…Because the most horrific consequence imaginable of underfunded public education would be that kids start reading comic books. I’m really tired of people perpetuating insulting myths about my hobbies, especially when those people are Democratic political candidates like Nancy King (running for the MD state senate), whose positions I tend to agree with, especially on [...]

A couple of posts ago, I tore apart a media article which seemed to report results from a scientific study, but really did no such thing, and in the attempt, did it really badly. This week, I found a good example of a short news report about a research study, and though it appropriate to [...]

Lo, so many years ago, the most excellent Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure borrowed the concept of a phone box shaped time machine from the venerable Doctor Who. With the finale of series five, the debt is paid, given the Doctor’s clever appropriation of the favored time travel technique of Bill S. Preston, Esq. and [...]

Regular visitors to this space will not be shocked to learn that I’m a big Doctor Who fan. The new series (as well as many of the old serials, thanks to Netflix) gets a lot of play in my living room; it’s sufficiently geeky, and it’s something the whole family can and does enjoy together. [...]

Wouldn’t you know it…it’s Talk like a Browncoat Day! An enterprising passel o’ Browncoats on Facebook (I’m not going to link there; FB and I are havin’ what I call some ‘apart time’ right about now) up an’ decided that the ‘Verse needed another engagin’ little bit of arbitrary holiday mirth*, so’n they set this [...]

According to Sony at E3, it appears that we PS3 owners will finally be able to get our hands on Gran Turismo 5 on November 2, 2010. Of course, there have been release dates before, and they’ve come and gone. I’m hoping this one sticks. Prologue felt half finished, and while I had lots of [...]

Author Jeremy Robinson in his piece at io9 dealing with conflicting feelings about the resurgence of 80s pop culture treasures in modern media really hits on a common truth for many of us of a certain geeky vintage. GI:JOE. Transformers. Battlestar Galactica. V. The A-Team. Voltron. Thundercats. The Smurfs. It’s everywhere. Everything old is new [...]

I’ll just let the original words speak for me here (and if you don’t know from whence these words come, get thee to a library or bookshoppe immediately): A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it [...]

“I’m making perfect sense. You’re just not keeping up” A sentiment that’s more than a little bit familiar sometimes. Otherwise, a decent, if damp weekend. Enjoyed an afternoon at the Virginia Rennaissance Faire, and only got a little wet. The rain came later as I was taking out the recycling.

As someone who both liberally applies snark and sarcasm to everyday communication, and often has trouble recognizing social and non-verbal cues*, the research presented in this paper is really very interesting to me. The research describes a “novel Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification” in online user-generated content (this study made use of Amazon product reviews) [...]