Coriolis effect

"In physics, the Coriolis effect is an apparent deflection of moving objects when they are viewed from a rotating reference frame."

Meta-Words

Onomatopoeia, autological, heterological: "What is a word called when it describes itself? You might be looking for onomatopoeia; these are words where the sound of the word describes the meaning of the word - some examples are 'buzz', 'clang', 'click'. What you're really looking for is autological. Autological words have the property they define. 'Humongous' for instance, could be considered autological. The antonym for autological is heterological. Heterological words do not posess the property they define. 'Big' is heterological."

Here's a great list of more words about words, including "bibliobibuli" ("people who read too much and so are generally oblivious to the world around them -- coined by H.L. Mencken"), along with classics such as "palindrome" (which is not an Alaskan ant), and every possible "-nym" word (antonym, homonym, etc.).

Steampunk

While looking over some Wiki entries for the films of Jeunot and Caro (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children), a reference to the genre of Steampunk was linked. The image on the left is a 19th c. French depiction of an 'aerial house' of the 20th century.

"Although many works now considered seminal to the genre were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the term steampunk originated in the late 1980s as a tongue in cheek variant of cyberpunk. It seems to have been coined by the science fiction author K. W. Jeter, who was trying to find a general term for works by Tim Powers (author of The Anubis Gates, 1983), James Blaylock (Homunculus, 1986) and himself (Morlock Night, 1979 and Infernal Devices, 1987) which took place in a 19th-century (usually Victorian) setting and imitated conventions of actual Victorian speculative fiction such as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine."

Stroop Effect

In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of the reaction time of a task. When a word such as blue, green, red, etc. is printed in a color differing from the color expressed by the word's semantic value (e.g. the word "red" printed in blue ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the meaning of the word is congruent with its ink color. The effect is named after John Ridley Stroop who first published the effect in English in 1935.[1] The effect had previously been published in 1929, but only in German. [2][3][4] The original paper has been one of the most cited papers in the history of experimental psychology, leading to over 700 replications.

Good, Fast, and Cheap

The Project Triangle is a concept in project management that saves teams from destruction by overly-demanding customers. "You are given the options of Fast, Good and Cheap, and told to pick any two. Here Fast refers to the time required to deliver the product, Good is the quality of the final product, and Cheap refers to the total cost of designing and building the product. This triangle reflects the fact that the three properties of a project are interrelated, and it is not possible to optimise all three – one will always suffer."

This idea spawned the title of the 1997 Erol Morris film, "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control".

Exponential Information Video

This is a very interesting video, set to Fatboy Slim's music, that illustrates in a Daniel Pink sort of way, some of the issues America faces in the coming years: http://www.flixxy.com/technology-and-education-2008.htm

Kübler-Ross model

"The Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as the five stages of grief, was first introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying.
It describes, in five discrete stages, a process by which people allegedly deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness or catastrophic loss. In addition to this, her book brought mainstream awareness to the sensitivity required for better treatment of individuals who are dealing with a fatal disease."

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

"Maslow's hierarchy of needs is predetermined in order of importance. It is often depicted as a pyramid consisting of five levels: the lowest level is associated with physiological needs, while the uppermost level is associated with self-actualization needs, particularly those related to identity and purpose. Deficiency needs must be met first. Once these are met, seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth. The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are met. Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level, needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized. If a lower set of needs is no longer being met, the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs, but will not permanently regress to the lower level. For instance, a businessman at the esteem level who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs), but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission."

The Fat Man and the Trolley

This entry in Wikipedia describes a very interesting series of moral dilemmas, the first of which is this:

"A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?"

Most people would answer 'yes', given that saving five people is "better" than saving one. An interesting tweak on this:

"As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?"

Now the survey participant might get a little squirmish. Why is that? The moral calculas is the same (saving 5 versus saving one).

Wankel Engine

This image is a diagram of a Wankel engine, an alternative design to the standard piston-driven combustion engine.

Laser Chess

Following on the earlier posting about old computers from youth, I had an Atari 800, and recall a program that was published in one of the periodicals devoted to that machine called Laser Chess. I always wanted to play it, and if you follow the links in the Wikipedia entry, you can find a public domain version of the game.

Kunstformen der Natur

Around the turn of the 20th century, German biologist Ernst Haeckel published the book Kunstformen der Natur, containing some rather beautiful arrangements of fauna and flora such as these:

Conway's Game of Life

When I was young my Dad had a TRS-80 Model I that he used for work (stop laughing - it managed to calculate, er, something productive), and one of the books you could buy that had BASIC programs in it (which you would spend hours typing, verifying, and editing, before running), contained a version of Conway's Game of Life, of which this odd animated GIF is an example:

Conway's Game of Life is an example of a simple cell automaton program. Imagine a piece of graph paper in which the squares are randomly either filled or empty. That graph paper represents the "organism" at zero generations. For each square (filled or empty), there are rules that govern whether it will be "alive" (filled), or "dead" (empty), in the next generation (represented by a second sheet of graph paper). Here are the rules:

"The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.

The initial pattern constitutes the 'seed' of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed — births and deaths happen simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick. (In other words, each generation is a pure function of the one before.) The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations."