Monday, September 10th was Seoul’s second annual “Car-free day” (차 없는날). Jongno road, which runs through downtown, was closed except to public transportation and a parade of bicycles, buses were free until 9 a.m., and citizens were widely encouraged to take public transportation. Excited by the prospect of seeing the city without cars, I set out to capture the morning commute while walking my son to school.

Scanning the AP headlines recently for news in the astronomy community (as I do fairly regularly) I was struck by the even distribution of stories between American and Russian national programs. Last week, I was also fortunate enough to catch the beginning of the film (with Bruce Campbell as writer, director and star) The Man with the Screaming Brain, featuring some choice over-the-top Russian accents. While the science stories stirred a light...

In a recently-posted opinion piece USC English professor Judith Halberstam argues for “The Death of English” to be acknowledged as a done deal, calling for the academic field of English to regain its relevance by admitting its current irrelevance and reconstituting itself into new interdisciplinary fields that might run job searches for, for example, “the poetries of industrialization” rather than “romanticism.” In part a response to Spivak’s ...

On the Yahoo News “most popular” page you can see the most e-mailed, most highly recommended, and most viewed recent news stories and photographs. I’ve been watching the photos Yahoo displays under these headings for some time now and it seems to me that there are three types of images that invariably populate each of the categories. (1) Women. (Currently it’s Aishwarya Rai and Selma Hayek but I’d bet, from my very unscientific research, that...

I have to admit I’ve been watching (well, reading) the spectacle of the Pope’s death and the election of the new one with a curiosity that has surprised me. As spectacles go, this has been one of medieval proportion and character. It seems like a thing from another time. In the days after John Paul II died, traffic in the streets around the Vatican ground to a halt as pilgrims gathered by the thousands to mourn and later to watch for the wh...

K Klingensmith's Friday post reminded me of one of the more useful heuristic concepts in my little arsenal of ideas: Ted's Law. Ted's Law was invented by my friend "Ted" when he was about 10 years old. His class was studying mathematical powers (you know, where 103 equals 10 x 10 x 10 equals 1000), and Ted came up with a way of explaining that rule in plain English for his classmates. His formulation, which I can't quite remember, was immortal...

By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to a conference in San Francisco. I’m excited to visit college friends I haven’t seen in a while, and since I did spend a year living and working in the East Bay right after college many years ago, I do have some fond memories. But if truth be told, I’d rather be going to Los Angeles. Yes, you read that right. I prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco. This idea is hard for many ...

When people liken movies to video games, they mostly mean it as an insult along the lines of: "Elektra" is slow and without pleasure, and it turns the vivid face of Jennifer Garner into the smooth, immobile face of a video game character. -- Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle One notable exception, familiar to anyone interested in the intersection of media, is Run Lola Run, a film whose link to video games has been imagined in generally positive ter...

I used to play the online role-playing game EverQuest a lot. By "a lot," I mean probably fifteen to twenty hours a week on average, and on weeks where I didn't have to work, as many as thirty or forty hours. In the world of online gaming, my behavior wasn't that unusual; lots of people I knew in the game played EQ that much. And I have to say that though sometimes EQ felt like work (performing repetitive, carpal tunnel syndrome-inducing tasks...

This week, something a little longer, over in the articles section.