March 10, 2011
Kiasu [kee-ah-soo] (lit: ‘fear of losing’) is a Chinese word describing behavior such as accumulating too much food on one’s plate during a buffet lunch (for fear of there not being enough) or joining a queue many days in advance just to ensure that one successfully gets hold of the limited free tickets to events. This word is so widely used by Singaporeans and Malaysians that it is incorporated into their English vocabulary (in the form of Singlish and Manglish).
It is often used in describing the social attitudes of people, especially about South East Asian society and its values and competitiveness. Kiasu is commonly compared to Kiasi (lit: ‘fear of death’) and both are commonly used to describe optimization behavior. Kiasu-ism means to take extreme measures to achieve success, and Kiasi-ism is doing the same to avoid risk.
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March 10, 2011
TerraPower is a nuclear reactor design spin-off company investigating a class of nuclear fast reactors called the traveling wave reactor (TWR).
One of TerraPower’s primary investors is Bill Gates. Whereas standard light water reactors such running worldwide use enriched uranium as fuel and need fuel reloads every few years, TWRs, once started, use depleted uranium instead and are considered to be able to operate for up to 100 years without fuel reloading.
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March 10, 2011
Arm & Hammer is a registered trademark of Church and Dwight, an American manufacturer of household products. The logo of this brand is a muscular arm holding a hammer. Originally associated only with baking soda and washing soda, beginning in the 1970s the company began to expand the brand to other products using baking soda as a deodorizing ingredient, including toothpaste, laundry detergent, underarm deodorant, and cat litter. The Arm & Hammer brand is one of the longest-running and most recognized U.S. trademarks.
The Arm & Hammer logo dates back to the 1860s. James A. Church ran a spice business known as Vulcan Spice Mills. According to the company, the Arm and Hammer logo represents Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking. Originally a stylized representation of the Greek god of fire and forge, the muscular male arm with hammer in fist was used prior to the American Civil War as a symbol of the labor movement.
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March 10, 2011
Spider silk is a protein fiber spun by spiders. Spiders use their silk to make webs or other structures, which function as nets to catch other animals, or as nests or cocoons for protection for their offspring. They can also suspend themselves using their silk.
Spider silk is a remarkably strong material. Its tensile strength is comparable to that of high-grade steel, and about half as strong as Kevlar, but Spider silk is about a fifth of the density of steel; a strand long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams (18 oz).
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March 10, 2011
BioSteel is a trademark name for a high-strength fiber material made of a spider silk-like protein extracted from the milk of genetically modified goats, made by Nexia Biotechnologies. Biosteel and other biopolymers are being researched to provide lightweight, strong, and versatile materials for a variety of medical and industrial applications. Nexia Biotechnologies plans to use the spider silk from the milk of transgenic goats for bullet proof vests and anti-ballistic missile systems.
The company has successfully generated distinct lines of goats that produce in their milk recombinant versions of either the dragline silk proteins. When the female goats lactate, the milk, containing the recombinant silk, is harvested and subjected to traditional chromatographic techniques in order to purify the corresponding recombinant silk proteins to homogeneity. The purified silk proteins are then dried, dissolved using appropriate solvents and transformed into microfibers using wet-spinning fiber production methodologies.
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March 9, 2011
Bob Peak (1927 – 1992) was an American commercial illustrator best known for innovative design in the development of the modern movie poster. United Artists studio hired Peak in 1961 to design the poster images for the film ‘West Side Story.’ The success of Peak’s work on that film led to work on posters for designer Bill Gold.
In the mid-1970’s Peak’s style would become familiar to fans of science fiction films when he created the poster art for the futuristic film ‘Rollerball’ (1975), which was followed by the first six ‘Star Trek’ films, ‘Superman’ (1978), ‘Excalibur’ (1981), ‘In Like Flint,’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979). By the 1980’s only the movie poster artist Drew Struzan was in as much demand by film directors.
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March 9, 2011
In Computer science, ‘The Cloud‘ is a marketing term for the Internet. In the case of electricity, users can simply use it. They do not need to worry where the electricity is from, how it is generated, or transported. At the end of the month, they will get a bill for the amount of electricity they consumed. The idea behind cloud computing is similar: The user can simply use storage, computing power, or specially crafted development environments, without having to worry how these work internally.
The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet based on how the internet is described in computer network diagrams; which means it is an abstraction hiding the complex infrastructure of the internet.
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March 9, 2011
Moleskine is an Italian brand of notebooks. Moleskine books are typically bound in coated paper cardboard, with an elastic band to hold the notebook closed, a sewn spine that allows it to lie flat when opened, cream color paper, rounded corners, a ribbon bookmark, and an expandable pocket inside the rear cover. Among artists who used similar black notebooks were Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Henri Matisse.
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March 9, 2011
Moog synthesizer [mohg] (pronounced like ‘vogue’) may refer to any number of analog synthesizers designed by Dr. Robert Moog or manufactured by Moog Music, and is commonly used as a generic term for analog and digital music synthesizers. The company pioneered the commercial manufacture of analog synthesizers in the early 1950s. The technological development that led to the creation of the Moog synthesizer was the invention of the transistor, which enabled researchers like Moog to build electronic music systems that were considerably smaller, cheaper and far more reliable than earlier vacuum tube-based systems.
The Moog synthesizer began to gain wider attention in the music industry after it was demonstrated at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967. The commercial breakthrough of a Moog recording was made by Wendy Carlos in the 1968 record ‘Switched-On Bach,’ which became one of the highest-selling classical music recordings of its era. In 1974 the German electronic group Kraftwerk further popularized the sound of the synthesizer with their landmark album ‘Autobahn,’ which used several types of synthesizer including a Minimoog. German-based Italian producer-composer Giorgio Moroder helped to shape the development of disco music also used Moog synthesizers.
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March 9, 2011
Bill Gold (b. 1921) is an American graphic designer best known for thousands of movie poster designs. During his 60-year career he worked with some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers, including Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Elia Kazan, Ridley Scott, and many more. Among his most famous film posters are those for Casablanca, A Clockwork Orange, and The Sting. Gold designed (and often photographed) posters for 35 consecutive Clint Eastwood films, from Dirty Harry (1971) to Mystic River (2004).
All of Gold’s posters have had a distinctive style. Each poster gave a film its unique identity, often creating the only lasting impression of a film that many would get. Gold’s ever-changing style reflected a wide range of current tastes, trends, and approaches, yet never strayed from the tried-and-true basics of film promotion. Together, Bill Gold’s poster art represents many of the most important American films since the advent of color photography.
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March 8, 2011
Michel Fournier (b. 1944) is an adventurer and retired French Air Force colonel. He has been involved in planning several attempts to break freefall jumping height records, but has yet to be successful. In 1998, the French space agency chose Fournier to conduct a record jump to test the ability of astronauts to survive reentry without a space craft. This project was quickly canceled. In 2003, Fournier attempted his first privately-financed jump but the balloon ripped while being filled. ‘The New York Times’ reports that Fournier has spent nearly $20 million on his two private attempts.
Fournier was scheduled to carry out the Grand Saut (Big Jump) project in 2008, which would have seen him ascend to 40 km (25 mi) in a balloon and freefall 34 km (21 mi) to earth before opening his parachute at 6 km (3.7 mi). In the process he was expected to break the sound barrier, and reach speeds upward of 1,000 miles per hour. His freefall was expected to last 15 minutes. Joseph Kittinger set the previous parachute record by jumping from 31,333 meters (102,799 ft) in 1960 (with a small parachute for guidance) under Project Excelsior. Roger Eugene Andreyev from the Soviet Union holds the longest freefall record of 24,483 meters (80,325 ft) in 1962.
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March 8, 2011
Paul Rand (1914 — 1996) was an American graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Westinghouse, and ABC. He was one of the originators of the Swiss Style of graphic design, which emphasizes cleanliness, readability and objectivity.
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