Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written. These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples.
Have a crazy brilliant idea that needs funding? We award $1,000 grants every month. It couldn't be simpler! Your idea is yours alone. We don't want a stake in it. We just want to help you make it happen!
Sideways dictionary — it's like a dictionary, but using analogies instead of definitions. Use it as a tool for finding and sharing helpful analogies to explain technology. Because if everyone understands technology better, we can make technology work better for everyone.
If you’re a self-taught engineer or bootcamp grad, you owe it to yourself to learn computer science. Thankfully, you can give yourself a world-class CS education without investing years and a small fortune in a degree program 💸. There are plenty of resources out there, but some are better than others. You don’t need yet another “200+ Free Online Courses” listicle. You need answers to these questions: Which subjects should you learn, and why? What is the best book or video lecture series for each subject? This guide is our attempt to definitively answer these questions. TL;DR: Study all nine subjects below, in roughly the presented order, using either the suggested textbook or video lecture series, but ideally both. Aim for 100-200 hours of study of each topic, then revist favorites throughout your career
Pork Chops and Apple Sauce: Appraising the Brady Bunch’s Art Collection
The world of The Brady Bunch can be defined by a conspicuous style. After all, the setting is an architect father’s passion project, accoutered with what Carol Brady once described as Danish Modern furniture. The family’s fashion arc went from Ozzie and Harriet in season one to post-sixties extremes in season three. Yet the Brady’s choice of household artwork seems oddly uninspired. Apart from a few exceptions, Brady wall art is practically invisible, begging to be upstaged by Mike’s designs, which include both the house and the family that lives there. What follows is an examination of that which is meant to be ignored. I’ve detailed the Brady family art collection and elaborated on the trends and styles that it represents. It began as a lark, but it became a personal opus that surpassed the simple room-by-room inventory I envisioned. In some cases specific artists, pieces, and manufacturers have been unearthed, filling a gaping informational void on the internet. My work is sure to be a treat for anyone who loves art, or The Brady Bunch, or tedious overanalysis.
Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear. The app highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors; if you see a yellow sentence, shorten or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
I am obsessed with English etymology, the study of where words come from and how their meanings change over time. Each etymology is like a magic portal into a tiny truth about history, culture, language, or the mind—a miniature eureka, a quiet a-ha, a satisfying huh, or a little story that I believe only a good word origin can tell. So, each week, I pick some words, usually based on a newsy theme or topic, to see what we can learn from their roots.
Pixar in a Box is a behind-the-scenes look at how Pixar artists do their jobs. You will be able to animate bouncing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make virtual fireworks explode. The subjects you learn in school — math, science, computer science, and humanities — are used every day to create amazing movies at Pixar.
The Art of Storytelling | Pixar in a Box | Partner content | Khan Academy
What makes someone a good storyteller? Storytelling is something we all do naturally, starting at a young age, but there’s a difference between good storytelling and great storytelling. In this lesson you’ll hear from Pixar directors and story artists about how they got their start, what stories inspire them, and you’ll begin to think about what kinds of stories you might want to tell.
We are proud to announce the publication of Theft! A History of Music, a graphic novel laying out a 2000 year long history of musical borrowing from Plato to rap. The comic, by James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins and the late Keith Aoki, is available as a handsome 8.5 x 11″ paperback, and for free download under a Creative Commons license. This comic lays out 2000 years of musical history. A neglected part of musical history. Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ’s turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing—extensively borrowing—from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process? The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race—again and again, race—and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate ones. They still are. The history in this book runs from Plato to Blurred Lines and beyond. You will read about the Holy Roman Empire’s attempts to standardize religious music with the first great musical technology (notation) and the inevitable backfire of that attempt. You will read about troubadours and church composers, swapping tunes (and remarkably profane lyrics), changing both religion and music in the process. You will see diatribes against jazz for corrupting musical culture, against rock and roll for breaching the color-line. You will learn about the lawsuits that, surprisingly, shaped rap. You will read the story of some of music’s iconoclasts—from Handel and Beethoven to Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ray Charles, the British Invasion and Public Enemy. To understand this history fully, one has to roam wider still—into musical technologies from notation to the sample deck, aesthetics, the incentive systems that got musicians paid, and law’s 250 year struggle to assimilate music, without destroying it in the process. Would jazz, soul or rock and roll be legal if they were reinvented today? We are not sure. Which as you will read, is profoundly worrying because today, more than ever, we need the arts.
Making Your Online Identity Count: Know Your Digital Footprint
Employers are increasingly using the internet and social networks to screen prospective employees. Some studies suggest that up to 60% of employers research job candidates online, a figure that has been growing steadily over the past decade. In addition, social media is now an invaluable means of communicating with your professional peers from around the world. This is the first of two tutorials that explores how you can develop an online identity that is tailored for this professional environment and how to manage this identity effectively.
CryptoParties are free and open for everyone, but especially those without prior knowledge, who haven't yet attended one. CryptoParty is a decentralized movement with events happening all over the world. The goal is to pass on knowledge about protecting yourself in the digital space. This can include encrypted communication, preventing being tracked while browsing the web, and general security advice regarding computers and smartphones. To try the tools and apps directly at the CryptoParty, bring your laptop or smartphone.
WP Pusher lets you install and update WordPress themes and plugins, directly from GitHub - even if your clients are using cheap shared hosting. If it can run WordPress, it can run WP Pusher. You can manage all your WordPress themes and plugins from one place, the dashboard, or enable Push-to-Deploy and have your code update itself automatically every time you push to GitHub or Bitbucket. This is made possible by the WP Pusher plugin. The plugin hooks into WordPress and uses core functionality to fetch your themes and plugins from GitHub. No need to give us access to your servers or GitHub, since WordPress does the real work for us
How do you get students to post? How do you get students to do anything? You grade it. I don’t mean to sound cynical so much as realistic. It’s a fact: students need to know that what they’re spending their limited time doing is valued by us, their professors. And how do we show we value something in the classroom? At the most superficial level, by grades. So I typically make the blogging a substantial part of the semester grade. For example, in my most recent graduate class on postmodernism, I required once-a-week postings that would add up to 20 percent of the final grade
Learning to See: Photography at Black Mountain College
The impact of Black Mountain College on the history of twentieth-century arts is still coming to light. A small, liberal-arts institution that ran from 1933 to 1957 in rural North Carolina, the school brought some of the most inventive minds of a generation—including European intellectuals fleeing the ravages of World War II—into contact with an intrepid student body that was ready to change the cultural gears of history. The backbone of Black Mountain’s curriculum was the arts program, famously shaped and directed by Josef Albers from 1933 to 1949. Before coming to America, Albers had studied and taught at the Bauhaus, where he developed an understanding of Werklehre—the noble, “handicraft” aspect of art. He brought this pragmatic approach to his teachings at Black Mountain College. While at the Bauhaus, Albers created a series of semi-experimental photocollages (a selection of them is currently on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). His interest in photography as an art and as a mode of seeing continued upon his move to the States. “Photography,” Albers once observed, “is still a child among the crafts”; indeed, its newness might well have been part of the medium’s allure for him.
Bears, badgers and Boatswain: Lord Byron and his animals | Wordsworth Trust Blog
But it wasn’t only wolves and bears that immortalised Byron among animal-lovers; perhaps his most beloved and famous pet was the great Newfoundland dog, Boatswain. When Boatswain contracted rabies, Byron nursed him devotedly, without fear of catching the disease himself. Upon his demise, Byron commissioned a magnificent monument in the grounds of Newstead Abbey; etched upon the tombstone is one of his best-known poems, Epitaph to a Dog
With an estimated 2,000,000 speakers, American Sign Language (ASL) is the fourth most popular language in the United States. It’s the most prominent sign language of Deaf communities in the U.S. and Canada and many of its signs are used in countries around the world. Now learning how to sign has become easier thanks to Giphy’s recently-released library of over 2,000 ASL words and phrases.
“1917. Free History” is a project that enables participants to find out about the history of 1917 from those who lived during this defining moment of twentieth century history.
Composer is a dependency manager for PHP. Composer will manage the dependencies you require on a project by project basis. This means that Composer will pull in all the required libraries, dependencies and manage them all in one place.
Beautiful Trouble is a book, web toolbox and international network of artist-activist trainers whose mission is to make grassroots movements more creative and more effective.
Every New York Times Front Page Since 1852 Combined Into a Single Minute-Long Video
Data artist Josh Begley has combined every New York Times front page since 1852 into a single minute-long video. The 4K video puts 45 pages in each frame for a quick look at how the front page layout has evolved over time.
Back when I ran a webpage about Russian “parallel cinema,” I got invited to a meeting of the Syndicate mailing list subscribers which was held in Rotterdam in September 1996, as part of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF). When I registered at the festival, I got a badge that had “Artist” written on it. Before that, I considered myself mostly a film critic; I wrote about experimental cinema and served as a program director for CINE FANTOM film club. My career as an artist lasted the whole of three weeks. At the Metaforum III conference in Budapest, I presented a new web project, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, and after that, I became a Famous Net Artist (FNA)—a fascinating and much-wanted profession. I’d like to share four years’ worth of observations about the scene and talk about my personal experience of adapting to it.
THE TESSERA is an alternate reality game (ARG) about a mysterious collective of historically significant innovators, known as “The Tessera,” hunted by an even more unknown character who goes by “S.” Players navigate real-world and online computational thinking puzzles with the help of the ghosts of these famous men and women who are trying to save everything their think-tank stands for from S’s destructive tendencies. In the Computer History Museum, ghosts have come to visit us in our world; In The Tessera, we can visit them in theirs. Tessera: Ghostly Tracks is a real-world experience where players try to identify the ghosts of figures in computer history that are haunting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Tessera: Light in the Dark is an online game where players use real world media and skills to interact with the fictional world of the Tessera, working together to unravel the mystery of a haunted Victorian-era tavern.
The True History of Fake News | by Robert Darnton | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
In the long history of misinformation, the current outbreak of fake news has already secured a special place, with the president’s personal adviser, Kellyanne Conway, going so far as to invent a Kentucky massacre in order to defend a ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries. But the concoction of alternative facts is hardly rare, and the equivalent of today’s poisonous, bite-size texts and tweets can be found in most periods of history, going back to the ancients.
This Augmented Reality App Tells Indigenous Stories in Canadian Cities - Motherboard
Adrian Duke showed me his phone while we stood outside Vancouver's Skwachàys Lodge. An animated raven popped up to tell me the story behind this boutique hotel, which houses Indigenous artists and their works. The raven was modelled on a commissioned painting by Garnet Tobacco, whose other paintings are on display inside the gallery. Skwachàys Lodge used to just be another hotel until the nonprofit Vancouver Native Housing Society took it over, in 2011. Squamish Nation Chief Ian Campbell named it after the once-marshy land it occupies. Now, it houses Indigenous artists-in-residence, those at risk of homelessness who are given shelter-rate apartments, and patients who come from elsewhere in British Columbia, on Canada's West coast, seeking medical treatment in this city. Duke, 30, is a member of the Muscowpetung Nation. He's developing a new augmented reality app—think Pokémon Go—to share Indigenous stories that are tied to physical places like this one. It's called Wikiupedia, and Skwachàys is one of its first geolocations.
conducts creative, participatory research that aims to temporarily transform public spaces and instigate dialogue about democracy, spatial justice and everyday life. The Institute’s projects use performance, conversation and unexpected interventions to investigate social and political “tiny things”.
