While researching my previous post about véjà du and Abraham Wald I came across "The Back of the Napkin Blog" (a.k.a. Digital Roam). This blog is devoted to visual thinking and representation. Very cool and very interesting... well worth a visit. Turns out that there...
Posts related to: Fun
véjà du for the first time ever!
I learned a new term today, véjà du. As we all know (didn't I write a posting about this earlier?) déjà vu (or paramnesia) from the French meaning “already seen” describes the experience of feeling that one has witnessed or experienced a new situation previously. It...
Font Face Off
Mike DeSchryver sent me this video... very funny particularly if you are a typophile like me...
Obama’s gmail account
Did you know that any email sent to barackobama@gmail.com goes to an Indian software developer! Strange but true!
PersonalDNA & cool survey tricks
I just created a personalDNA map for myself. Turns out I am a Benevolent Inventor... beats being a benevolent dictator I say! However, this posting is concerned not with what the survey found out about me but rather about what I learned about the survey. Let's get the...
Ambigrams and the creative process
I received an email out of the blue from Nikita Prokhorov, a freelance graphic designer and assistant professor of graphic design from Connecticut. Nikita runs a blog devoted ambigrams, but in a different kind of way. As the email said, the blog is "devoted to the art...
John McCain meets the video professor!
No explanation required ... [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Jbw2-f8IQ]
It’s a wonderful world
My 12 year old son, Soham, has never been into music. An MP3 player I bought for him languishes somewhere in his room. So you can imagine my surprise when, a few months ago, he indicated an interest in a song, Louis Armstrong's What a wonderful world. So this posting...
Improv here, there, everywhere…
A few months ago I wrote about Professor R. K. Joshi (here and here). He was, as I said in the piece, maybe the single greatest influence on my role as a teacher. I had mentioned that R.K. loved absurdity and play. I was reminded of this when I read about this group...
Finding humor in play
Learning through play has been an important part of my philosophy of teaching (and learning). In fact I have argued that play is far more important than games (though games have been receiving a great deal of educational interest lately). [You can read a previous...
The Brahmin connection
A funny (and yet somewhat sad) story ... So I am in Nagpur airport waiting for my flight, which had been delayed, and I struck up a conversation with a young man there, as one is wont to do. We of course started by complaining about the airlines, then moved on to...
New Delhi, update
I have been at Delhi for the most part since coming to India, meeting people, developing project ideas, catching up… The only breaks have been a short trip to Nagpur (to visit my in-laws) and, coming up, another short trip to Bhubaneswar (to visit my parents). In...
Photography update
I have continued adding photographs from the trip to my Flickr Site... I had posted about this earlier but I guess it is time for another reminder. There are now 380 photographs on the "Travels in Asia 2008" Flickr-set (and more coming soon). Go to the...
Chinese-English Ambigrams
During my travel through Taiwan and Hong Kong, I usually opened my presentations with some bilingual ambigrams - words that can be read in Chinese AND English. These ambigrams were created by David Moser, someone I got to know, virtually, through Doug Hofstadter's...
Hello Hong Kong, goodbye Hong Kong
A short and sweet trip to Hong Kong, one full day, two nights, fly in fly out. I was a guest of the University of Hong Kong and gave a talk there yesterday, the last in my series of TPACK talks. I had a good audience, the talk went well, though I did not manage my...
Being a tourist in Taipei
I woke up this morning, feeling maybe for the first time in this entire trip, tired and a little homesick. I ascribe the first to the rather hectic schedule I have had the past 10 days so, continually on the move, presentation after presentation, meeting after...
National Sun Yat Sen University & Taipei
National Sun Yat Sen Unversity has one of the most gorgeous campuses you can imagine. Nestled between hills, with wonderful views of the ocean, with little twisty roads that connect departments and buildings, just beautiful. My hotel room had a magnificient view of...
Chiayi, Chung Cheng & on to Kuosheng
I had been looking forward to the high speed rail journey though I had some concerns about navigating through the train station since most of the signs were in Chinese and Waiway (the graduate student who had come to pick me up from the airport) could not come with me...
Goodbye Malaysia, welcome Taiwan
So my stay in Malaysia comes to an end. I haven’t had either had time or internet access to be able to update the blog the last few days. So briefly here goes… The day after the presentation (the 13th) I had a meeting with Professors Ramayah, Rozinah, and Bala at USM...
Kuala Lumpur & Penang
I love Malaysia. I love its greenery, its up and down hilly landscape, the colors and designs of the houses, and yes the food. Malaysians are food crazy. There are food stalls everywhere and the range and variety of food available is just amazing. My first night here...
Summer travel 2008 photographs
I have been taking photographs as I travel around Asia (what I have previously described as my multi-national TPACK tour) and uploading them onto Flickr as and when I can. Go to the photographs
Tasteless and offensive
Checking up on urban legends leads to tasteless and offensive error message. I recently received a forwarded email from a friend that listed a bunch of top-notch, companies that were filing for bankruptcy. The list included Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Circuit City,...
Slipping into uncanny valley
MindHacks has a great post related to some of my previous postings about anthropomorphizing interactive artifacts (see here and here) - just that this time these artifacts under discussion are robots. As it turns out, sometime too much similarity between humans and...
Buttoning on to a trend
There is an barely interesting article on today's NYTimes.com site by Steven Heller on campaign souvenirs being sold by the three presidential candidates through their websites (read: From Mousepads to Piggy Banks). I thought his earlier columns on the graphic design...
ZIPskinny
Just found out about this website www.zipskinny.com, a great example of how the web makes information easily available. This website allows you to enter your US zip code, and see US Census data and comparisons with neighboring ZIP codes (or other ZIP codes, upto to 20...
Gender & GPS
During our recent NY / New Jersey visit (during the kids spring break) I had the first opportunity to drive a car equipped with a GPS system. It was a case of love at first sight. I got back home and bought myself a Tom Tom right away. I used this unit extensively...
Google ranking, a self defeating approach
Matt Koehler has an interesting post (Keeping track of the Koehlers) about his attempts to rise in Google's rankings for searches on his last name. In the last few months he seems to have had some success judging that he has moved from page 25 to somewhere in the 3-4...
How to author 85,000 (or is it 200,000) books…
Andrea Francis just emailed me a note about Professor Phillip Parker who is the world's fastest book author. He has over the past five years over 85,000 books to his name. He is also the most eclectic. As the article says, "He has authored some 188 books related to...
Cost of living
Being alive costs taxpayers trillions of dollars a year First time research reveals staggering annual taxpayer cost for being alive East Lansing, MI, April 15: In first-ever research, a new report quantifies a minimum 3 trillion annual taxpayer cost from citizens...
Seeing in the dark
All of us have walked through a sun-dappled forest. However, few of us have noticed that underneath are feet are thousands of little perfect circles. This is often difficult to see because these little perfect circles often overlap into irregular globs of sunlight....