a noun's a very special word – it's any name you ever heard

BoingBoing directs our attention to a clever little interview by Mother Jones magazine with the graphic designers behind the brilliant and massive Noun Project, which has—out of necessity—created icons to visually communicate some 17, 000 concepts. The artists go on to reveal that their motivation was kept up by educators reaching out to them for a larger set of symbols to equip autistic learners with as cues to see a task through.

Of course, these signs have broad appeal in their exhaustive and humourous coverage. Individual icons are available for fair-use purchase on the project's website.  Decades ago, there was a similiar prodigy, called Stefan Kanchev from Bulgaria who worked on the commercial advertizing side of the house, renowned for his endless business and industry logo designs.

macbeth effect

Here is an interesting vignette demonstrating how washing one's hands turns ones self-assessment towards the optimistic and provides a sense of closure. In clinical trials at least, in what could be named after Lady Macbeth or Pontius Pilate, subjects felt better after failing to accomplish an impossible task when encouraged to wash up afterwards. Egos from the hand-washers recovered significantly faster than those who did not, the study shows. I wonder, however, if the therapeutic results have to do with the body exorcizing defeat in the the mind symbolically or rather the low-hanging fruit effect, being assigned a very easy job after presented with one that was very hard.

yearbook, jahrgang

The exquisite BibliOdyssey delivers another brilliantly curated gallery with historical background with the annals of the Matriculation Register of the Basel Rectorate, documenting in three volumes enrollment and stewardship for the university continuously from 1460 to the year 2000, illustrated with beautiful paintings in miniature to bookend the reign of successive registrars and classes.  Be sure to linger a bit at this book to discover an amazing compendium of picture-books with stories about their origins sure to please any bibliophile.

monoceros

Website io9 has an interesting book review of a new work by geographer Chris Lavers on the natural history of the unicorn and how this legendary creature has become somewhat of an obsession and a symbol pregnant with associations, connotations of all sorts, employed by many different agencies.

It turns out that the earliest reports of an illusive and ferocious beast in the wilds of distant India, which probably referred to a third-hand sighting of a rhinoceros, propagated by ancient Greek naturalists, is completely unrelated to the unicorn as it appears in the Bible. Early translators were at a loss as to what animal Hebrew word re'em ( רֶאֵם ), often used metaphorically, could refer to. Literally the word stood for the extinct aurochs, the European bison—and other animals like goats and cattle and camels were recognisable, but re'em was used in the text, with license, for any beast of burden and symbol of strength and, alternately, for submission—which makes more sense when read in context. The authorities substituted the Greek and Latin words for unicorn, however, sanctifying and popularizing the pensive creature.