optotype

German-born optometrist George Mayerle developed a rather comprehensive and inclusive eye chart whilst practising in San Francisco that reflected the diversity of his adopted home.
The radiant dials above test for astigmatism and the bars at the bottom can be used to reveal colour-blindness. Different scripts are represented as well as pictorial characters and geometric symbols for the pre-literate and is nearly contemporaneous with the Snellen table that we’re probably best acquainted with. Learn more about this striking diagnostic tool at Public Domain Review at the link above and find out how to purchase a copy of your own.

worshipful company

Despite not entering into common-parlance unlike some of the other phrases he turned like Boston Brahmin or anesthesia, the term epeolatry coined by poet, physician and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior (Junior was the US Supreme Court justice) that means the adoration of words deserves a champion. Holmes’ Breakfast-Table series of essays, where the concept was first elaborated, were the foundational dialogues of The Atlantic Monthly—a publication that Holmes named and helped establish.

7x7

figgy pudding: 1970s era Sainsbury’s Christmas dinner packaging

fun-size: definitive ranking of convenience store movie scenes

dalí atomicus: teacher and photographer Karl Taylor recreates the 1948 iconic, action-filled photograph of the artist with flying cats

the shape of water: a Hollywood theme park produced a Creature from the Black Lagoon musical

ghost of christmas future: retro-future ventriloquist Paul Winchell brings the War on Christmas to the Moon

alta vista: a look at some of the internet’s memorable relics

and a happy new year: a curated collection of the New York City Public Library System’s cartographic greeting cards

a real trooper

Our thanks to Things Magazine for introducing us to the concept of an eggcorn, similar to an oronym—that is a word or phrase that can be substituted for another, as in “We all scream for ice-cream!” or a mondegreen, a misheard lyric (the ballad goes “They have slain the Earl O’Moray, and laid him on the green”) which was coined in 2003 to describe the idiosyncratic substitution of one word for another plausible, possibly more sensical one.
Linguists were discussing the case of an individual convinced that the nut of oak tree was called an eggcorn and it was difficult to persuade her otherwise. Alzheimer’s disease might be fairly logically characterised as old-timers’, especially when the term was new or having another think (as in the need to re-think one’s stance) coming makes less sense than having another thing coming, bolstered by song, or chomping versus champing at the bit. What other folk etymologies can you think of? Photochop?  Are you the veteran member of your troupe, reliable and uncomplaining?  I wonder what other convoluted constructions might be attributed to a similar transformation and drive to re-couch a phrase in terms that come across as more logical to contemporaries. 

zigzag

Researcher Kohske Takahashi presents a new sort of optical illusion that he has named “curvature blindness” which is manifested as the identical sets of lines pass over the grey field and appear to retain and take on alternating properties of a wave and a more angular trough. No one is certain about the mechanism behind this cognitive illusion but Takahashi suspects that registering sharper corners might be the default, Gestalt mode of human visual perception and what we retreat to when faced with a confusing arrangement. Same-otherwise, this visual trickery and related stunts could also be grounded in the self-deception that the human brain creates for our benefit that reduces the granularity of the senses and make things seem smooth and continuous, despite gaps and delays.

décades

Not only did the French Revolution of 1793 unseat God and king it also sought to redefine time and did so with its Revolutionary Calendar—the official civil calendar of the Republican government in use for about a dozen years until a compact between the Pope and Napoléon restored the traditional Gregorian calendar.
Wanting to strip the calendar of all royalist or religious contexts, anno domini was abandoned in favour of recording events either before or after the storming of the Bastille (sort of A.F. for after Ford in Brave New World or the Battle of Yavin in the Star Wars universe) with 1793 reset to year one. As part of a greater push towards decimalisation, a month consisted of three ten day weeks (with interstitial holidays peppered throughout) called décades and adapted from Greek and Latin numbers rather than mythological terms and dropped saints’ days in favour of terms from agriculture and domestic economics. The months themselves were rebranded according to the harvest or weather one might expect to encounter at that season. Although intuitive I suppose, it was all terribly complicated with neologisms for winter time Nivôse (Snowy), Pluviôse (Rainy) and Ventôse (Windy) and to be specific, today would be known as IX primidi (the first day of the ninth décade of the year) An 226 de la République Français, that falls in the month of Frimaire (from frimas for frost) and dedicated to Cire—that is wax. As with many other efforts at calendar reform or spelling reform, the change proved too disruptive despite appeal to reason and the best intentions and without government sanction quickly reverted to old ways.

sunday school or psalm 10010111

After helping produce a podcast whose topic was speculating what sort of theological system a machine might make with access to all the world’s religious texts, our intrepid friends at Lewis and Quark (previously here, here and here) decided upon a slightly less ambitious experiment and tried to teach their neural network psalms from Judaism and Western Christianity. Most of the results were unsatisfying gibberish and beyond the programme’s comprehension (and perhaps a little strange that it comes at the same time that the Pope urges reform in the way that a phrase is translated, interpreted in the Pater Noster and we have to wonder about and perhaps re-examine our own language and liturgy) but there are some good lines and the structure fit the standard form so well, the words could be easily adapted to choral arrangement. What do you think? Oddly, the binary number translates to psalm one hundred fifty-one, the one about David slewing Goliath and then gives a prayer of thanksgiving.  Oh let them do no bungers in the mountains…