What's in a Logo?

What's in a Logo? A great deal, if you've ever tried to come up with a new one or even revise an old one. Brand New is a web log devoted to expressing "opinions on corporate and brand identity work." It is a part of UnderConsideration, a blog for those interested in graphic design. The discussions are enlightening, and often the redesigns are puzzling.

Moss Piglets

Moss Piglets. Water Bears. Tardigrades. "Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew," as Sam Gamgee said in The Two Towers. It wouldn't faze them. For one thing they are small, really small, small as in smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. And that's the really big ones. For another thing they are tough. Real tough.

They live in a slight film of water on moss or lichen. They have eight legs, and all the legs have claws. They can survive in a vacuum; they can survive near absolute zero; they do ok up to 150 degrees; they can survive for up to ten years without water. They can survive radiation a thousand times stronger than other any other critter could handle.

All in all, they are incredible little beasties.

Links:

• The Incredible Water Bear
  
• Tardigrades from the Goldstein Lab at Chapel Hill
  
• Water Bear (video)
  
• Tardigrada Newsletter
  
• Tardigrades.com
  
• TARDIGRADES: BEARS OF THE MOSS (About Tardigrades)
  
• Nature's Great Survivors: Water Bears
• from Stephen Jay Gould's Of Tongue Worms, Velvet Worms, and Water Bears.
  

FAQ's

QueryCAT is a searchable database of over 4,000,000 Frequently Asked Questions gathered from sites all over the web.

You can use it to find answers to puzzling questions like

• How early should I arrive at the airport for my flight?
  
• Why does my smoke detector make a short chirping sound every few minutes?
  
• Do I need a law degree to become a sports agent?
  
• What type of food is typical of Guatemala?
  
• My neighbour's dog barks all the time, who do I complain to and how?
  
• How do I stop my goggles from fogging up when I play?
  

This is a useful site. After all, you never know when you might find yourself wondering "What is the difference between east coast swing, west coast swing, and lindy hop?"

Books by the Foot

We have long been sensitive to the fact that one of the occupational hazards of teaching English is the regular and inexorable accumulation of books -- book creep, as it were. They gradually fill bookshelves, first in neat orderly rows, then stacked on top of those books in their neat orderly rows, and then in front of them. They fight with magazines for space on coffee tables, cluster by reading chairs, and make themselves at home on the dining room table. Cookbooks cluster in odd corners in the kitchen, wearing with pride assorted splatters and stains. Paperbacks sneak into the bedrooms, pile up on bed stands and hide under the bed. Eventually it all becomes too much, and every year or so a general roundup is conducted, followed by a brutal Darwinian culling. The rejects are boxed up and hauled off for the library fund raising sale.

Intellectually we've always realized that that not everyone suffers from book infestation, but still it came as something of a surprise to discover that there is a service for people with the opposite problem--empty space which needs to be filled with books.

For those poor souls, there is the The Strand Bookstore in New York, which offers a wonderful service entitled Books by the Foot. The Strand, which advertises it has over 18 miles of books, will happily sell you a few feet or yards -- whatever your need. The image above is from their Antique Leather collection -- "Beautiful antique leather books with gold tooling, mostly 19th Century books in good condition" -- for a mere $400 a foot.

If you are more concerned with genre than binding, books become more affordable. A foot of biographies (mostly historical, but with some modern) runs $150 a foot. Perhaps as a sign of the times, fiction is only $30 a foot. Books are also available by subject matter.

The 1 October 2007 issue of The New Yorker has a piece entitled "Books in Bulk." It turns out this is quite a useful service for the film industry, as well as the occasional home which needs a library with a lived in look. (The 4 Nov. 2003 New York Times also has a nice article on Strand owner Nancy Bass entitled "Those Books Look Good? Imagine Reading Them.")

The Strand is not the only bookstore to offer this service. Kenny's, in Ireland, can provide "A selection of finely bound antiquarian leather bindings with gilt spines and leather labels" for 1,200 euros per foot." For the more modest budget, Wonderbooks offers cloth books starting at $9.99 a foot.

Actually, we are rather glad we don't live near The Strand. It would probably be too tempting to stop in every now and then and pick up a foot or two of fiction.

Necrotizing Sialometaplasia

There's a bit of disagreement over just how many words are in the average English speaker's vocabulary. Studies have reached widely varying conclusions. Depending on when and where the study was conducted, the figure ranges from 20 or 30 thousand upwards of 150 or 200 thousand. This is due, in part, to disagreements over how many words there are in the English language and, for that fact, what you count as a word in the first place. Bill Bryson, in his wonderful book The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, points out that the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000 entries, and that doesn't include medical or scientific terms or the names of flora and fauna, which would add millions more.

Of course, it is one thing to understand a word and quite another to actually use it. And that brings us to Necrotizing Sialometaplasia, a phrase which would probably give most of us pause, even if we knew what it meant.

Fortunately, The Merck Manuals Online Medical Library is an extensive and terrific source of medical information. In addition to finding a tremendous wealth of advice for virtually any medical issue (i.e., when a Gila monster clamps on to you and starts to inject venom by chewing, "applying a flame under the lizard's chin" may be a good way to get it to open its jaws so you may remove it), their Pronunciation Guide provides an audio clip of the exact pronunciation for an extensive list of medical terms.

Make sure your speakers are on, click on a term, and a lovely mellow voice carefully pronounces the word or phrase for you. (Not only that, but a number of different voices are used for different terms.) Soon, you too will be able to speak with confidence about a nonketotic hyperglycemic-hyperosmolar coma. Abetalipoproteinemia will fall trippingly from your tongue, and no longer will mucopolysaccharidoses give you pause.

There is poetry in these pronunciations. The site is worth a visit just to hear the flow of the syllables.

Audiobooks for Free

ResourceShelf offers a wonderful compilation of sources for free audiobooks at its Resource of the Week: Audio Books for Free.

J. K. Rowling Reveals All

Doubtless you've heard: Joanne Rowling outed Dumbledore at Carnegie Hall on October 19th. Yes, he's gay.

According to an article in Salon.com, that's not all she's revealed about the on-going lives of characters from the Harry Potter series:

Since "Deathly Hallows" was published, Rowling has shared with everyone who would listen details about the unwritten fate of her characters: that Harry and Ron are aurors at the Ministry of Magic; that Hermione is "pretty high up" at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement; that Luna Lovegood is a naturalist who marries Rolf Scamander; that Ginny Weasley plays Seeker for the Holyhead Harpies before becoming a sports writer at the Daily Prophet.

At Carnegie Hall, Rowling told the crowd that Neville Longbottom, Hogwarts herbology professor, marries former Hufflepuff Hannah Abbott, who becomes the landlady of the wizarding watering hole Leaky Cauldron, and that Hagrid never gets married. Perhaps most disconcerting was Rowling's assertion that what Harry's conflicted aunt Petunia would have said to him at their parting, at which Rowling wrote this tantalizing passage –- "for a moment Harry had the strangest feeling that she wanted to say something to him: She gave him an odd, tremulous look and seemed to teeter on the edge of speech, but then, with a little jerk of her head, she bustled out of the room..." –- was, "I do know what you're up against, and I hope it's OK."

Writing for Salon.com, Rebecca Traister asks if Rowling isn't being a bit too chatty. Hasn't one of the strengths of Rowling's writing been its willingness to allow ambiguity? Case in point: Is Snape good or is Snape evil? His character's ambiguity allows for wide-ranging cogitation and many a spirited discussion.

We tend to agree with Traister who says Rowling needs to know when to call it quits. Her imagination needs to be curbed, so ours can roam without fences.

You can read the entire Salon.com article online -- requires free log-on.

There Oughtta Be a Law

A little research is a good thing, but enough is enough! Scientists simply should not go too far.

When researchers revealed that dark chocolate is good for us--the darker the better--we rejoiced. Finally, a justification for all our deepest, mysterious cravings.

Now, however, we learn via Wired News that research "links the type of bacteria living in people's digestive system to a desire for chocolate." Yes, our urges for chocolate operate on a gut level: "Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate's allure."

For some reason, this slight loss of free will depresses us. We think we need a nice piece of chocolate.

The Visual Interpretation of Data

Good Magazine has a terrific feature called Transparency which is a "graphical exploration of the data that surrounds us." Here, for instance, is a representation of the total acreage of major retail stores in America. Turns out Wal*Mart occupies 18,810 acres, while the island of Manhattan occupies only 15,000. My goodness.

Macabre Minds Want to Know

New Scientist has a fascinating and macabre story on what it's like to die in various forms--"How Does It Feel to Die?": drowning, heart attack, bleeding to death, fire, decapitation, electrocution, fall from a height, hanging, lethal injection, and explosive decompression.

Given our morbid fascination with beheading (Henry VIII's wives, the French Revolution, etc.), we've often wondered about that particular exit. Here's what the article's author Anna Gosline says:

Beheading, if somewhat gruesome, can be one of the quickest and least painful ways to die - so long as the executioner is skilled, his blade sharp, and the condemned sits still.

The height of decapitation technology is, of course, the guillotine. Officially adopted by the French government in 1792, it was seen as more humane than other methods of execution. When the guillotine was first used in public, onlookers were reportedly aghast at the speed of death.

Quick it may be, but consciousness is nevertheless believed to continue after the spinal chord is severed. A study in rats in 1991 found that it takes 2.7 seconds for the brain to consume the oxygen from the blood in the head; the equivalent figure for humans has been calculated at 7 seconds. Some macabre historical reports from post-revolutionary France cited movements of the eyes and mouth for 15 to 30 seconds after the blade struck, although these may have been post-mortem twitches and reflexes.

New Scientist has an entire special report dedicated to death, including dozens of features which you can read on their web site.

Student Life and "The System"

This video is really good!

The Cultural Anthropology class of Michael L. Wesch at Kansas State University has created a YouTube film which illustrates the life of today's student. Called A Vision of Students Today, the short film (about 4.5 min.) summarizes "some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime." The video was created by Prof. Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

Among the startling survey results the students share? On average, they complete only 49% of the readings assigned to them; only 28% of their assignments seem relevant to their lives; they'll read 8 books this year, 2,300 webpages, and 1,281 Facebook entries; they'll write 42 pages for class in a semester, but over 500 pages of email.

SF Minds Want to Know

How does the Serenity compare in size to the Enterprise? Or--for that matter- to the Discovery, the Nostromo, the Millennium Falcon, or the Columbia? And how do they compare to the Eiffel Tower or an American football field or the space shuttle Discovery?

You'll find the answers--beautifully pictured to scale--on Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions: A Museum of Speculative Fiction inspired Spaceships.

Pictured: Jabba's Sail Barge from Star Wars

• Serenity -- TV series Firefly and the movie Serenity
• Enterprise -- various Star Trek TV series and movies
• Discovery -- 2001: a Space Odyssey
• Nostromo -- Alien
• Millennium Falcon -- Star Wars
• Columbia -- Battlestar Galactica 1968 TV series

How to Cite a Blog in a Science Paper

The arcane yet interesting question of whether one cites weblogs in a scientific paper has been answered by the U. S. National Library of Medicine in The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (2nd ed., 2007).

You can see an explanation of the citation rules for weblogs with examples on the style guide's web site.

Podcasts from the National Book Festival 2007

Podcasts from the 2007 National Book Festival are available online, in addition to some webcasts. You can find them at the Festival's web site.

Paris Architecture Explained

"Paris Architecture Explained" by Lisa Pasold is an "Overview with examples of the history of notable architecture in Paris. Covers the medieval period, Renaissance, French Baroque and Classicism, Rococo, Neo-Classicism and Empire, Haussmann renovations, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and 20th century developments through the mid 1990s." (--from Librarians' Index to the Internet)

Agatha Christie, Queen of Crime

The official Agatha Christie web site is a great resource on Christie titles, protagonists, and productions (and includes downloads and games).

For more great Christie web sites, the Librarians' Index to the Internet recommends

• Delicious Death, an Agatha Christie works list and
• the British Museum's exhibit on Agatha Christie and Archaeology.
  

“I am too cool to be a professor, I am too cool to be a professor.”

From The James Bond Lifestyle Seminar for Academics©--

As everyone knows, James Bond is cool; most professors are not. They are the opposite of cool. That’s why no one listens to them.

Most professors don’t know how to dress themselves. They are rarely seen with beautiful people. They usually drive ugly cars. And most of them don’t even know how to tip properly. Let’s face it, pal. If you’re an academic, you are probably a nerd, a geek, a loser, or, as Sinatra—the arbiter of all things cool—used to call such people, a “Clyde.”

But that’s probably why you became a professor in the first place, instead of, say, a military test pilot, an A-list actor, or president of the United States. You stayed in school, and you never learned the rules of cool. That’s why you don’t have a license to kill.

And that’s why you need the James Bond Lifestyle Seminar for Professors©. You need to be a “Dr. Yes” instead of a “Dr. No.”

You can read the entire useful article, Clyde, on Chronicle.com.

Rave Reviews: Bestselling Fiction in America

The University of Virginia's online exhibit--Rave Reviews: Bestselling Fiction in America--celebrates "the fiction Americans actually read-fiction we admire, fiction we love, fiction we pretend to ignore."

The exhibit includes "illustrated discussions of bestsellers and movies, and types of bestsellers (such as regional, genre, and war fiction, social criticism, and scandalous books), and a link to bestseller lists" (Librarians' Index to the Internet).

In Honor of National Archives Month

We are blessed to live during a time of interesting male facile hair. But darlin', we can't touch the imaginative, hirsute males of the 19th c. As evidence, we offer Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century: A Daily Celebration of The Golden Age of Upper Lip Hair.

The mustache blog is the brainchild of a photographic archivist who was looking for a way to celebrate National Archives Month (October). The result is creation of a daily mustache blog with the digital images from the collections of the University of Kentucky Archives:

Dear Gentle Reader, Many of the following pages have graphic and clear images of the masculine mustache in all its forms, both sublime and grotesque. My intent is not to shock or titillate, but merely to inform on the subject. The Nineteenth Century gave us many things, but above all it was a hotbed of facial hair experimentation and this is but a poor sampling of those many lost forms.

Wired Science | New PBS Show!

“More than ever before, advances in science and technology affect people's daily lives,” says WIRED Science executive producer David Axelrod. “Our goal is to keep our viewers two steps ahead of those changes - and entertain them at the same time.”

WIRED Science's web site describes the new show:

Each week, WIRED Science correspondents take viewers to the frontiers of discovery across the country and around the world, spotlighting the cutting-edge innovations and research that are defining 21st-century culture, and introducing the high-tech mavericks who are making it happen.

The show isn’t limited to the airwaves. WIRED Science's online arm features Web-exclusive stories, and expands the broadcast segments with additional video, blogs, columns, and interviews. A lively discussion area and regular contests bring viewers into the action. The website also features a dynamic collection of related science activities for the classroom, developed by leading science teachers - and their students - from across the US.

Locally (NW Wyoming), WIRED Science shows on PBS channels, Wednesday nights, 7:00 p.m. You can also access episodes and content on the show's web site; and you can download free video podcasts from iTunes.

The War Toolbox

THE WAR by Ken Burns inspired creation of The War Toolbox by the California Center for the Book.

At the Toolbox, one can find book lists (for all age groups), movie lists, forums, lists of scholars, and supplemental information.

L'Engle Memorial Service in November

Madeleine L'Engle, the woman who introduced us to a lifelong love of Science Fiction when we read A Wrinkle in Time, died on September 6th this year. The memorial service for L'Engle will be held on November 28th at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. That is the day before what would have been her 89th birthday.

You can find a Four-Dimensional Tribute to L'Engle on NPR's Bryant Park Project.

One Image Is Worth 1000 Words

From The Knight with His Hand on His Breast by El Greco. Original from Art Renewal Center at http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=14299

Worth 1000 sponsors regular Photoshopping contests, and we particularly like this one, which challenges Photoshop users "to show us what occurred after the artists completed their artwork. You can show us a few seconds later, when a cow wanders in front of the American Gothic couple, or hours later, when the waiters and busboys are cleaning up the Last Supper table."

You can view all the provocative images on the Worth 1000 web site.

Wi-Fi How To

Authors Adam C. Engst and Glenn Fleishman are making their book on how to create a Wi-Fi network available online for FREE.

Why? The authors say, "We'll be frank: the book got great reviews, and we heard from hundreds of readers how they liked it–but it didn't sell well enough to continue to update it.

"That's why we're giving this edition from 2004 away at no cost: there's still much that's relevant even after all the changes that Wi-Fi has gone through. (What's really out of date? There's little coverage of WPA security and nothing on 802.11n.)"

You can access a free version of the second edition of The Wireless Networking Starter Kit by following the book's link.