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July 1, 2010

Slow Media

A manifesto and blog

Given that I'm currently completing a project called A Slow Year, and given that it is, somewhat poetically, taking longer than I anticipated to finish, and given that I'm resolved to do it right rather than to do it fast, given all those things I was intrigued to learn of ...

June 27, 2010

Latertasking

How multitasking really works on iOS 4

Despite the fact that I develop for iPhone, I can't tolerate using beta versions of the OS on my personal device. So it was only last week that I I installed iOS 4 on my iPhone last week. Ever since, I've been trying to grasp how the widely-anticipated multitasking feature ...

June 11, 2010

The Rancor of Rhetoricians

Object-Oriented Misunderstandings

A while back Jim Brown mentioned to me that there would be an object-oriented rhetoric panel at this year's Rhetoric Society of America conference. Jim attended RSA but wasn't able to make the panel; still, he's managed to dig up the papers and he wrote up a summary over on ...

June 4, 2010

The Cocktail Party Test

Branding Your Weird Academic Field

I've been meaning to post a link to Ethan Watrall's April article Building an Interdisciplinary Identity in a (Mostly) Non-Interdisciplinary Academic World. It includes a number of tips for branding yourself as an academic when working outside of or in-between traditional fields. I know that many academics, particularly those straggler ...

May 28, 2010

Two Immanent Deadlines

Indie Games and Code and Los Angeles

I have two June 1 deadlines to remind you (and myself) about: (1) The IndieCade independent game festival. You can submit online. The festival will be held October 8-10 in Culver City, CA. (2) The Critical Code Studies conference. It will be held July 23, 2010 at USC. Both are ...

February 19, 2010

Pascal Spoken Here

Learning about Learning Programming from the Apple ][

Among the many, many things we talk about when we discuss curriculum for the Computational Media degree is how to make learning programming facile and appealing all throughout a student's career. Many sub-problems arise, for example, how can one help students learn new languages and environments after they've become familiar ...

January 9, 2010

The Turtlenecked Hairshirt

Fetid and Fragrant Futures for the Humanities

In a reflection on all the recent hubbub about the sordid state of the humanities and the recently proposed possibility of a cure in the form of the "digital humanities," Cathy Davidson offers the following lament: When I think of what the humanties offer...it is astonishing to me (and tragic) ...

December 14, 2009

Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers

Paper written with Nick Montfort for Digital Arts and Cultures 2009

October 16, 2009

How to Think About Narrative and Interactivity

A colloquium with Espen Aarseth, Fox Harrell, and Janet Murray

The School of Literature Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech is hosting what is sure to be a great colloquium next week, "How to Think About Narrative and Interactivity." It will be held 4:30-6pm on Tuesday October 20th in the Skiles building on campus (map), room 002 on the ground ...

September 20, 2009

Computing as a Liberal Art

Thoughts on Education, Research, and Progress

I recently read Paul Lockhart's incredible essay "A Mathematician's Lament" [PDF]. Lockhart, a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, wrote the piece in 2002, but it wasn't published until last year, on Keith Devlin's monthly column. "A Mathematician's Lament" begins with the nightmares of a musician and a ...

September 18, 2009

Buy Me

Cashback available

I've been trying out Microsoft's new search engine Bing, mostly out of curiosity, and partly to see how alternatives to Google feel for everyday use. Naturally, one of the first queries I conducted was an ego search. The results are reasonable enough, but what really caught my eye is that ...

September 13, 2009

Don Draper and Elle Macpherson

So good for beautiful people

On last week's episode of Mad Men (season 3, episode 4), the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency shot a TV spot for the then-new diet cola Patio. 1962-3 was the year of diet soda, with the introduction of RC Cola's Diet Rite, Pepsi's Patio and Coca Cola's TaB. As often ...

September 11, 2009

In the War on Ideas, War Always Wins

On the British Government's neglect of Alan Turing's role in the history of computation

In the winter of 1952, Alan Turing called on the Manchester police to investigate a break-in at his house. He suspected an estranged lover was responsible and, being the earnest man that he was, reported his suspicion to the police. The problem was, Turing's lover was Arnold Murray. Homosexuality was ...