Fritinancy

Word of the week: Penrose tiling

San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center, a 1.2-million-square-foot hub for four Bay Area counties’ bus systems plus intercity Greyhound buses (and light rail, too, eventually), officially opened on August 11 to huge crowds. I skipped the festivities but heard rave reports from friends who'd gone, and so on August 13 I took an AC Transit bus from Oakland to San Francisco to see it for myself. I was not disappointed. Indeed, I was elated by the light-filled Grand Hall, the clear signage, the well-integrated public art, the pristine restrooms (every fixture is touchless), and the astonishing 5.4-acre rooftop garden, officially called Salesforce Park. (The software company bought the naming rights to the park and transit center in 2017; the adjacent 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce Tower, which opened earlier this year, is the tallest building in San Francisco.)

During the eight years of construction, I’d frequently driven beneath a filigreed white overpass that marked one of the center’s boundaries. While researching the completed center I learned that the filigree’s distinctive pattern has a name: Penrose tiling. And it’s not merely some designer’s fanciful grace note: it’s a mathematical marvel discovered in the 1970s and defended in a famous lawsuit.

 

Filigreed Penrose tiling outside the new transit center.

Word of the week: Soy boy

Settle in with a nice tofu sandwich and some edamame as I tell you about soy boy and how it became the insult of choice among alt-right troglodytes – the sort of chuckleheads who call Trump “god emperor.” 

 

Via Reddit/The_Donald. Note pussy hat.

Word of the week: Vitriol

After a gunman opened fire June 14 on a Republican congressional baseball practice, responses from the public and the media tended to focus less on American gundamentalism than on the mood that fuels it. One word was used over and over to describe that mood: vitriol. 

“It didn’t take long for partisan vitriol to erupt,” noted the lede of a story in USA Today. “Vitriol Is Poisoning America,” lamented the writer of a letter to the Chicago Tribune. A columnist for the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal – “no fan of Trump” – wrote that the American left should “admit that their – our – vitriol can be as bad. Or worse” than that of the president’s supporters. Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, took to Twitter to condemn partisan vitriol:

Many members talked about threats to their lives and families. The vitriol must stop.

— Jackie Speier (@RepSpeier) June 14, 2017

As did non-politicians.

Why have so many folks calling for the end of ideological vitriol today not cared about marginalized people who have been targeted & harmed?

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 14, 2017

 

Why would murderous, lunatic, fascist Leftists promulgating hatred and spewing vitriol want to disarm innocent, law abiding citizens?

— Covfefe Craig (@Cwtkns) June 15, 2017

All of them were using vitriol in its contemporary sense: “bitterness” or “acrimony of feeling or utterance.” But it took 400 years for that meaning to take root in English.

MAR-A-LAGO

Last week five Democratic congressmen introduced a bill that would require the Trump administration to release the visitor logs at the White House or wherever else the president holds court – including Mar-a-Lago, the Trump-owned private Florida club that the president likes to call the “Southern White House” and which the club’s website calls “The Legendary Pinnacle of Palm Beach.”

The name of the bill: Making Access Records Available to Lead American Government Openness, or MAR-A-LAGO.

 

 

March linkfest

I’m generally skeptical of corporate-storytelling advice, but Andy Raskin’s “How to Design Your Company Story” is just wacky enough – its hypothetical company is called FairyGodmothers.com – to win me over.

 

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An illustrated guide to Republican metaphors for the Affordable Care Act, from goat to puzzle to house of sand.

 

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There’s going to be a sweary-face emoji. (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

 

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Back to (brand) school

Welcome, students! Here’s your curriculum for the semester:

 

Anthropologie

Course description: “Founded in Wayne, Pennsylvania in the autumn of 1992, Anthropologie remains a destination for women wanting a curated mix of clothing, accessories, gifts and home décor that reflects their personal style and fuels their lives' passions, from fashion to art to entertaining.”

Extra credit: Anthropologie has a charitable division called Philanthropie.

 

Checknology

Course description: “Get connected today and take control of your money like never before.”

Instructor: Central Bank, Edmond, Oklahoma.

Name in the news: Rapunzel

Item: “She calls her startup Rapunzel, and for good reason: Angela Christiano is working on growing a full head of hair in the lab.” – Stat, August 12, 2016

The startup is so new it doesn’t yet have a website, but it has generated plenty of buzz in the scientific community. And the name story is so good that I can’t resist sharing it.

Angela Christiano, a researcher at Columbia University, suffers from alopecia areata, a condition that causes sudden and severe hair loss. Dissatisfied with the two hair-loss products currently one the market, Propecia and Rogaine – both of which were developed 20 years ago – she’s working on a method that uses patients’ own stem cells to create hair. Her research is especially promising for women, who can’t use Propecia because of its strong hormonal effects.

Word of the week: Henge

Henge: A type of Neolithic earthwork featuring a circular banked enclosure with an internal ditch. The most famous henge is Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, England; it is estimated to have been built between 3000 and 2000 BCE. The -henge element “may have meant something ‘hanging’ or supported in the air,” according to the OED.

Detached henge first appeared in the mid-18th century; Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, wrote in his 1742 Tour of Great Britain that “The present Name [sc. Stonehenge] is Saxon, tho' the Work is beyond all Comparison older, signifying a hanging Rod or Pole, i.e. a Gallows, from the hanging Parts, Architraves, or rather Imposts; and pendulous Rocks are still in Yorkshire called Henges.”

Henge is in the news this week because of Manhattanhenge, an affectionate name for an annual east-west alignment of the setting sun with New York City’s street grid. The phenomenon occurs today, May 31, at about 8:12 p.m. (It also occurred on May 30, and will be visible again on July 11 and 12.)

According to a Wikipedia entry:

In accordance with the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, the street grid for most of Manhattan is rotated 29° clockwise from true east-west. Thus, when the azimuth for sunset is 299° (i.e., 29° northward of due West), the sunset aligns with the streets on that grid.

Other cities with fairly uniform grids and unobstructed views of the horizon may also experience the event. A similar phenomenon, dubbed MIThenge, can be experienced at varying times of the year.

 

Manhattanhenge observed from 34th Street. Photo via American Museum of Natural History.

Word of the week: Asperitas

Asperitas: A cloud formation “made up of well-defined, wavelike structures in the underside of the cloud, more chaotic and with less horizontal organization than undulatus. It is characterised by localized waves in the cloud base, either smooth or dappled with smaller features, sometimes descending into sharp points, as if viewing a roughened sea surface from below. Varying levels of illumination and thickness of cloud can lead to dramatic visual effects. (Source: World Meteorological Organization.) Asperitas is a Latin word meaning “roughness” or “harshness”; the root is the source of asperity (harshness) and exasperate (to irritate or provoke).

 

Asperitas formation over Mesa, Arizona. Photograph via Cloud Appreciation Society.

January Linkfest

The ABC Family network, stigmatized by that F-word in its name, now calls itself Freeform. Network president Tom Ascheim told the Television Critics Association that the new name “not only elicits the moment of transition in the medium and a sense of ‘creativity’ and ‘spontaneity’ but also evokes [a] younger 14 to 34-year-old audience, whom he’s dubbed ‘becomers’.” So much to ponder in that single sentence. (Hollywood Reporter)

As for the Freeform logo, Brand New dismisses it as “atrocious in either its stacked or horizontal form.”