17 March 2014

Monday miscellany

A thread store? No, it's part of a pins-and-needles, crazy-things-to-do-with-thread music video
(Favourite Places by Black Books) - watch the unravelling here

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Need a prescription for correct pronunciation? (20% of 1000 people surveyed pronounced prescription as perscription or proscription) - read about the 8 errors of pronunciation (pronounciation?) that are changing the English language here. Most can be summed up with a Greek work - like syncope: disappearing sounds, such as the T in Christmas; or metathesis: swapping sounds around, such as nucular for nuclear. At time of writing there were 2500 comments on mispronunciations - I particularly liked "the specific ocean"... and cockrodile ... both of which were near the top of the page.

[Pet peeve alert!] Growing up across the pond (in Canada), I say INventory and have to restrain a gasp when people here in UK say inVENtory, which sounds to me like a place where things are invented. Just checked this on the Macmillan Pronouncing Dictionary, which gives the British pronunciation as IN-ven-tree and the American as IN-ven-tore-ee.

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Need an excuse to eat chocolate? Try the scientific experiment here and see if sound affects taste.

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"Mail Rail" - underground route is to be part of London's new postal
museum, opening in 2016; read more about it here

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Two men and their bookshelves - arrangement by colour, yes very nice in an office -
The statistician: David Spiegelhalter, Professor of Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge
(his website helps make sense of chance, risk, luck, uncertainty and probability)
The designer: David McCandless,  author of "Information is Beautiful"
The shots are from the introductory video to the British Library's "Beautiful Science" exhibition, which runs till 26 May and is free - it's about the visual representation (graphing, mapping) of data and how this has evolved over the centuries. Mind-bending is one way to describe it....

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Wall art in east London -
The first mural, of what are now nearly 500, in Global Street Art's Walls Project, which started in 2012 (read more about it here).

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Who writes these crazy comments on blogs (this was sent to raggedclothcafe.com) ... and why, for heaven's sake?
Ragged Cloth is art blog […]
Recyclers have the skill when it comes to rigging of crane equipment, it
is a sports car. Additionally, there are some things three to be
specofic that hardcore fans are especially insistent peugeot
moped on seeing. My first mistake was not making sure the bumper insert’s came peugeot moped all the way around.

Ya gotta wonder...


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1 comment:

Olga Norris said...

Interesting miscellany as ever - as for the last, my husband tells me that it is most probably done in a random scatter-gun way to tempt us to click the contact, which will generate a definite link. I simply trash without any further ado.