughter from the back of the van. “Can we go to the Science Center instead?” “No, honey, we’re driving to your penguin class,” I tell her. She grabs her brother’s arm. “Both of us?” she asks. “The two…
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants,…
While the Church gets a lot of guff for its skeptical responses to Galileo’s astronomical findings, some Jesuit astronomers not only listened to his ideas but repeated his observations, and some university faculty members flatly refused to look through a telescope. Simplistic representations of scientific issues, with heroes and villains, make good stories, but rarely…
Another article that’s on my mind as I consider how to integrate group work into an unusually large literature class. In an undergraduate genetics course, students were, on 16 occasions during the course of a semester, asked a pair of “isomorphic” questions, which have different facts but require students to apply the same principles or…
I like to think of the cosmos as a theater, yet a theater cannot exist without an audience, to witness and to celebrate. Robot craft and mighty telescopes will continue to show us unimaginable wonders. But when humans return to the moon and put a base there and prepare to go to Mars and become…
This NYT overview of the NASA craft designed to replace the space shuttle is a great example of 3D animation in a news context. Similar:Twitter is testing a tool for reporting fake & offensive contentIt’s risky to get your news from a socia…Current_Eventsdungeon.jpg (JPEG Image, 2535×1616 pixels)Great Zork map.AestheticsWhen the Reporter Becomes Part of the…
An interesting method of publicizing high-quality science in a form accessible to (and editable by) the general public. RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit work to a new section of the journal, to be launched later this week, that describes families of RNA molecules. The first paper scheduled is “A…
And then there was light — and it was powered by the sun. The Vatican on Wednesday activated a new solar energy system and announced an ambitious plan that could one day make it an alternative energy exporter. The massive roof of the “Nervi Hall” where popes hold general audiences and concerts are performed, has…
I heard about Bloxorz this afternoon at a meeting. This evening, I came down to the study where my kids were playing Lego Indiana Jones for the umpteenth time, and without any fuss, started playing Bloxorz on the laptop. Within thirty seconds, my six-year-old daughter was begging to play it. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old…
Nasa says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead. | Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth.| Phoenix, which landed on the planet’s northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold…
A 1960s tape recorder the size of a household fridge could be the key to unlocking valuable information from NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon. An archiving error by NASA has meant 173 data tapes have sat in Perth for almost 40 years, holding information about lunar dust that could be vital in expanding science’s…
Blogging this to show to my kids later. Similar:Mars Is a Hellhole: Colonizing the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity.Some of Elon Musk’s stunts have caught m…BusinessShakespeare on EclipsesPrepping for tomorrow’s first meeting of…AcademiaWatched "Apollo 11" at local library with my son today50 years ago today, three humans were on…CultureNo, Dr. Anthony…
This is from the robots category of Paleo-Future, which also has categories devoted to picturephones, jetpacks, and each decade’s collected futurism (that is, see what our future looked like to people writing in the 1880s, the 1930s, or the 1980s). Try as it might the robot could not make its desired turn. Its little broken wheel…
The Commonwealth of Virginia announces plans for a free, open-source physics textbook. The Virginia Physics “Flexbook” project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to…
Because the children were rarely bored – at least, when a television was nearby – they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. “The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere,” Belton says. “But that’s a…
From a recent study of university libraries. There’s plenty in this report on digital scholarship, print journals, and comparative approaches of the various disciplines. Neither faculty members nor librarians expect e-books to constitute a viable substitute for print books; they are more generally seen as complementary. Somewhat oddly given this low level of faculty interest…
From the BBC… thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. The 3,000-year-old skeletons were in such good condition that anthropologists at the University of Goettingen managed to extract a sample of DNA. That was then matched to two men living nearby: Uwe Lange, a surveyor, and Manfred Huchthausen, a teacher. The two men have now become local…
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think the lack of respect for math and science is one of the largest unacknowledged problems in today’s society. And it starts in the academy — somehow, we have moved to a place where people can consider themselves educated while remaining ignorant of remarkably basic facts of…