RESIDENTS of Winnipeg in Canada (and doubtless elsewhere) have recently been bombarded with a for Infiniti, apparently a brand of luxury personal transport, that opens with the suggestion that: “If no one ever challenged the status quo, the Earth would still be flat.”
James Daun, clearly a believer in an objective reality that exists independently of our beliefs, says he “would hesitate to deal with a company that believed that the Earth ever was flat”.
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“We know the wind in Edinburgh can be chilly – but the 24 August forecast for the Scottish capital that Chloë Dear sent says “Feels: -223 °C”. Oxygen sleet and nitrogen hail, then?”
A welcome for our dyskeuomorph overlords
WHAT, we asked, would be the properly sciency term for computer features that represent technology which is not only obsolete but broken – for example, juddering second hands and clanky camera “shutters” (13 August)? We have received a small host of suggestions. Peter Howells, noting that “the obsolete images are iconic themselves”, proposes “iconicon”. Andy Johnson-Laird prefers “igons”, the study of which would be “igonography”. The word that popped into Tony Neilson’s head was “anachricons” – and he thinks “the best example is the Windows hourglass cursor”. It might be, if it were cracked and leaking sand…
While a famous web search engine turned up the first two, “anachricon” is found just once, on a page of misspellings. Before this appeared, Ian Burgess’s “atavistiglitch”, like Glynis Langley’s “retroplexity”, got no hits: so now with one they too are “googlewhackblatts” (3 April 2010).
Mary Clare Craigen proposes “anachrospasm”, properly made from the Greek “anachronismos” and “spasmenos”, meaning “broken”. Sam Warburton literally translates our description,”gratuitously broken”, as “amisthyaxthesanites”. Predicting, as do we, that this won’t catch on, Sam also offers a crossword clue: “Oincs? (6,5)” – answer, “broken icons”.
John Dobson was the first of several to remind us of the word “skeuomorph”, meaning “an object or feature copying the design of a similar artefact in another material” (28 May). “What about broken skeuomorphs?” we asked him: so “dyskeuomorphs” these things are.
A SHARP-EYED proofreader pointed out that the claim by that there “are just under 1.6 1000000000000 electricity meters installed in the universe” (6 August) was made on 1 April. So we examined the site to see whether it had a seasonal sense of humour – and were immediately exhorted to install “Magnetic power generators”. What are they, then? “A zero point magnetic energy generator is a machine or power generator which is very less complicated than it actually sounds to be.” And very less in accordance with known physics, the more we read.
We were puzzled: what is this random collection of words for? Then we realised our web browser had hidden the advertising there.
WHEN Chris Evans bought a new car tyre at a branch of a well-known chain he was given the option, for a mere £1 extra, of having it inflated with nitrogen rather than air. Why? Because nitrogen “expands less when the tyre gets hot, so does not deform the tyre as much,” they said.
Chris tells us that all “ideal” gases have the same coefficient of expansion, and that the difference for actual nitrogen or oxygen “would be almost unnoticeable”. But it turns out to be a bit more complicated. We found an extensive and non-converging discussion on the urban legends website – and were slightly persuaded by one suggestion that nitrogen can drive out (some of) the water vapour in air, which can cause pressure problems.
We are rather more convinced that nitrogen makes sense in racing-car and fighter-plane tyres, given the extreme thrashing they get. So is its use in common-or-commuting cars a sort of “go-faster stripe”, whose only virtue is its association with “sexy” and dangerous machines?
Keeping lawyers off the streets
FINALLY: another day, another computer security warning. Our correspondent Jeff Hecht downloaded the latest urgent update to Adobe’s Flash Player software. Not so urgent, though, that he could avoid clicking a box to certify that he had read and agreed to a user licence.
Sighing, he downloaded a 266-page PDF file, which opened to page 66. After eight pages of vintage legalese it turned even less comprehensible (to us), now being in Estonian. It contains texts in some 20 languages, from Arabic to Ukrainian. Presumably all have been vetted by lawyers fluent in the appropriate languages and laws.
We have to take that on trust, however, because our attempt to look at the Ukrainian version yielded only a message from Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader: “An error exists on this page – please contact the person who created this document.” Er, that’d be you, Mr or Ms Adobe.
What function can this document serve, beyond keeping lawyers off the streets? Should it outlast our civilisation, it could provide the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone to help future linguists decipher lost languages. What future historians would conclude about us from it, we would rather not contemplate.