August 18, 2011
The Adidas Samba is an indoor soccer training shoe. It has been among Adidas’ most popular, best selling shoes in recent times, the second best sold Adidas shoe ever with over 35 million sold pairs worldwide, behind the legendary Adidas Stan Smith. It is produced in a variety of color schemes, yet the classic black with three white stripes is the most popular. The shoe features a tan gumsole that distinguishes it from other Adidas shoes.
The shoe was first produced in 1950 to enable association football players to train on icy hard ground (hence the suction cups on the gumsole). Its original design featured the classic three stripes, as well as the gold trefoil on the foldable tongue. As years progressed, the Samba evolved into the Samba Millennium (which was made without the extended tongue) and the Samba ’85. Classic models of the shoe are still in production, under the name Classic M. the original model is sometimes used for training, street play, and futsal (a variant of indoor soccer).
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August 18, 2011
Adidas Stan Smith is a tennis shoe made by Adidas. Stan Smith was an American tennis star of the 1960s and ’70s. Adidas approached him in 1971 to endorse the Haillet shoe (designed for French tennis pro Jean-Louis Haillet). The shoe, usually made with a leather upper, has a simple design and unlike most of the Adidas range has no external stripes.
Instead there are three rows of perforations in the same pattern. There is a sketched picture of the tennis player on the tongue of the shoe. The brand is the biggest-selling tennis shoe ever.
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August 16, 2011
In motorsports, homologation [huh-mol-uh-gey-shun] is the approval process a vehicle, race track or standardized part must go through to race in a given league or series. The regulations and rules that must be met are generally set by the series’ sanctioning body. The word is derived from the Greek homologeo—literally ‘same words’—for ‘agree.’ The names of the Ferrari 250 GTO, 288 GTO, Pontiac GTO, and Mitsubishi GTO, where ‘GTO’ stands for ‘Gran Turismo Omologato’ (‘Grand Touring, Homologated’), use the term explicitly.
In racing series that are ‘production-based’ (that is, the vehicles entered in the series are based on production vehicles for sale to the public), homologation requires not only compliance with a racing series’ technical guidelines (for example, engine displacement, chassis construction, suspension design and such) but it often includes minimum levels of sales to ensure that vehicles are not designed and produced solely for racing in that series. Since such vehicles are primarily intended for the race track, practical use on public roads is generally a secondary design consideration, so long as government regulations are met.
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August 16, 2011
Raymond Loewy [loh-ee] (1893 – 1986) was an industrial designer. Born in France, he spent most of his professional career in the United States. Among his work were the Shell and former BP logos, the Greyhound bus, the Coca-Cola bottle, the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 and S-1 locomotives, the Lucky Strike package, Coldspot refrigerators, the Studebaker Avanti and Champion, and the Air Force One livery. His career spanned seven decades.
Loewy was born in Paris in 1893, the son of a Jewish Viennese journalist and French woman. He served in the French army during World War I, attaining the rank of captain. He boarded a ship to America in 1919 with only his French officer’s uniform and $50 in his pocket. He lived in New York and found work as a window designer for department stores, including Macy’s, Wanamaker’s and Saks in addition to working as a fashion illustrator for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
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August 16, 2011
Henry Dreyfuss (1904 – 1972) was an American industrial designer. Dreyfuss was a native of Brooklyn, New York. As one of the celebrity industrial designers of the 1930s and 1940s, Dreyfuss dramatically improved the look, feel, and usability of dozens of consumer products.
As opposed to Raymond Loewy and other contemporaries, Dreyfuss was not a stylist: he applied common sense and a scientific approach to design problems. His work both popularized the field for public consumption, and made significant contributions to the underlying fields of ergonomics, anthropometrics, and human factors.
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August 15, 2011
A smiley, or happy face, is a stylized representation of a smiling human face. It is commonly represented as a yellow circle with two black dots representing eyes and a black arc representing the mouth. ‘Smiley’ is also sometimes used as a generic term for any emoticon (a facial expression pictorially represented by punctuation and letters, usually to express a writer’s mood).
The first unhappy face recorded on film can be seen in Ingmar Bergman’s 1948 film ‘Hamnstad.’ Later on, in 1953 and 1958, the happy face was used in promotional campaigns for motion pictures ‘Lili’ and ‘Gigi’, respectively.
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August 15, 2011
Oniomania [oh-nee-uh-mey-nee-uh] (Greek: onios ‘for sale’ and mania ‘insanity’) is the technical term for the compulsive desire to shop, more commonly referred to as compulsive shopping, shopping addiction, shopaholism, compulsive buying or CB. All of these are considered to be either clinical addictions or impulse control disorders, depending on the clinical source. ‘Originally termed oniomania by Kraepelin (1915) and Bleuler (1924), CB has been described for over 100 years’; but though included among other pathological and reactive impulses, CB went largely ignored for the middle quarters of the twentieth century, and even today ‘Compulsive Shopping is a painful yet virtually unknown mental illness.’
‘Some psychiatrists believe compulsive buying is more indicative of an impulse control disorder, others think it is more indicative of an obsessive-compulsive disorder, or bipolar disorder’ or even an addiction. It has been accepted as a disorder by the Deutsche Gesellschaft Zwangserkrankungen (German organization for obsessive-compulsive disorders), for several years; but in the United States, ‘an Impulse control disorder not otherwise specified…is the diagnostic category usually accorded to compulsive buying.’
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August 15, 2011
A twin-lens reflex camera (TLR) is a type of camera with two objective lenses of the same focal length. One of the lenses is the photographic objective or ‘taking lens,’ while the other is used for the viewfinder system, which is usually viewed from above at waist level. In addition to the objective, the viewfinder consists of a 45-degree mirror (the reason for the word reflex in the name), a matte focusing screen at the top of the camera, and a pop-up hood surrounding it. The two objectives are connected, so that the focus shown on the focusing screen will be exactly the same as on the film.
However, many inexpensive TLRs are fixed-focus models. Most TLRs use leaf shutters with shutter speeds up to 1/500th sec with a B setting. For practical purposes, all TLRs are film cameras, most often using 120 film, although there are many examples which used other formats. No general-purpose digital TLRs exist, since their heyday ended long prior to the digital era. The main exception is the collector-oriented Rollei Mini-Digi, introduced as a rather expensive ‘toy’ in 2004.
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August 15, 2011
Kopi luwak, or civet coffee, is one of the world’s most expensive and low-production varieties of coffee. It is made from the beans of coffee berries which have been eaten by the Asian Palm Civet, then passed through its digestive tract. A civet eats the berries for their fleshy pulp. In its stomach, enzymes seep into the beans, making shorter peptides and more free amino acids. Passing through a civet’s intestines the beans are then defecated, keeping their shape. After gathering, thorough washing, sun drying, light roasting and brewing, these beans yield an aromatic coffee with much less bitterness, widely noted as the most expensive coffee in the world.
Since the flavor of coffee owes much to its proteins, there is a hypothesis that this shift in the numbers and kinds of proteins in beans after being swallowed by civets brings forth their unique flavor. The proteins are also involved in non-enzymatic Maillard browning reactions brought about later by roasting. Moreover, while inside a civet the beans begin to germinate by malting which also lowers their bitterness. Kopi luwak is produced mainly on the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali and Sulawesi in the Indonesian Archipelago, and also in the Philippines, and also in East Timor. Weasel coffee is a loose English translation of its name cà phê Chồn in Vietnam, where popular, chemically simulated versions are also produced.
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August 14, 2011
The Anthora is a paper coffee cup design that has become iconic of New York City daily life — its name is a play on the word amphora (ceramic container with two handles and a long neck narrower than the body). The cup was originally designed by Leslie Buck of the Sherri Cup Co. in 1963, to appeal to Greek-owned coffee shops in New York City — and was later copied heavily by other companies. The genuine Anthora depicts an image of an Ancient Greek amphora, a meander design on the top and bottom rim, and the words ‘WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU’ in a font that resembles ancient Greek writing. The blue and white colors were inspired by the flag of Greece.
Buck never made royalties from his design, but as a salesman he was remunerated handsomely from the success of the product. When he retired from Sherri Cup Co. in 1992, he was presented with 10,000 Anthoras printed with a testimonial inscription. On the occasion of Buck’s death in 2010, a New York Times writer described the motto on the cup as having ‘welcome intimations of tenderness, succor and humility.’ The trademark is currently held by the Solo Cup Company, which licenses sales of the cup.
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August 14, 2011
Greenwashing (a compound word modelled on ‘whitewash’), or ‘green sheen,’ is a form of spin in which ‘green’ PR or ‘green’ marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that a company’s policies or products are environmentally friendly. The term was coined by New York environmentalist Jay Westerveld in a 1986 essay regarding the hotel industry’s practice of placing placards in each room promoting reuse of towels ostensibly to ‘save the environment.’
Westerveld noted that, in most cases, little or no effort toward reducing energy waste was being made by these institutions — as evidenced by the lack of cost reduction this practice effected. Westerveld opined that the actual objective of this ‘green campaign’ on the part of many hoteliers was, in fact, increased profit. Westerveld thus labeled this and other outwardly environmentally conscientious acts with a greater, underlying purpose of profit increase as greenwashing.
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August 9, 2011
Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomic thought based on the ideas of 20th-century English economist John Maynard Keynes. Most economists today are primarily Keynesian-influenced. According to the theory, there exists a cycle in the economy, in which there are years of growth, followed by years of depression or recession, called the business cycle. Keynes′ theory suggested that active government policy could be effective in managing the economy.
Rather than seeing unbalanced government budgets as wrong, Keynes advocated what has been called countercyclical fiscal policies, that is, policies that acted against the tide of the business cycle: deficit spending when a nation’s economy suffers from recession or when recovery is long-delayed and unemployment is persistently high—and the suppression of inflation in boom times by either increasing taxes or cutting back on government outlays.
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