November 29, 2011
The Dymaxion [dahy-mak-see-uhn] car was a concept car designed by U.S. inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller in 1933. The word Dymaxion is a brand name that Fuller gave to several of his inventions, to emphasize that he considered them part of a more general project to improve humanity’s living conditions. The car had a fuel efficiency of 30 mpg, and could transport 11 passengers.
While Fuller claimed it could reach speeds of 120 miles per hour, the fastest documented speed was 90 miles per hour. Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi was involved with the development of the Dymaxion car, creating plaster wind tunnel models that were a factor in determining its shape, and during 1934 drove it for an extended road trip through Connecticut with congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce and actress Dorothy Hale.
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November 29, 2011
A jalopy [juh-lop-ee] (also clunker or hooptie or beater) is a decrepit car, often old and in a barely functional state. A jalopy is not a well kept antique car, but a car which is mostly rundown or beaten up.
As a slang term in American English, ‘jalopy’ was noted in 1924 but is now slightly passé. The term was used extensively in the book ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac, first published in 1957, although written from 1947. The equivalent English term is old banger, often shortened to banger, a reference to older poorly maintained vehicles’ tendency to backfire.
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November 28, 2011
Rat bikes are motorcycles that have fallen apart over time but been kept on the road and maintained for little or no cost by employing kludge (ad hoc) fixes. The concept of keeping a motorcycle in at least minimally operational condition without consideration for appearance has probably characterized motorcycle ownership since its earliest days. The essence of a rat bike is keeping a motorbike on the road for the maximum amount of time while spending as little as possible on it. This calls for adaptation of parts that were not designed to fit the model of bike in question. Most Rat bikes are painted matte black but this is not a requirement.
‘Survival bikes’ are bikes that may appear to be rat bikes, but are not. They are influenced by the ‘Mad Max’ films. The term survival bike itself originated in the British motorcycle press particularly ‘Back Street Heroes,’ and the now-defunct AWoL in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
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November 28, 2011
A rat rod is a style of hot rod or custom car that, in most cases, imitates (or exaggerates) the early hot rods of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. It is not to be confused with the somewhat closely related ‘traditional’ hot rod, which is an accurate re-creation or period-correct restoration of a hot rod from the same era.
Most rat rods appear ‘unfinished’ (whether they actually are or not), with just the bare essentials to be driven. The rat rod is the visualization of the idea of function over form. Rat rods are meant to be driven, not shown off. Sometimes the customization will include using spare parts, or parts from another car altogether.
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November 28, 2011
Novelty architecture is a type of architecture in which buildings and other structures are given unusual shapes as a novelty, such as advertising, notoriety as a landmark, or simple eccentricity of the owner or architect. Many examples of novelty architecture take the form of buildings that resemble the products sold inside to attract drive-by customers.
Others are attractions all by themselves, such as giant animals, fruits, and vegetables, or replicas of famous buildings. And others are merely unusual shapes or made of unusual building materials.
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November 25, 2011
Junk food news is a sardonic term for news stories that deliver ‘sensationalized, personalized, and homogenized inconsequential trivia,’ especially when such stories appear at the expense of serious investigative journalism.
It implies a criticism of the mass media for disseminating news that, while not very nourishing, is ‘cheap to produce and profitable for media proprietors.’
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November 25, 2011
Deviancy amplification spiral is a media hype phenomenon defined by media critics as a cycle of increasing numbers of reports on a category of antisocial behavior or some other ‘undesirable’ event, leading to a moral panic. The term was coined in 1972 by Stanley Cohen in his book, ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics.’ According to Cohen the spiral starts with some ‘deviant’ act. Usually the deviance is criminal, but it can also involve lawful acts considered morally repugnant by a large segment of society.
With the new focus on the issue, hidden or borderline examples that would not themselves have been newsworthy are reported, confirming the ‘pattern.’ Reported cases of such ‘deviance’ are often presented as just ‘the ones we know about’ or the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ an assertion that is nearly impossible to disprove immediately. For a variety of reasons, the less sensational aspects of the spiraling story that would help the public keep a rational perspective (such as statistics showing that the behavior or event is actually less common or less harmful than generally believed) tends to be ignored by the press.
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November 25, 2011
Dieter Rams (b. 1932) is a German industrial designer closely associated with the consumer products company Braun and the Functionalist school of industrial design. Rams studied architecture at the Werkkunstschule Wiesbaden as well as learning carpentry from 1943 to 1957. After working for the architect Otto Apel between 1953 and 1955 he joined the electronic devices manufacturer Braun where he became chief of design in 1961, a position he kept until 1995.
Rams once explained his design approach in the phrase ‘Weniger, aber besser’ which freely translates as ‘Less, but better.’ Rams and his staff designed many memorable products for Braun including the famous SK-4 record player and the high-quality ‘D’-series (D45, D46) of 35 mm film slide projectors. He is also known for designing the 606 Universal Shelving System by Vitsœ in 1960. Many of his designs — coffee makers, calculators, radios, audio/visual equipment, consumer appliances and office products — have found a permanent home at many museums over the world, including MoMA in New York. He continues to be highly regarded in design circles and currently has a major retrospective of his work on tour around the world.
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November 25, 2011
In the jargon of the media-industry, ‘development hell‘ is a period during which a film or other project is trapped in development. A film, television program screenplay, computer program, concept, or idea stranded in development hell takes an especially long time to start production, or never does.
The film industry buys rights to many popular novels, video games, and comics, but it may take years for such properties to be successfully brought to the cinema, and often with considerable changes to the plot, characters, and general tone.
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November 24, 2011
‘The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering’ is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that ‘adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.’ This idea is known as Brooks’ law, and is presented along with the second-system effect (the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors) and advocacy of prototyping.
Brooks’ observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360. He had mistakenly added more workers to a project falling behind schedule. He also made the mistake of asserting that one project — writing an Algol compiler — would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved (it required longer). The tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called ‘The Bible of Software Engineering,’ because ‘everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.’ The book is widely regarded as a classic on the human elements of software engineering. The work was first published in 1975
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November 24, 2011
Overengineering is when a product is more robust or complicated than necessary for its application, either (charitably) to ensure sufficient factor of safety, sufficient functionality, or due to design errors.
Overengineering is desirable when safety or performance on a particular criterion is critical, or when extremely broad functionality is required, but it is generally criticized from the point of view of value engineering as wasteful. As a design philosophy, such overcomplexity is the opposite of the minimalist school of thought.
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November 24, 2011
Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program include an increasing proportion of unnecessary features that are not used by end users, or generally use more system resources than necessary, while offering little or no benefit to its users.
Software developers in the 1970s had severe limitations on disk space and memory. Every byte and clock cycle counted, and much work went into fitting the programs into available resources. Achieving this efficiency was one of the highest values of computer programmers, and the best programs were often called ‘elegant’; —seen as a form of high art.
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