Acetio | Blogma

Each year Pantone names a color to be the "color of the year" of sorts, anticipating trends in clothing and home decorating.

The color they have selected for 2010 is "Turquoise", nearly identical to the 2005 selection, "Blue Turquoise"

15-5519

HEX: #1A9A94

In 2009 the shade was called "Mimosa", although it looked more like mustard

14-0848

HEX: #EEC050

And in 2008 the color was "Blue Iris"

18-3943

HEX: #2B167B

I don't recall seeing any more blue in the world in 2008 or any more yellow in 2009. Maybe I'm not sensitive enough to have noticed anything but the broadest patterns, but the only color trends I've ever noticed in this country were the early 1990s when mauve seemed to be everywhere, and the past five years when colors in the range of chartreuse/wasabi/avocado became popular.

In Japan, nearly ten years ago, I noticed an inordinate number of women dressed like neopolitan ice cream: tan, white, and pink. I was sure we would see that style in the US, but it hasn't happened.

There was an electrical outlet (everyone but my father called it a "plug") near the floor, near the bathroom.
The plastic cover had cracked long ago and when my sister accidentally kicked it while running down the hall, the cover fell off in pieces. Later, at dinner, my father announced, "The Face Plate is broken." I looked at my dinner plate, wondering what he could possibly be talking about. My sister looked at me, accusingly, and I kept my mouth shut.

After dinner my father muttered to himself while he covered the hole in the drywall with bits of masking tape. Without looking up he said, "This is for the time being."

Through transferring data on computers more than anything else, we have learned prefixes such as "kilo", "mega", and "giga" meaning "thousand of", "million of", and "billion of" (or "milliard of" if you're an old-timey Englishman)

Similarly, as metric measurements creep into our collective consciousness, we have become aware of the prefixes that denote small fractions such as "milli", "micro", and "nano" meaning "thousandth of a", "millionth of a", and "billionth of a"

What strikes me is that the prefixes seem to enter common parlance in symmetry. People began using "mega" (million) in casual conversation when I was a kid to mean something really big or striking e.g. "mega-awesome" and at the same time began using "micro" (millionth) to refer to something really fast e.g. "micro-second". And perhaps ten years ago the terms "giga" (billion) and "nano" (billionth) became more widely used particularly because of familiarity with gigabytes and nanotechnology. (most of us first heard the prefix "giga" when Doc Brown screeched about the "one point twenty-one gigawatts" needed to power the flux capacitor, back in 1985, during the brief period when "giga" was pronounced with a soft "g")

As a freelancer, I sometimes wonder how I got to use a title that hearkened to the age of knights in shining armor, riding gantlets (and wearing gauntlets) and jousting.

Evidently the word "freelance" was coined by Walter Scott in his 1820 "Ivanhoe" to refer to mercenary soldiers unattached to a king. In some ways you could think of knight:freelance :: samurai:ronin at least in terms of a trained soldier either having or not having allegiance to a king.

Don Willmott writes:

"... as with most aspects of the Middle Ages, it only goes back to the nineteenth-century medieval revivalists. The earliest use of free lance (in early use, it was usually spelled as two words) meant 'a mercenary soldier of the Middle Ages', and goes back to the medieval novel Ivanhoe (1820), by Sir Walter Scott, who also effectively invented the concept of clan tartans and most other aspects of the Scottish Highlanders. This use pops up in various historical novels of the Victorian era.

The word was being used figuratively by the 1860s to mean 'a person (as a politician) who contends in various causes without being attached to a particular group'. The use of freelance referring to a writer arose by the 1880s, and the verb "to freelance" by around 1900."

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19960617

The pancakes were stacked three-high and were tender enough that I needed no knife.
I sipped from my mug and carved an inch of breakfast from the stack, then speared the bite of pancake and made figure-8 patterns in the syrup.
The inside of my cheeks were still wet with coffee when I put the fork in my mouth and allowed everything to sit for a moment.
I breathed slowly and deeply through my nose in order to smell the sweet cake and maple with a smoky hint of coffee.
I chewed slowly and continued to take deep breaths through my nose.
I closed my eyes.
I swallowed almost as slowly as I could, hastened only by the thought that I was making room for the next bite.

The thought occured to me that there was a maximum of joy one could feel at any moment and I was currently at that maximum - no more neurons could fire, no more chemicals could be released.
Then I wondered whether I was worthy of this bliss; should a man be permitted to feel such complete joy at 8:00 am?

I expressed this to my wife. She said, "I'm glad you liked the pancakes, but you should know the day will only get worse from here."

xkcd is a webcomic that has been around for a number of years and Randall is posting his 700^th entry this week.

It's the only comic I read now. The ones in the paper (on the rare occasion [less than once per month] when I read a newspaper) are embarrassingly unfunny, as are most web-only comics. But xkcd has moments of insight - and is perhaps the only heir to the long-lost and Calvin & Hobbes in terms of its mix of intellect, humor, and sentimentality.

The best strips are typically one-idea jokes that have something to do with math:

But some great ones are almost more like HowToons than comics:

It's not for everyone, and some of the nerdier strips require information that I don't, and won't ever, have - but it's worth checking out.

I don't normally broadcast this kind of thing but it was one of those situations where I had been gesturing rudely at the computer screen for hours on end before finally having the revelation: when validating a web form with JavaScript, it will fail if you have hyphens in the form names.

I've been doing this kind of thing for over ten years and I don't recall this ever coming up before.

Normally, when you validate a form, if the code detects a problem (e.g. an empty field that is required, or an email address that's not a real address) it aborts the submission of the form, thus saving time both for the user and the server. But the form I was working with defied this basic rule - it always successfully detected the problem, but then went ahead and allowed the form to be submitted anyway. Removing hyphens from the field names resolved the issue.

Special characters are typically things such as apostrophes or dollar signs, characters that have meaning in cod as well as normal language. But I had thought hyphens were safe.

The surprise to me is that, while googling the keywords almost always provides the needed answer, this one came up with nothing. It felt like I was back in 1996 or something.

I hope future generations will benefit from my wasted time.

A user on reddit submitted a poster he created of "Periodic Table of Beer Styles" that displays 65 different styles of beer in a format similar to Mendeleev's periodic table of elements.

In the beeriodic table, ales are on the left and lagers on the right, with lighter beers at the top. Instead of atomic weight, valence, etc. the table lists: Gravity (density), SRM (color), ABV (alcohol % by volume) and IBU (international bitterness units, essentially hoppiness)

I don't know if I agree entirely with the layout, but it's fun - and a handy way to visualize how similar or different any two styles are.