A group of middle-school-aged self-proclaimed nerds from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, who won the New York City FIRST Lego League Robotics Championship with their motorized robot called Thingamajig are embarking on a trip to the Robotics World Festival in Atlanta. After a lack of funds nearly scuttled their journey, they've been bailed out by British vacuum cleaner exec James Dyson, and have been given the kind of sendoff most young nerds can only dream of: an all-school nerd-cheering pep rally.
posted by ocherdraco on Apr 10, 2009 - 52 comments

"You aren't in as much control as you think you are." Buyology by Martin Lindstrom. Cigarette Health Warnings Stimulate Smoking. Subconscious Encounters: How Brand Exposure Affects Your Choices . A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Oct 23, 2008 - 27 comments

For Roland Barthes, the Death of the Author came on March 23, 1980, in the form of a car speeding down the Rue des Écoles (perhaps that car has become, like wrestling or detergent, another myth); though the Author is gone, his works--texts--remain; they are about history, about fashion, about love, about chopsticks, but fundamentally, they are about signs--as Barthes, once interviewed, said, "Each of us speaks but a single sentence, which only death can bring to a close"--rapidly approaching the end of his sentence, Barthes thought about living together, but the period would be found on his tombstone: écrivain. [more inside]
posted by nasreddin on Aug 27, 2007 - 19 comments

Zoomusicology , a subfield of Zoosemiotics.
posted by Miko on Aug 22, 2007 - 23 comments

"Almost half the children committed one or more of these mistakes. They attempted with apparent seriousness to perform the same actions with the miniature items that they had with the large ones. Some sat down on the little chair: they walked up to it, turned around, bent their knees and lowered themselves onto it. Some simply perched on top, others sat down so hard that the chair skittered out from under them. Some children sat on the miniature slide and tried to ride down it, usually falling off in the process; others attempted to climb the steps, causing the slide to tip over. (With the chair and slide made of sturdy plastic and only about five inches tall, the toddlers faced no danger of hurting themselves.)"
posted by Tlogmer on Aug 18, 2005 - 34 comments

Semiotics for beginners. via Michael Bérubé
posted by kenko on Jul 27, 2005 - 21 comments

“The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically.”
In "Tout Va Bien", just released on Criterion DVD, four years after May '68 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin examine the wreckage: fading workers' empowerment (page with sound), media fatuity, capitalist sprawl, global imperialist mayhem, interpersonal disconnections. "Tout Va Bien" is the story of a strike at a factory as witnessed by an American reporter (Jane Fonda) and her has-been New Wave film director husband (Yves Montand). Included on the DVD is also Letter to Jane (1972), a short film in which Godard and Gorin spend an hour examining the semiotics of a single, hypnotizing photograph of Fonda as she shares feelings with a Vietnamese villager. More inside.
posted by matteo on Mar 8, 2005 - 18 comments

Seduce the opposite sex: learn the universal language of laundering and drycleaning symbols.
posted by xmutex on Nov 3, 2003 - 12 comments

Film Schools obsessed with theory David Weddle complains that in film schools "discussions about movie characters, plots and the human beings who created them are replaced by theories such as semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalytics and neoformalism. [More inside]
posted by gregb1007 on Sep 14, 2003 - 45 comments

CTHEORY the international journal of theory, technology, and culture.
Recent articles:
The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace
Posterchild for the Future: Living with Michael Jackson
The Post-Cyborg Path to Deconism
posted by signal on Mar 14, 2003 - 22 comments

If you don't live round here, you might not have heard of these chaps. They have a nice line in (Flash-animated) semiotics, and their advice for urban gentlemen is pretty useful as well.
posted by Mocata on Jun 16, 2000 - 0 comments