Monthly Archives: May 2012

Tuesday Links (05/08/12)

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The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid is Your Liberal Arts Degree: “I don’t need some pencilneck with four Ph.D’s, one-thousand hours of simulator time, and the ability to operate a robot crane in low-Earth orbit. I need someone with four years of broad-but-humanities-focused studies, three subsequent years in temp jobs, and the ability to reason across multiple areas of study.”

The Most Astounding Fact: By Neil Degrasse Tyson, poet of the stars, with illustrations.

The Most Dangerous Gamer: But is it art? The perennial gaming debate.

Book Review: A Bridge of Years

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It’s hard to write a time-travel story without it turning into a metaphor for something. The past and the future are too pregnant with meaning; too tied into what we are. The immutability of the past doesn’t prevent us from obsessing over it. The uncertainty of the future doesn’t discourage us from trying to fix it securely. We, perhaps alone amongst the animals, live and breathe time.

Read the rest of my review at AESciFi.

Tuesday Links (05/01/12)

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How Shakespeare Changed Everything: My grade 12 English teacher was right. You don’t have to like Shakespeare, but being culturally literate means being familiar with his major works.

Songs from District 12: Did the Hunger Games produce a movie soundtrack worth buying?

Class dismissed: “Half of new bachelor’s degree grads are either unemployed or underemployed, according to the Associated Press. . . .  In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem with public higher education in America is that it was designed to create and support a massive middle class. . . . When the goal of a prosperous middle class was tacitly dismissed, dominos started to fall.  “