So yesterday my wife, son, and I ventured for the first time into Kids-R-Us, home of the well-behaved toddler, destination of choice for the stark raving mad parent. Our visit deserves a separate post of its own (suffice it to say that it ended with the purchase of 100 plastic balls, each the size of… Continue reading Baby’s First ATM
Author: Mark Sample
WordCount Poetry
My students and I have been playing with WordCount, Jonathan Harris's slick database of the 86,000 or so most commonly used words in the English language, ranked according to frequency. As Harris points out (playfully calling it a "conspiracy"), there are many sequences of adjacent words in the ranked list of 86,800 words that are… Continue reading WordCount Poetry
Jets! Bombs! War! A Visit to the National Air and Space Museum!
We went to the National Air and Space Museum today, thinking it'd be a lark for our 16-month old son, who loves planes and anything else that makes a lot of noise and moves through the sky. I'd forgotten, though, exactly what the Air and Space Museum memorializes: jets, bombs, and war. Truly, the history… Continue reading Jets! Bombs! War! A Visit to the National Air and Space Museum!
The Pros and Cons of Life Hacking
I've been meaning to blog about Clive Thompson's NYT Magazine article on life hacking for a week now, but, as it happens, I've been operating on "continuous partial attention" myself since, oh, I don't know, weeks, months, maybe years even. While the science Thompson describes is fascinating--when is the perfect moment to interrupt someone at… Continue reading The Pros and Cons of Life Hacking
Some of the best things in life are classified
What I want to write is so confidential, so classified, I can't even write it. It has something to do with the Pentagon the government. That's about all I can say. And that people involved have signed non-disclosure agreements. Which have been broken. Apparently. Maybe not. I don't know. The lawyers are deciding. The key… Continue reading Some of the best things in life are classified
Using Understanding Comics to Understand New Media
A few weeks ago I posted some thoughts about the rhetoric of the hyperlink, which I was working on with my Textual Media course. I've complicated my students thinking (I hope) by suggesting that we can use Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud's wonderfully insightful dissection of comics (itself in comics form) to understand new media. Among… Continue reading Using Understanding Comics to Understand New Media
A Fleeting Thought on Interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinarity is one of the enduring keywords of academia in the past decade. I've been hearing it praised for so long now and seeing so little actual evidence of it, that I'm beginning to think all the praise is simply wish-fulfillment. And like most wishes, the wisher probably wouldn't know what to do with it… Continue reading A Fleeting Thought on Interdisciplinarity
Rhetoric of the Link
Rhetorics of the Web (by Nicholas Burbules at Wesleyan University) is an often-cited overview of various kinds of hyperlinks and the rhetorical strategies that they employ. In the course of teaching a new media class this fall, I've begun to wonder whether Burbules' examples are too general, ahistorical, or even naive about the possibilities of… Continue reading Rhetoric of the Link
It’s Not Looting If You’re White
My friend Adam pointed me towards another example of egregious racism in the mainstream press: the captions on photos of looters in New Orleans. Both pictures show residents of New Orleans wading through chest-deep flood waters, carrying various goods. According to the two AP captions, in the first photograph a young black man is returning… Continue reading It’s Not Looting If You’re White
Tarzan, Africa, and Cellphones
After writing Thursday's post about the August 25, 2005 NYT article on soaring cellphone use in Africa, I got the urge to reread Tarzan. It must have been this memorable line from journalist Sharon LaFraniere's article: On a continent where some remote villages still communicate by beating drums, cellphones are a technological revolution akin to… Continue reading Tarzan, Africa, and Cellphones
Cellphones in Africa (New York Times article)
There's an article in the Times about the amazing popularity of cellphones in Africa. Factually, the data is quite amazing: between 1999 and 2004, the number of subscribers to mobile phone services increased at an annual rate averaging 58 percent. There are now nearly 77 million cellphone subscribers in Africa, up from just 7.5 million… Continue reading Cellphones in Africa (New York Times article)
GMU Course Blogs
I've been fed up with the standard issue university courseware options--namely Blackboard and WebCT--so I decided this semester to wing it with my own version of courseware (what I'm calling "of-courseware") powered by WordPress. Although Sample Reality runs on Movable Type, I've been hearing good things about WordPress, and I thought I'd give it a… Continue reading GMU Course Blogs
Disney babies are always dreaming
The following text is from the packaging of an "easy-grasp" fork and spoon set some kind, Disney-loving soul gave our son: Playtime is filled with pixies and princesses. Bathtime overflows with pirate ships and mermaids. Meals are shared with bears who love honey. And Naps take place in castles, not cribs. So whether they are… Continue reading Disney babies are always dreaming
Going in for tests…
Sitting in the local coffee shop I overheard a group of fifty-ish women having their weekly coffee clutch. Their conversation drifted toward doctors and illnesses, and one of them related how the husband of a mutual friend was "going in for tests." I've never thought much about this phrase before, but suddenly today it struck… Continue reading Going in for tests…
This is a test, this is only a test.
"The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we'll be from the real thing.....There is no substitute for a planned simulation." So says a character in Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise, as a midwestern town is overrun by men in Mylar suits, conducting a simulated evacuation from some vague chemical disaster. Yesterday we had out… Continue reading This is a test, this is only a test.