It didn’t involve an F, but I have attempted this feat in my life.

(via the always eerily on point xkcd… and remember, don’t forget to mouseover the comic…)

Did you know that if you press the ALT button and click on any word on the New York Times website a pop-up window opens with the word’s definition? The feature is powered by Answers.com.

Does anyone know when they added this feature? Not that the newspaper uses to many 10 cent words, but the feature is clean and useful. Now, if the ALT-click opened a window with a Wikipedia entry for the clicked word, that would be extrememly useful.

Update: It appears that this feature works on individual articles, but not on section pages (e.g. the homepage, business, sports, etc.)

Got killed in Procedure this morning. I found out something intertesting though. . .I was asked to provide the class with a definition. But instead of the definition of a word (e.g. Volenti non fit Injuria. . . the volunteer suffers no wrong), I was asked to define a concept. It was this big picture view that I had a hard time with. When I taught programming last year, I found that this was the hardest thing for a student to do. They could identify, for instance, an object when they saw it, use it to solve problems, and understand its component parts. But they all had a hard time summoning up the language to answer the question of “so what.” They never got the why of it.

I am noticing a lot of overlap between the skills it takes to learn programming and the skills it takes to learn the law. I will return to this topic soon after I fleshed out my ideas.