Onomatopoeity - onomatopoeia

Also something old I found on the PC. I wrote some of my onomatopoetic mistakes down in the last couple of years. This is their story.

Into the sizzling heat of savannas and bearly bearable humidity of the Brasilian rainforest.
... barely bearable humidity ...
A thought that has stricken me while reading the essay is
While on the topic, it stroke me that
While on the topic, it struck me while reading the essay that

Maybe I should've delete it the rest.
Maybe I should've deleted the rest.

jeaolus -> jealous  It's nice to know it just isn't in my dictionary.

and how much incouraged? -> encouraged

Yeah, it's a really cool weed...:)
Yeah, it's a really cool video:)

Sustainable: labelling of the food wood be
Sustainable: labelling of the food would be

with the same characterystic
with the same characteristic

I just saw you're message and I'm in Technotron... Jammer.
I just saw your message...

and the work did not at all progress as fast as I would hev liked to
and the work did not at all progress as fast as I would have liked to

Levels of English plummeting: No, these is to say that ...
Jesus. Onomatopoety, I kill you.

quire > choir

Lied on the bed
I lay on the bed...

##Dutch
Sometimes, my brain says something between Dutch & English, and instead of saying bye or dag, today, I went: "Bah!"
(Which is definitely better than the other way around, between dag and bye: "Die!" :)

Mono-dialogues

This is something old I found on my PC.


Internal dialogues

- I like her.
- You like everybody.
- True.
Still, she's kinda cute.
- Hopeless.

The Age of (Un)natural Inventions

Ho, luckily I'm not there yet. So, still exciting. Referring to the 'supposebly' Douglas Adams' three human reactions to new technologies (image below, got it from a tweet, here).

In the spirit of the post, here's my selection of the best inventions I recall from only the last 5 years.
Have you seen:

1. The awesome self-inflatible biking helmet, Hovding? A collection of links, info, here.
2. An all-year-round beer/drinks cooler, that also looks cool. Oh, it doesn't need any electricity, once installed. See link here.
3. A keyring that calls out for your keys, Chipolo (Slovenia) crowdfunded here.
4. A toy that talks and teaches your kid, and responds to him or her, Ubooly, here.
5. Copenhagen wheel - attachable wheel that powers up while you cycle, and helps you (up hill) faster, here. And same same but different (yet, Slovenian) version, FlyKly here.
6. Because I've tried it and it works (to reasonable physical limits of bending), Sugru with magnets!
7. Solar powered flash light: BoGo light: Buy one, Give one, a nice concept* with a useful product.
   (*Can't find it, but the idea of a pink flashlight in Africa (so that men wouldn't steal it from women) is touched upon here.)
8. One laptop (that can be winded-up) per child [empower the world's poorest children through education], here OLPC project, here: XO laptop (and tablet?). TED talk here.
9.  ? (tell me of more you know of)

 

So, I'm glad to be looking at another 7 years or so of wonder and amazement in tech world. (Though I'll strive for like, 77 years, just to be on the safe side of Wonder.)

Invisible bike helmet in a scarf

Bike helmets discourage cycling. Do they make you safer or unsafer? See extensive blog post with links, written by Howie Chong, below (4).

How about an invisible biking helmet? Or one that you can wear as a scarf, a neckie?
Enter Hövding from Sweden.

(1): Hövding: cycling helmet in a scarf | Hunter Skipworth, 14 Oct 2013
The latest innovation in bike gear? A nifty collar that inflates to become an airbag at the first sign of trauma. And you're safe from helmet hair, too.

(2): video: Invisible Bike Helmet Saves Your Hair and Your Life: link (yT).

(3): NY Times: Who needs a cycling helmet, when you’ve got an airbag? | Murad Ahmed Technology Reporter, November 13 2013. Link here.

And how to drive in tricky situations? See (5), Cycling Savvy.

"Bike helmets discourage cycling. An Australian study on mandatory helmet laws concluded that laws that required cyclists to wear head protection actually decreased the number of cyclists on the road. The implication of this study? The fewer cyclists on the road, the less likely drivers will be accustomed to sharing road space with cyclists, ultimately increasing the hazards faced by cyclists and further dissuading people from hopping on their bikes." (From: (4))

(4): "Children and toddlers on foot are far more likely to receive traumatic brain injuries than cyclists, yet parents who place protective headwear on their walking toddlers are openly ridiculed."
:: link here.

(4.2): Got it (4) via Florian Friedrich, on FB.

(5): Cool animations and explanations. Could work well for kids, learning to share the road. Here.

(6): The startup company, Hövding: http://www.hovding.com/

Got the image from: here.

The passing of time, marked by the changes in (written) language

See, for example older novels, like the ones of John Carter from Mars - excerpt below.

John Carter:
Adventures on Mars book cover

Ascending to the roof of the building I watched her for hours, until finally she was lost in the dim vistas of the distance. The sight was awe-inspiring in the extreme as one contemplated this mighty floating funeral pyre, drifting unguided and unmanned through the lonely wastes of the Martian heavens; a derelict of death and destruction, typifying the life story of these strange and ferocious creatures into whose unfriendly hands fate had carried it.

Edgar Rice Burroughs: John Carter of Mars, Chapter VIII, p. 38

Nice, huh? I think it's more diverse words than your reg'lar newspaper article. Or even a paragraph from your average book, nowadays. This is a guess.

Some time ago, I wanted to research, how words and language in Disney songs changed through the years. (Or search the web first, in case someone dunnit before.)

My proposition is that the level has dumbified and dropped dramatically. What's your take?

BMX - a kid in the eighties and nineties

It's nice to know I was definitely a kid in the 90s.

"BMX Bike: The amount of cool that you were is in direct correlation with the number of speeds on your bike.

"Nintendo: This was the greatest Christmas gift I’ve ever received and as soon as my parent’s got it for me I knew I would let them live with me when they got older and couldn’t take care of themselves."

From: The 40 Christmas Presents That Every Kid In The 90s Absolutely Had To Have. Nov. 21, 2013, By Rob Fee.

The trouble with trolls, nowadays

Dman, I like Terry Pratchett's style.

She was impressed, despite herself. You didn't often see proper dwarf halls these days. Most dwarfs were off earning big money in the cities down in the lowlands, where it was much easier to be a dwarf - for one thing, you didn't have to spend most of your time underground hitting your thumb with a hammer and worrying about fluctuations in the international metal markets. Lack of respect for tradition, that was the trouble these days. And take trolls. There were more trolls in Ankh-Morpork now than in the whole mountain range. Granny Weatherwax had nothing against trolls but she felt instinctively that if more trolls stopped wearing suits and walking upright, and went back to living under bridges and jumping out and eating people as nature intended, then the world would be a happier place.

From: Witches Abroad, page 67.

Bennedict Cumberbitch err ... Cumberbatch. You know, Sherlock.

Let's get it on: Bennedict Cumberbatch (link here)
:D Quietly, you'll thank me, ladies.

Cumberbatch talked for a long time about the tragedy of Turing’s life and about what has been a series of very intense roles, heavy on iconic fictional characters and real people. “I am so ready to play a really dumb character,” he said.

I like this two excerpts below:

'As good a sport as Cumberbatch is, he sometimes finds it a bit too much.

Filming “Sherlock” last year in Cardiff, Wales, he had an awkward interlude when he had to walk from his trailer to his car wearing a costume that, had anyone seen it, might have become a major plot spoiler. When he failed in his efforts to get a particularly persistent paparazzo not to photograph him, Cumberbatch shrouded himself in a hoodie (“I looked like Kenny in ‘South Park’”) and held up a sign he had hastily fashioned that said: “Go photograph Egypt and show the world something important.”

The move was lampooned by the British newspapers, particularly when, to the delight of hundreds of fans massed on the street in London for another shoot, Cumberbatch did it again, this time with signs printed with provocative questions about democracy, government intrusion, journalism and the battle between liberty and security in the war on terror.

“These are very complex questions and very difficult arguments to be very clear about, so to ask the questions is to stimulate the debate,” he explained. He has not done it since, though, he said, “I felt really strongly about it at the time.” '

This sounds positively like Ms. Granny Weatherwax* of Terry Pratchett's Discworld!

For a moment, he sounded positively Sherlockian. “There is a way of just shadowing through,” he continued. “The higher the walls, the more dark the windows, the bigger the sunglasses — the more people are going to look. The greatest disguise is learning how to be invisible in plain sight.”

*She has the ability to fade into the background of a room, see Powers, here.

Unhappy tree logs

So, I won't talk about deforestation, much like . I won't really delve into how discoveries like this newfound "gecko-bat" species wouldn't be possible anymore, if forests disappear. Also, I won't say anything more about cultural significance and indigenous people, nor relevance for medicine (Mark Plotkin's (wiki) quote "every time a shaman dies, it is as if a library burned down", see also (2), (3)).

I actually just thought it would be nice to store this photo somewhere.
So here you go.

(1): Source of pic: Got it from Carla, on FB: link here.

(2): Shamanism, By: Mark Andrew Ritchie. I use it as a source of the quote. Found by google.

(3): This book seems interesting: Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest; Mark Plotkin (Amazon).

(4): This one is also actually pretty scary/cool: face on the side of the tree trunk.