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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Rereading/re-experiencing increases pleasure and memory

Revisiting books or experiences can enhance memory and the experience, according to researchers from American University.

This is something good readers and good students have known for a long while. Sometimes we don't really know a thing until we do it again.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

How to Commit Literary Murder

For fans of mystery, medicine, and forensics is this blog on how to kill off your characters by D. P. Lyle, MD.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Friday, February 24, 2012

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Tornados on the Sun

Space.com posts a video showing a "tornado" on the sun:
"For a 30 hour spell (Feb 7-8, 2012) the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured plasma caught in a magnetic dance across the Sun's surface. The results closely resemble extreme tornadic activity on Earth."
For those of us who like to show brief videos to break up the class time, this one's a pain in the buttocks as it will switch to a new video if you let it go all the way to the end, forcing you to refresh the page.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Magazines of Shorts

These are magazines I've been meaning to look into as friends and writers I've admired landed in them, or something about them struck my fancy:

Ellipsis

Furious Fictions

Linguistic Erosion

Stanley the Whale

Free ebooks

David Marusek, a fine and sometimes hilarious writer of science fiction, is giving away some of his short stories.

Also, Paul di Filippo offers for free his fun novella in the Linear City series, A Princess of the Linear Jungle, which pays homage to many SF classics.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Friday, February 17, 2012

Make Ice Cream

It's also useful for ambitious science teachers let loose and make something like ice cream. This should be useful for any class of chemistry, physics, or physical science. You can make them discuss how it works or calculate final temperatures--just to ease your mind that it's educational.

One recipe to try.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Neal Stephenson

...on the importance of the big idea in SF. The big idea or conceptual breakthrough can aid student/scientific thinking in getting people think along normal lines of SF. As improbable these ideas may be in reality, many of the impressive leaps in science were jumps such as these.

Monday, February 13, 2012

4 Realizations about SF

...realizations that supposedly ruin SF. Some interesting thoughts/patterns here, but I'm not sure if they ruin SF.

Cats (or their parasites) can make you crazy.

Now the archetype/stereotype of the crazy cat lady makes sense (from the Atlantic Monthly).

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Time Won't Give You Time

Cracked has come up seven ways to look at time. Fun stuff--good for interesting students in science although it's not especially useful in the classroom.