December 8, 2011
A Macquarium is an aquarium made to sit within the shell of an Apple Macintosh computer. The term was coined by computer writer Andy Ihnatko. In the early 1990s several Mac models in this form factor (the Macintosh 128K, Macintosh 512K and Macintosh Plus) were becoming obsolete, and Ihnatko considered that turning one into an aquarium might be ‘the final upgrade’ — as well as an affordable way to have a color Compact Mac.
He has mentioned in interviews that he had seen previous, overly-complex attempts at Macintosh aquariums at trade shows that among other drawbacks suffered from noticeable water level lines across the ‘screen’ that spoiled the illusion of a ‘really good screensaver,’ which drove him to design a version without a visible water line and which allowed the external case of the donor Mac to remain intact.
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December 8, 2011
Pteridomania [tuh-rid-uh-mey-nee-uh] or Fern-Fever was a craze for ferns. Victorian decorative arts presented the fern motif in pottery, glass, metal, textiles, wood, printed paper, and sculpture, with ferns ‘appearing on everything from christening presents to gravestones and memorials.’
The term, a compound of ‘Pteridophytes’ and ‘mania,’ was coined in 1855 by Charles Kingsley in his book ‘Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore’: ‘Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania’…and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem different in each new Fern-book that they buy)…and yet you cannot deny that they find enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool.’
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December 7, 2011
Paradoxical [par-uh-dok-si-kuhl] laughter is an exaggerated expression of humor which is unwarranted by external events. It may be uncontrollable laughter which may be recognized as inappropriate by the person involved. It is associated with altered mental states or mental illness, such as mania, hypomania or schizophrenia, and can have other causes.
Paradoxical laughter is indicative of an unstable mood, often caused by the pseudobulbar affect (a neurologic disorder characterized by uncontrollable episodes of crying and/or laughing), which can quickly change to anger and back again, on minor external cues. This type of laughter can also occur at times when the fight-or-flight response may otherwise be evoked.
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December 7, 2011
Gerd Arntz (1900 – 1988) was a German Modernist artist – famous for his black and white woodcuts. A core member of the Cologne Progressives he was also a council communist. The Cologne Progressives participated in the revolutionary unions AAUD and its offshoot the AAUE in the 1920s, and in 1928 Arntz was contributing anti-parliamentary prints to its paper ‘Die Proletarische Revolution’ which called for workers to form and participate in worker’s councils. These political prints depicted the life of worker’s and the class struggle in abstracted figures in woodcuts.
In 1926 Otto Neurath sought his collaboration in designing pictograms for the ‘Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics’ (‘Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik’; later renamed ‘Isotype’). From the beginning of 1929 Arntz worked at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and economic museum) directed by Neurath in Vienna. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 pictograms. After the brief civil war in Austria in 1934 he emigrated to the Netherlands, joining Neurath and Reidemeister in The Hague, where they continued their collaboration at the International Foundation for Visual Education.
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December 7, 2011
Isotype (International System of TYpographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial form.
It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, due to its having been developed at the Social and Economic Museum of Vienna (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien) between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of the museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.
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December 7, 2011
Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world’s major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
Blissymbols were invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (in what is now Ukraine), which had a mixture of different nationalities that ‘hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.’ Bliss graduated as a chemical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, and joined an electronics company as a research chemist. When the German Army invaded Austria in 1938, he was sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenbald. His German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in Shanghai, where Bliss had relatives.
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December 7, 2011
iConji is a free pictographic communication system based on an open, visual vocabulary of characters with built-in translations for most major languages. The app debuted with 1183 unique characters, known as the lexiConji (vocabulary), culled from base words used in common daily communications, word frequency lists, often-used mathematical and logical symbols, punctuation symbols, and the flags of all nations.
The process of assembling a message from iConji characters is called iConjisation. Since most characters represent an entire word or concept, rather than a single letter or character, iConji has the potential to be a more efficient communication system than SMS (texting). The usual jumble of text and confusing abbreviations can often be replaced by a short string of colorful icons that convey the identical meaning.
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December 7, 2011
Emoji [ih-moh-jee] is the Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages. Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means ‘e’ (‘picture) ‘moji’ (‘letter’). The characters are used much like emoticons elsewhere, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into mobile devices. Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing (apologizing) businessman, a face wearing a face mask, or a group of emoji representing popular foods (e.g. ramen noodles, rice balls). The three main Japanese phone operators, NTT DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone), have each defined their own variants of emoji.
Although typically only available in Japan, the characters and code required to use emoji are, thanks to the nature of software development, often present in many phones’ software. As a result, some phones, such as the Apple iPhone, allow access to the symbols without requiring a Japanese operator. Emoji have also started appearing in emailing services such as Gmail (accessed via Google Labs) in 2009.
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December 6, 2011
Molybdenite [mo-lib-de-nite] is a mineral (molybdenum disulfide, MoS2). Similar in appearance and feel to graphite, molybdenite has a lubricating effect that is a consequence of its layered structure, which consists of a sheet of molybdenum atoms sandwiched between sheets of sulfur atoms. The Mo-S bonds are strong, but the interaction between the sulfur atoms at the top and bottom of separate sandwich-like tri-layers is weak, resulting in easy slippage as well as cleavage planes.
Molybdenite occurs in high temperature hydrothermal ore deposits. Important deposits include the disseminated porphyry molybdenum deposits at Questa, New Mexico and the Henderson and Climax mines in Colorado. Molybdenite flakes are being researched for their potential use in low power semiconductors.
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December 6, 2011
The Tweel (a portmanteau of tire and wheel) is an experimental tire design developed by the French tire company Michelin. The tire uses no air, and therefore cannot burst or become flat.
Instead, the Tweel’s hub connects to flexible polyurethane spokes which are used to support an outer rim and assume the shock-absorbing role of a traditional tire’s pneumatic properties.
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December 6, 2011
Non-pneumatic tires (NPT), or Airless tires, are tires that are not supported by air pressure. They are used on some small vehicles such as riding lawn mowers and motorized golf carts. They are also used on heavy equipment such as backhoes, which are required to operate on sites such as building demolition, where tire puncture is likely. Tires composed of closed-cell polyurethane foam are also made for bicycles and wheelchairs. Airless tires generally have higher rolling friction and provide much less suspension than similarly shaped and sized pneumatic tires. Other problems for airless tires include dissipating the heat buildup that occurs when they are driven. Airless tires are often filled with compressed polymers (plastic), rather than air.
Michelin is currently developing an integrated tire and wheel combination, the ‘Tweel,’ that operates entirely without air. The automotive engineering department at Clemson University is developing a low energy loss airless tire with Michelin through the NIST ATP project. Resilient Technologies and the University of Wisconsin’s Polymer Engineering Center are creating a ‘non-pneumatic tire,’ which is basically a round polymeric honeycomb wrapped with a thick, black tread. The initial version of the tire is for the Humvee.
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December 4, 2011
Supersize is a very large portion of fast food. At McDonald’s it once referred to the largest size of French fries (7-ounce) and soft drinks (42-ounce). After taking a customer’s order, employees would ask, ‘Would you like that Supersized?’
The 2004 documentary ‘Super Size Me’ is often credited with associating the term with obesity and unhealthy portions sizes. The movie followed one man’s month-long McDonald’s diet. McDonald’s began to phase out the Super Size option from their menu in the spring of 2004, and by the end of the year it was gone completely.
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