Showing results for Non-Computer - The Old New Thing

Since I'm obviously a glutton for punishment, I also helped read eighth grade essays on the same topic: Describe the qualities you consider to be those which make someone an adult. As always, remember that these are just the funny sentences/excerpts. Let me tell you about my parents Entering a no fun zone It's harder than I thought Tautology...

I didn't participate in the reading of the seventh grade essays, but I did get some of the more entertaining sentences from that batch. As you may recall, the topic was to describe the qualities you consider to be those which make someone an adult. Students were given 90 minutes, plus one additional hour upon request, equipped only with paper and p...

I was out of town for the grading of the seventh grade essays, so I pitched in with the sixth grade essays instead. The students were asked to think of an adult and describe the qualities that make that person an adult. This topic was not very well received by the students, who deemed it uncreative and boring. While I understand their lack of enthu...

The other night, I was playing a friendly game of Scrabble®, and I managed to play BEANIER* (meaning "with a stronger flavor of beans") onto a triple-word score, crossing the B with an open Y, scoring over 100 points in the process. This sufficiently demoralized the other players that the game turned into "play anything that vaguely r...

Security researcher Ross Anderson gives a talk on how a search engine can be used to shed light on the various evils that lurk on the Web. It starts off slow, but picks up when he gets to the "Can you spot the scam?" game that he plays with each Web site. (If you're in a hurry, skip ahead to a little past the 20 minute mark.)

Jeffrey Strain chats with a former burglar and learns the best place to hide money. ("The bank," responds the former burglar. Oh, the best place to hide money in the house...) A month later, the follow-up article discussed the worst places to hide money (that sound like good ideas but aren't).

On the Media in its story "Fact? Check!" forwarded the revelation (uncovered by the PBS program Frontline in the first part of their "News War" series) that the fact that the United States Justice Department launches a leak investigation implicitly confirms the leak! That's because one of the prerequisites for a leak investigation is that the le...

A story a while back about ridiculously expensive speaker cables and James Randi's challenge to tell the difference between them and modestly-priced cables reminded me of a conversation I had with a wine-loving friend of mine. He went on a wine tasting tour and sampled wines of varying quality and price. His conclusion was that he could detect ...

Jürgen Perthold modified a lightweight camera and hung it around his cat's neck, snapping a picture every few minutes. Join Mr. Lee on a trip through the neighborhood. If those trips aren't enough, you can also see what Jacquie is up to.

Some time ago, there was a bit of excitement when researchers John H. Conway (best known to geeks as the inventor of The Game of Life, a Turing-complete cellular automaton) and Simon Kochen (best known to geeks as, um, okay, he's not known to geeks) concluded that if human beings have free will, then so too do elementary particles. In 2009,...