Posts Tagged ‘Settlers of Catan’
Sunday Morning Links!
* Good year for children’s studies academic jobs: Bryn Mawr and York.
* But some researchers want to dig deeper. They want to know why quantum mechanics has the form it does, and they are engaged in an ambitious program to find out. It is called quantum reconstruction, and it amounts to trying to rebuild the theory from scratch based on a few simple principles. The simulation crashes at very large speeds and very small scales. We solved this years ago!
* These Women Entrepreneurs Created A Fake Male Cofounder To Dodge Startup Sexism.
* Study: a universal basic income would grow the economy.
* College football gives conservatives their own safe space on campus.
* Well-off “helicopter” parents are super annoying, but they didn’t create economic inequality.
* Evidence of Russian Election-Data Tampering Mounts as Urgency to Investigate It Does Not.
* Trump Looks Likely to End Protections for Dreamers. Here’s What Would Happen Next. Trump’s next big play on immigration could be much worse than you think.
* ‘Willful blindness’: Deportees becoming easy prey for gangs along the U.S.-Mexico border.
* Hurricane Harvey Floods Toxic Waste Sites, With The EPA Missing In Action. Houston officials were warned they had a problem — they didn’t listen.
* Evacuations ordered in ‘largest ever’ Los Angeles wildfire. 185,000 acre Battle Complex fire burning across Eastern Montana, Northern Wyoming.
* The Incarcerated Women Who Fight California’s Wildfires.
* Donald Trump Jr. to be paid $100,000 for UNT Kuehne Series speech. Bail money?
* Months later, DOJ confirms Trump was lying when he said Obama wiretapped Trump Tower.
* Quick, someone option this Twitter feed. I see at least three films.
* “Virtual Reality Settlers of Catan” seems like a joke, and yet.
* And Texas goes Full Dark Tower.
Open-carrying swords and machetes
Blades more than 5.5 inches in length are being permitted for open-carry in public places. The law, though, prohibits swords and machetes in most bars, schools, colleges, sporting events, polling places, race parks, correctional facilities, hospitals, amusement parks and places of worship.
Thursday Links!
* Coetzee: There is nothing wrong with arguing that a good humanistic education will produce graduates who are critically literate, by some definition of critical literacy. However, the claim that only the full apparatus of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy seems to me hard to sustain, since it is always open to the objection: if critical literacy is just a skill or set of skills, why not just teach the skill itself? Would that not be simpler, and cheaper too?
…in the end, I believe, you will have to make a stand. You will have to say: we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society.
* Huge drop in humanities majors at Swarthmore.
* Not for the first time, vandals are wreaking havoc in central Europe. Russian police say they’re looking for the intellectually minded miscreants who graffitied “Kant is a moron”—along with a flower and heart—on the philosopher’s home outside Kaliningrad.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 16: Flexibility. Special appearance by Plastic Man.
* Higher Education and the Politics of Disruption.
* Black UVA Student Beaten Bloody by Police Over Alleged Fake ID: Reports. UVA’s White President Outsources Outrage Over Martese Johnson to Two Black Administrators.
* Chapel Hill Will Pay $335,000 to Whistle-Blower in Fraud Scandal.
* More Scrutiny of Decision to Close Sweet Briar.
* Penn State Fraternity’s Secret Facebook Photos May Lead to Criminal Charges.
* Despite Progress, Only 1 in 4 College Presidents Are Women.
* The New York Times ran the Duke story—a story about the internal politics of an English department—on its front page.
* I can’t remember if I already linked to Jalada #2: “Afrofuture(s),” but it’s great. I think my favorite little piece is one of the short poems, “Found: An Error in the System.”
* Schools Plan Massive Layoffs After Scott Walker Guts Funding.
* 21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor.
* Why The U.S. Won’t Let the U.N. Look Inside Its Prisons.
* Modern-Day Caligula Orders Everything Bagel.
* Everything’s different in Denmark: Porn belongs in the classroom, says Danish professor.
* What could possibly go wrong? The Scientist Who Wanted To Bring A Death Row Inmate Back From The Dead.
* Starbucks loses its damn mind. Starbucks Wants To Talk To You About Race. But Does It Want To Talk To You About Racism? Starbucks’s Race to the Center of Civic Life.
* Simians, Cyborg-Women, and Godzilla: 40 Years of Terror of Mechagodzilla.
* 41 Awesome Euphemisms For Vagina Around The World, Because Your Pupusa Speaks All Languages.
* Mars One Finalist Explains Exactly How It‘s Ripping Off Supporters.
* The New Optimism of Al Gore.
* Antarctica appears to be melting from below.
* Climate change and full communism.
* When the CIA funded the National Student Association.
* The Problem With History Classes.
* Rise of the Gender Novel: Too often, trans characters are written as tortured heroes. We’re more complex than that.
* The lonely shame of student debt.
* Queer Silence and The Killing Joke.
* #LightenUp: On Comics and Race.
* I’m Al Lowe and I created a series of games called Leisure Suit Larry for Sierra back in the ’80s and ’90s along with another 20 games and titles back in that period. I was with Sierra from 1982 until 1998 when it — well, it was the poor victim of a hostile takeover by criminals. How about that for an opening?
* Did Terry Brooks save epic fantasy? Given the years involved if anything did it seems more likely to me that it was Dungeons and Dragons, but it’s a nice remembrance of the franchise regardless.
* I’m good for five seasons at least: Bridgeport Priest Who Ran Meth Ring Pleads For Leniency.
* Really bad idea watch: Sherlock Goes Old-School For Its Christmas Special.
* The Hidden History of Miscarriage.
* One chart that shows just how ridiculously huge Wall Street bonuses are.
* Where to expect upsets on your NCAA bracket.
* New edition of Catan coming down the pike.
* You had me at fully automated luxury communism (FALC).
* And because you demanded it! Sam Jones Says New Flash Gordon Is A Sequel.
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
Friday Links!
* Ferguson, Missouri, is still the most important story in the country right now; I put up a bunch of links related to the crisis there last night. A letter from David Simon.
* I had a feeling there was more to Robin Williams’s suicide than the initial flurry around depression. It turns out he was suffering from the onset of Parkinson’s disease.
* Nick Kristof defends the humanities. I want to save the humanities more than anyone, but the price is too high. THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH.
* Over 1500 Scholars to University of Illinois: We Will Not Engage With You! The case for dismissing Cary Nelson, from the co-chair of the search committee that hired Salaita.
* Denying tenure to game college rankings. Well, that’s cheery.
* “Stop Writing Dystopian Sci-Fi—It’s Making Us All Fear Technology,” says venture capitalist.
* Zombie narrative as teaching tool, at LARoB.
* It Turns Out Colleges Aren’t Actually Atheist Factories.
* Wherever there’s a professor worrying over whether their student really deserves an A- or a B+ — that’s where I’ll be. The Professorate and The Grapes of Wrath.
* You come at the Scrabble King, you best not miss.
* Amy Acker, Fran Kranz, Settlers of Catan. I’m sold.
* Starbucks–with a human face.
* And a mother has been arrested for dropping f-bomb in front of her kids. I think I’d better start my legal defense fund now….
Wednesday Night Links!
* Reminded today of a recent Facebook post from Jonathan Senchyne: …teaching students to be critical of the institutional logics and power structures which many of them aspire to belong to requires you to open space and time for them to mourn these institutions as anchors and meaning-givers in their lives. Only after that can they begin to think about how best to live in the ruins and to think otherwise. See also: David Palumbo-Liu, on sadness.
* “The university hasn’t laid out long-term goals for the MOOCs, and the numbers don’t bode particularly well for the courses’ overall success,” the editorial reads. “We’re confused as to why an unproven and unused educational experiment that isn’t even aimed at UT students is something the system feels they should continue funding.”
* Disability and the campus visit.
* Is Ivan adjuncting on your campus? Be vigilant, administrators! Meanwhile the Brookings Institution proposes we just let the markets eat adjuncts. Sure, people can choose to pay more for cruelty-free adjuncts if they want, but in these tough times…
* What chairs can do for adjuncts, today. Informed and realistic, striking precisely because the suggestions are so small.
* When I first saw it on Twitter I couldn’t believe the New York Times *actually* headlined their Wendy Davis profile “Can Wendy Davis Have It All?”
* W.H. Auden: “J.R.R., old boy, does this story really need two women?”
* The New Yorker’s culture blog profiles @NeinQuarterly, while their finance blog profiles Klaus Teuber, creator of Settlers of Catan.
* Bing censoring Chinese language search results for users in the US.
* Humans aren’t built to sit all day. This is much healthier.
* Climate map of every Winter Olympics. On Sex in the Olympic Village. The Shoshi Games.
* Just Ten Colleges Take in One Sixth of All Donations.
* And listen: you should really just be reading Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal every day.
