I've seen lots of people talk about this year's Presidential candidates in terms of equivalency: "They're both so awful this year," or "Why do we have two people who ought to be disqualified this time?" I doubt anyone's going to change my mind at this point, but I always really want to understand viewpoints that differ from my own. And yet when I ( Read more... )

I hate shopping for clothes. I'm terrible at it, and it takes forever, and it is miserable. I have stories.[1] This is no doubt part of the reason that I'm getting close to the point where my entire wardrobe needs replacing ( Read more... )

I'm teaching a First Year Seminar class this fall entitled "Time Travel in Science and Literature", and I'm looking for suggestions on the "Literature" part. I honestly don't know how much reading is reasonable to assign in this context, so my main request here is for short story suggestions. (I'm also considering a couple of short-ish books: ( Read more... )

I've been sharing links to this all over social media since I heard about it earlier today. "Robot Turtles" is a board game project on Kickstarter by Dan Shapiro (a fellow Mudder). From the looks of it, it's a fun game that's designed to teach kids (3-8 years old, he says) some basic programming concepts along the way (and that gives the kids the ( Read more... )

Walking around town, you occasionally see things that seem a bit funny. This sign, for example, is in the window of a local bar:


( Read more... )

Lots of people seem to like this "Legend of Korra" show, and I've heard the helpful tip that it's viewable free on the Nickelodeon website. But... um... turns out I haven't managed to watch Avatar yet. How important or helpful would it be to see The Last Airbender before leaping into this newer show? Is there anyplace I can conveniently watch that ( Read more... )

I'm looking for ideas!

I'm giving a talk on "The Physics of Gaming" at a small convention this weekend (run by our college anime/gaming club). My plan is to first talk about "good physics" (games where some aspect(s) of physics are done well and important), then about "bad physics" (games where some aspect of physics is horribly inaccurate), and ( Read more... )

I'm planning to add an entry about racism/feminism issues to my "Wow, Good to Know" page, and I want to give a useful link for each one. But (and I hope this doesn't come across poorly) I've had a lot of trouble finding "Feminism 101" or "Racism 101" pages that sound like they were written by someone who was actually in the mood to teach. (Many of ( Read more... )

I finally got a memory card for my Samsung Alias 2 phone, but when I copy MP3s onto it and say "scan card for new music" the phone always randomly *reboots* after it's processed 20-100 of them. The songs already processed work just fine, but further attempts immediately fail. (The 4GB microSDHC card is the same brand that Samsung sells on their ( Read more... )

I've been soliciting suggestions from various social networks to help me make a list of surprising but important bits of life knowledge that my college students may not have heard. I gave three examples to start things off:

• Tylenol/acetaminophen OD can be awful: no symptoms for 12 hours, but without help in 8 you need a liver transplant to live.
• ( Read more... )