Today’s Podcast

Today’s word, copacetic, is a favorite of mine. Although I too often forget to use it.

Copacetic is an adjective meaning completely or entirely satisfactory. I think its connotation is much more positive then satisfactory. For example if a boss told me my work was satisfactory I would be concerned it wasn’t very good, that it was barely above unsatisfactory. But if they described the situation or my projects as copacetic I would be much happier.

The etymology of copacetic is murky at best. Bartelby, Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com all list the etymology as unknown. Word-detective.comand Etymonline.com both take a stab at the etymology noting it emerged in America around the end of the 19th century. Both sources suggest it has its roots in America’s African American culture.

Affordance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Emerging Tech conference call for proposals: “Cory Doctorow:
The O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference has consistently been the high-point of my tech year, ever since the days when it was the O’Reilly P2P conference. I like it so much that I’ve served on the advisory board since the second event. The next one has just been announced for March 6-9, 2005, in San Diego, and O’Reilly has posted its Call for Proposals for the show. This is one of the most provocative CFPs I’ve read — this year’s con should be a(nother) doozy:

While typically (and ultimately) associated with economics, the concept of externalities applies rather well to technology: web services are a purposeful version of the scrapeability of web based services and applications; media in digital form is inherently hackable and repurposeable (just ask the music industry); Wifi base stations provide much more than Internet connectivity–they provide a sense of locality, group, and (through their limited reach) space; Bluetooth-enabled phones, PDAs, and computers broadcast globally unique identifiers.

Affordances, usually associated with human-computer interaction, industrial design, and environmental psychology, is here seen as the flipside of externalities: one person’s externality is another’s affordance. Web services provide an affordance for hooking in to Amazon’s business process (not to mention Amazon being it’s own biggest user); Ajax style interaction with a web application’s data affords a peek at the underlying data structure and associated atomic actions; whether and how one exposes the internal workings of a piece of consumer hardware can mean the difference between a TiVo and a WebTV.

* How does one identify one’s own externalities and turn them to one’s own advantage? Open the door to customers and downstream developers and resellers?

* What has been noticable this last year is the unintentional affordances, the serendipitous design decisions that turn products into platforms. For example, Google Maps was quickly turned into a web component by a world of programmers hungry for a visual display of geographic information. Google went with it, and built the API into the second release of their Javascript maps system. What are some other examples?

* Where are the affordances guiding interaction of data and services between realms? For example, if you use Bloglines, del.icio.us, and have a Movable Type blog, you have separate systems to blog, tag, and email any page you find interesting. How do you tie these disparate fragments together? Despite their great potential, RSS, trackbacks, and permalinks haven’t yielded much more than expected ties; where are the unintended (aside from spam, that is) uses?

* Wifi changes the usage of public and private spaces. Coffee shops aren’t just throwing in free wifi, but are changing the very buildings (power, spaces, group areas, meeting spots, etc.). With these physical changes to provide computer affordances come changes in social affordances. Where are the next nexus points of the social and virtual?

Link

(via O’Reilly Radar)

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(Via Boing Boing.)

Welcome back. Today we have a celebrity inspired term, Mea Culpa.

Recently Bill Gates used it when describing MS’s failure to dominate the online music industry.

“Mea culpa” is a latin phrase uttered to accept guilt. It translates to “my fault.” I think people like using the phrase because it is psychologically easier to say than “my fault.”

Bill Gates use of mea culpa is interesting. While I am sure Bill thinks he can dominate anything he directs MS to tackle. Apologizing for not dominating the online music industry is awfully presumptuous.

I have also heard Adam Curry drop this bit of Latin on the Daily Source Code many times. My notes show I first heard it over a year ago, back on September 27, 2004. Since then I have heard him utter mea culpa several times. Funny how his use of mea culpa humanizes him and makes him more credible, while Gates’ use reveals his underlying expectation of unmitigated success.

I would like to offer my own mea culpa for being so derelict in producing podcasts. I have been busy applying for law school and trying to make a living in Cincinnati. Thank you for staying subscribed.

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While putting together yesterday’s podcast on zoetrope I came across today’s word- heliotrope.

Heliotrope is a noun with several definitions. One is a purple or violet color. Another heliotrope is a surveying tool for civil engineers and map makers. It allows them to focus a beam of sunlight and signal a fellow surveyor up to twenty miles away. Using the heliotrope’s signaling the engineers can triangulate locations. These heliotropes are not used anymore. A heliotrope is any member of the Heliotropium genus or plants. Heliotrope can also be used to describe anything that turns toward the sun.
I don’t know if this happens to anyone else but I find as soon as I learn a new word I see and hear it in use much more frequently then I did before I took the time to learn the definition. After choosing heliotrope for today’s Today’s Podcast I noticed G.B Trudeau used heliotropic in Sunday’s Doonesbury comic to describe a Zonker’s sunbathing skills. I love when

Heliotrope like so many other words is derived from Greek. As we learned in an earlier podcast trope means turn. Combine that with helio meaning sun and you have something that turns towards the sun. Just like Zonker.

Zoetrope in motion

Originally uploaded by tempo.


On a recommendation from Michael Geohegan I watched the Francis Ford Coppola movie the Conversation. Great movie.

Frequent listeners of this podcast know I enjoy reading the credits. Well the credits for the Conversation include the name of Coppola’s production company Zoetrope. What a beautiful word. And a great name for a movie company.

A Zoetrope is a primitive movie toy that spins to animate a series of images. It is hard to describe so I recommend checking out the photos. But basically it is a cylinder with narrow, evenly spaced vertical slits. A series of images, very often images of a horse galloping, appears on the inside of the cylinder. When the viewer spins the cylinder and looks through the slots they see the images in rapid succession. This spinning animates the images.

The zoetrope, originally called the “daedalum” or “daedatelum,” was invented in the first half of 19th century by George Horner. But it was promoted in the US by William F. Lincoln as a “zoetrope.” The first half of the 19th century saw a great many inventions designed to create moving images including the thaumatrope, the zoetrope, praxinoscope, the phenakistoscope and flip books. Thomas Edison studied many of these devices while developing kinetoscope, the precursor to modern movies.

Interestingly, Wikipedia, mentions Edison created the kinetoscope so that people would listen to phonographs. History sure is interesting. America’s most prolific inventor develops movies as an aside just so people will listen to more audio recordings.

The name zoetrope was created by combining two greek words- “zoe” and “trope.” Zoe means life and trope means turn or wheel. So the zoetrope is the wheel of life. Or maybe a turning wheel that gives life to images. Zoe is also the root of the word zoo.

If you want to make you own persistence of vision project there are a couple sites that will help you make you own zoetrope. HowToons.org, an educational site with great cartoons describing how to create various toys that demonstrate interesting scientific properties. Brightbytes.com has a great collection of persistence of vision toys including- the thaumatrope, the zoetrope, praxinoscope, the phenakistoscope and flip books.