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A new year... a new start... a new beginning...
May 2010 be a year that is filled with happiness, love and warmth!
Heh :)
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THE DAY-GLO BROTHERS
The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors
By Chris Barton. Illustrated by Tony Persiani
Unpaged. Charlesbridge. $18.95. (Ages 7 to 10)
THE BOY WHO INVENTED TV
The Story of Philo Farnsworth
By Kathleen Krull. Illustrated by Greg Couch
Unpaged. Alfred A. Knopf. $16.99. (Ages 5 to 8)
ROBERT CROWTHER’S POP-UP HOUSE OF INVENTIONS
Written and illustrated by Robert Crowther
Unpaged. Candlewick Press. $17.99. (Ages 3 and up)
O.K., so you’re a baby. You show up. You know nothing. You can’t even hold up your own head, for God sakes! I mean, look at yourself. You’re a blob! Then, time goes by, you’re on solids now, and know a thing or two, yet there remains this one big fact you miss entirely: that the world, which you take for granted, as if it’s always been like this, because (for you) it always has been, has in fact been designed. Your baby world, which turns into your toddler world, is wholly invented, made by people. Everything you turn on and put batteries into and look at, with the possible exception of the earth and sky, is the outcome of a story, a struggle, a patent stolen, a fortune made or lost.
Now here come three books, each, in its way, determined to brief the new cast on the back story. Where does television come from? Why does the hot rod seem to glow in the sun? Who designed the first toilet? Here’s an answer for that one: “Domestic toilets on the Orkney Islands, off Scotland, had clay pipes to carry waste to streams, c. 8000 B.C.,” according to “Robert Crowther’s Pop-Up House of Inventions.”
Crowther’s “House of Inventions” — a revised edition of a book that first appeared in 2000 — is itself a kind of invention, an ingenious physical object in which each room of the house — kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom — is recreated, popped to life and filled with tags that date and explain dozens of household objects. “The first electric eggbeater was sold in 1910” (kitchen); “Six-sided dice were first used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans” (living room); “first brassiere, Greece, 2500 B.C.” (bathroom). This book demonstrates, in the most graphic way, how our lived-in spaces are the product of accretion, a history of fiddles and fixes. It may, in fact, be more appealing to cultural historians and students of design than to kids. All the tags, dates, numbers — it can be overwhelming. And is it all true? Remember that 10,000-year-old toilet? The earliest settlements in the Orkney Islands are said to date to around 3000 B.C., which makes you wonder about some of the other fun facts here.
If it’s narrative you want, you could turn to Chris Barton and Tony
Persiani’s “Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s
Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors.” It’s a story in color and about
color, in which two sons of a pharmacist, one carefree and into magic,
the other studious and into medicine, experimented with fluorescent
light in their basement in Berkeley, Calif., in the 1930s and mixed the
first Day-Glo paint. It’s perfect that they did this in Berkeley, as
their colors would play such an interesting role in the postwar West
Coast hippie scene. (See Tom Wolfe’s first book, “The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” from the toddler era of fun nonfiction.)
The brothers, in other words, did the seemingly unimaginable: invented a band of colors new to the world. As with many great inventions, the discovery happened somewhat by accident, while they were making a billboard to grab attention on a nighttime Ohio highway. (They knew their paint was good, just not how good.) In Barton’s description of the breakthrough moment, which can stand for all such moments, you can almost hear the echo of Moses and the burning bush: “When the billboard came into view that afternoon, what the brothers saw astonished them. From more than a mile away, it looked like the billboard was on fire!”
The book, which explains the whys and hows of Day-Glo and is illustrated with tremendous Pop Art verve, began with Barton’s perusal of The New York Times’s obituary page, proving that the dead really do tell the best tales.
The invention of TV makes a kind of bookend with the discovery of Day-Glo. They’re band mates, Paul and John. Because if you have TV and Day-Glo, you have the key elements of the modern age in place. In “The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth,” by Kathleen Krull (illustrated by Greg Couch), you have another classic story: the science-loving country boy who solves the puzzle before the professionals, by himself, in the wilds.
“One bright, sunny day, 14-year-old Philo plowed the potato fields. It was the best chore for thinking — out in the open country by himself. Back and forth, back and forth, . . . the plow created rows of overturned earth. He looked behind him at the lines he was carving — perfectly parallel.”
“Then,” Krull writes, “he almost fell off the plow seat.” Instead of
seeing rows of dirt, he imagined breaking down images into parallel
lines of light, then reassembling them for the viewer. If it could be
done quickly enough, the eye could be tricked into seeing a complete
picture.
This scene is illustrated in heroic, almost Social Realist style. The light-drenched fields, the fresh-plowed rows, the smiling boy with horse waiting dumbly: it’s a scene from an American gospel done in stained glass in the window of a church, or bank.
Beautiful and beautifully told, the book tracks like the sort of graphic novel that breaks your heart, with its implied passage of time and slipping away of early dreams. In fact, the invention of Day-Glo and Philo Farnsworth’s story read like fables of old America: the kid from the provinces, face illuminated in lab light, tubes and burners humming. Each follows the reliable three-act structure of Horatio Alger or “Rocky”: the early breakthrough, the reversal, the triumph. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about these books. You work, you succeed, you win — or at least you live to see your idea made manifest. “The Boy Who Invented TV” also has a glimpse of the world you, as an adult, will recognize. “With his brainstorm in the potato field, Philo Farnsworth may have won the race to invent TV. But he lost the war over getting credit for it during his lifetime,” Krull writes in an author’s note. “Partly this was due to several strokes of bad luck; partly it was because he was more brilliant at inventing than at business. Mostly it was due to the Radio Corporation of America, the most powerful electronics company in the world in the 1930s.”
But that’s another story, and can wait till junior high.
Take the chapter "Advice from a caterpillar", for example. By this point, Alice has fallen down a rabbit hole and eaten a cake that has shrunk her to a height of just 3 inches. Enter the Caterpillar, smoking a hookah pipe, who shows Alice a mushroom that can restore her to her proper size. The snag, of course, is that one side of the mushroom stretches her neck, while another shrinks her torso. She must eat exactly the right balance to regain her proper size and proportions.
While some have argued that this scene, with its hookah and "magic mushroom", is about drugs, I believe it's actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra, which severed the link between algebra, arithmetic and his beloved geometry. Whereas the book's later chapters contain more specific mathematical analogies, this scene is subtle and playful, setting the tone for the madness that will follow.
===
What would Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess's baby or the Mad Hatter's tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you'll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text.
As I embarked on my DPhil investigating Victorian literature, I wanted to know what inspired these later additions. The critical literature focused mainly on Freudian interpretations of the book as a wild descent into the dark world of the subconscious. There was no detailed analysis of the added scenes, but from the mass of literary papers, one stood out: in 1984 Helena Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra. Given the author's day job, it was somewhat surprising to find few other reviews of his work from a mathematical perspective. Carroll was a pseudonym: his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford.
The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.
Even Dodgson's keenest admirers would admit he was a cautious mathematician who produced little original work. He was, however, a conscientious tutor, and, above everything, he valued the ancient Greek textbook Euclid's Elements as the epitome of mathematical thinking. Broadly speaking, it covered the geometry of circles, quadrilaterals, parallel lines and some basic trigonometry. But what's really striking about Elements is its rigorous reasoning: it starts with a few incontrovertible truths, or axioms, and builds up complex arguments through simple, logical steps. Each proposition is stated, proved and finally signed off with QED.
For centuries, this approach had been seen as the pinnacle of mathematical and logical reasoning. Yet to Dodgson's dismay, contemporary mathematicians weren't always as rigorous as Euclid. He dismissed their writing as "semi-colloquial" and even "semi-logical". Worse still for Dodgson, this new mathematics departed from the physical reality that had grounded Euclid's works.
By now, scholars had started routinely using seemingly nonsensical concepts such as imaginary numbers - the square root of a negative number - which don't represent physical quantities in the same way that whole numbers or fractions do. No Victorian embraced these new concepts wholeheartedly, and all struggled to find a philosophical framework that would accommodate them. But they gave mathematicians a freedom to explore new ideas, and some were prepared to go along with these strange concepts as long as they were manipulated using a consistent framework of operations. To Dodgson, though, the new mathematics was absurd, and while he accepted it might be interesting to an advanced mathematician, he believed it would be impossible to teach to an undergraduate.
Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the "semi-logic" of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Take
the chapter "Advice from a caterpillar", for example. By this point,
Alice has fallen down a rabbit hole and eaten a cake that has shrunk
her to a height of just 3 inches. Enter the Caterpillar, smoking a
hookah pipe, who shows Alice a mushroom that can restore her to her
proper size. The snag, of course, is that one side of the mushroom
stretches her neck, while another shrinks her torso. She must eat
exactly the right balance to regain her proper size and proportions.
While some have argued that this scene, with its hookah and "magic mushroom", is about drugs, I believe it's actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra, which severed the link between algebra, arithmetic and his beloved geometry. Whereas the book's later chapters contain more specific mathematical analogies, this scene is subtle and playful, setting the tone for the madness that will follow.
The first clue may be in the pipe itself: the word "hookah" is, after all, of Arabic origin, like "algebra", and it is perhaps striking that Augustus De Morgan, the first British mathematician to lay out a consistent set of rules for symbolic algebra, uses the original Arabic translation in Trigonometry and Double Algebra, which was published in 1849. He calls it "al jebr e al mokabala" or "restoration and reduction" - which almost exactly describes Alice's experience. Restoration was what brought Alice to the mushroom: she was looking for something to eat or drink to "grow to my right size again", and reduction was what actually happened when she ate some: she shrank so rapidly that her chin hit her foot.
De Morgan's work explained the departure from universal arithmetic - where algebraic symbols stand for specific numbers rooted in a physical quantity - to that of symbolic algebra, where any "absurd" operations involving negative and impossible solutions are allowed, provided they follow an internal logic. Symbolic algebra is essentially what we use today as a finely honed language for communicating the relations between mathematical objects, but Victorians viewed algebra very differently. Even the early attempts at symbolic algebra retained an indirect relation to physical quantities.
De Morgan wanted to lose even this loose association with measurement, and proposed instead that symbolic algebra should be considered as a system of grammar. "Reduce" algebra from a universal arithmetic to a series of logical but purely symbolic operations, he said, and you will eventually be able to "restore" a more profound meaning to the system - though at this point he was unable to say exactly how.
The madness of Wonderland, I believe, reflects Dodgson's views on the dangers of this new symbolic algebra. Alice has moved from a rational world to a land where even numbers behave erratically. In the hallway, she tried to remember her multiplication tables, but they had slipped out of the base-10 number system we are used to. In the caterpillar scene, Dodgson's qualms are reflected in the way Alice's height fluctuates between 9 feet and 3 inches. Alice, bound by conventional arithmetic where a quantity such as size should be constant, finds this troubling: "Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing," she complains. "It isn't," replies the Caterpillar, who lives in this absurd world.
Wonderland's madness reflects Carroll's views on the dangers of the new symbolic algebra
The Caterpillar's warning, at the end of this scene, is perhaps one of the most telling clues to Dodgson's conservative mathematics. "Keep your temper," he announces. Alice presumes he's telling her not to get angry, but although he has been abrupt he has not been particularly irritable at this point, so it's a somewhat puzzling thing to announce. To intellectuals at the time, though, the word "temper" also retained its original sense of "the proportion in which qualities are mingled", a meaning that lives on today in phrases such as "justice tempered with mercy". So the Caterpillar could well be telling Alice to keep her body in proportion - no matter what her size.
This may again reflect Dodgson's love of Euclidean geometry, where absolute magnitude doesn't matter: what's important is the ratio of one length to another when considering the properties of a triangle, for example. To survive in Wonderland, Alice must act like a Euclidean geometer, keeping her ratios constant, even if her size changes.
Of course, she doesn't. She swallows a piece of mushroom and her neck grows like a serpent with predictably chaotic results - until she balances her shape with a piece from the other side of the mushroom. It's an important precursor to the next chapter, "Pig and pepper", where Dodgson parodies another type of geometry.
By this point, Alice has returned to her proper size and shape, but she shrinks herself down to enter a small house. There she finds the Duchess in her kitchen nursing her baby, while her Cook adds too much pepper to the soup, making everyone sneeze except the Cheshire Cat. But when the Duchess gives the baby to Alice, it somehow turns into a pig.
The target of this scene is projective geometry, which examines the properties of figures that stay the same even when the figure is projected onto another surface - imagine shining an image onto a moving screen and then tilting the screen through different angles to give a family of shapes. The field involved various notions that Dodgson would have found ridiculous, not least of which is the "principle of continuity".
Jean-Victor Poncelet, the French mathematician who set out the principle, describes it as follows: "Let a figure be conceived to undergo a certain continuous variation, and let some general property concerning it be granted as true, so long as the variation is confined within certain limits; then the same property will belong to all the successive states of the figure."
The
case of two intersecting circles is perhaps the simplest example to
consider. Solve their equations, and you will find that they intersect
at two distinct points. According to the principle of continuity, any
continuous transformation to these circles - moving their centres away
from one another, for example - will preserve the basic property that
they intersect at two points. It's just that when their centres are far
enough apart the solution will involve an imaginary number that can't
be understood physically
Of course, when Poncelet talks of "figures", he means geometric figures, but Dodgson playfully subjects Poncelet's "semi-colloquial" argument to strict logical analysis and takes it to its most extreme conclusion. What works for a triangle should also work for a baby; if not, something is wrong with the principle, QED. So Dodgson turns a baby into a pig through the principle of continuity. Importantly, the baby retains most of its original features, as any object going through a continuous transformation must. His limbs are still held out like a starfish, and he has a queer shape, turned-up nose and small eyes. Alice only realises he has changed when his sneezes turn to grunts.
The baby's discomfort with the whole process, and the Duchess's unconcealed violence, signpost Dodgson's virulent mistrust of "modern" projective geometry. Everyone in the pig and pepper scene is bad at doing their job. The Duchess is a bad aristocrat and an appallingly bad mother; the Cook is a bad cook who lets the kitchen fill with smoke, over-seasons the soup and eventually throws out her fire irons, pots and plates.
Alice, angry now at the strange turn of events, leaves the Duchess's house and wanders into the Mad Hatter's tea party, which explores the work of the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton. Hamilton died in 1865, just after Alice was published, but by this time his discovery of quaternions in 1843 was being hailed as an important milestone in abstract algebra, since they allowed rotations to be calculated algebraically.
Just as complex numbers work with two terms, quaternions belong to a number system based on four terms (see "Imaginary mathematics"). Hamilton spent years working with three terms - one for each dimension of space - but could only make them rotate in a plane. When he added the fourth, he got the three-dimensional rotation he was looking for, but he had trouble conceptualising what this extra term meant. Like most Victorians, he assumed this term had to mean something, so in the preface to his Lectures on Quaternions of 1853 he added a footnote: "It seemed (and still seems) to me natural to connect this extra-spatial unit with the conception of time."
Where geometry allowed the exploration of space, Hamilton believed, algebra allowed the investigation of "pure time", a rather esoteric concept he had derived from Immanuel Kant that was meant to be a kind of Platonic ideal of time, distinct from the real time we humans experience. Other mathematicians were polite but cautious about this notion, believing pure time was a step too far.
The parallels between Hamilton's maths and the Hatter's tea party - or perhaps it should read "t-party" - are uncanny. Alice is now at a table with three strange characters: the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse. The character Time, who has fallen out with the Hatter, is absent, and out of pique he won't let the Hatter move the clocks past six.
Reading this scene with Hamilton's maths in mind, the members of the Hatter's tea party represent three terms of a quaternion, in which the all-important fourth term, time, is missing. Without Time, we are told, the characters are stuck at the tea table, constantly moving round to find clean cups and saucers.
Their movement around the table is reminiscent of Hamilton's early attempts to calculate motion, which was limited to rotatations in a plane before he added time to the mix. Even when Alice joins the party, she can't stop the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse shuffling round the table, because she's not an extra-spatial unit like Time.
The Hatter's nonsensical riddle in this scene - "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" - may more specifically target the theory of pure time. In the realm of pure time, Hamilton claimed, cause and effect are no longer linked, and the madness of the Hatter's unanswerable question may reflect this.
Alice's ensuing attempt to solve the riddle pokes fun at another aspect of quaternions: their multiplication is non-commutative, meaning that x × y is not the same as y × x. Alice's answers are equally non-commutative. When the Hare tells her to "say what she means", she replies that she does, "at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing". "Not the same thing a bit!" says the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"
It's an idea that must have grated on a conservative mathematician like Dodgson, since non-commutative algebras contradicted the basic laws of arithmetic and opened up a strange new world of mathematics, even more abstract than that of the symbolic algebraists.
When the scene ends, the Hatter and the Hare are trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot. This could be their route to freedom. If they could only lose him, they could exist independently, as a complex number with two terms. Still mad, according to Dodgson, but free from an endless rotation around the table.
And there Dodgson's satire of his contemporary mathematicians seems to end. What, then, would remain of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland without these analogies? Nothing but Dodgson's original nursery tale, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, charming but short on characteristic nonsense. Dodgson was most witty when he was poking fun at something, and only then when the subject matter got him truly riled. He wrote two uproariously funny pamphlets, fashioned in the style of mathematical proofs, which ridiculed changes at the University of Oxford. In comparison, other stories he wrote besides the Alice books were dull and moralistic.
I would venture that without Dodgson's fierce satire aimed at his colleagues, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would never have become famous, and Lewis Carroll would not be remembered as the unrivalled master of nonsense fiction.
The real numbers, which include fractions and irrational numbers like π that can nevertheless be represented as a point on a number line, are only one of many number systems.
Complex numbers, for example, consist of two terms - a real component and an "imaginary" component formed of some multiple of the square root of -1, now represented by the symbol i. They are written in the form a + bi.
The Victorian mathematician William Rowan Hamilton took this one step further, adding two more terms to make quaternions, which take the form a + bi + cj + dk and have their own strange rules of arithmetic.
Melanie Bayley is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. Her work was supported by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council
POSTED AT 9:44 AM December 11, 2009
Hemant Mehta, "The Friendly Atheist", is also a math teacher. This is what he found on one of the tests he was grading this week. The ol' Elephant Excuse. Pretty crafty. So how does a responsible educator of young minds respond to such a stunt? The answer is after the jump ..
If you're going to throw a Hail Mary Pachyderm on your final exam, you damn well best get your artwork correct.
My very first Thanksgiving in Salt Lake City! :)
Doodle for Google featuring Snoopy :) Found on www.google.com on Thanksgiving Day.
===
November 26, 2009
Sitting down with friends and family today, there will be thanks for the steady currents, flowing out of the past, that have brought us to this table. There will be thanks for the present union and reunion of us all. And there will be prayerful thanks for the future. But it’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning.
What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from? How could we account for these new faces at the Thanksgiving table or for the faces we’re missing this holiday, missing perhaps now all these years?
It will never cease to surprise how the condition of being human means we cannot foretell with any accuracy what next Thanksgiving will bring. We can hope and imagine, and we can fear. But when next Thanksgiving rolls around, we’ll have to take account again, as we do today, of how the unexpected has shaped our lives. That will mean accounting for how it has enriched us, blessed us, with suffering as much as with joy.
That, perhaps, is what all this plenty is for, as you look down the table, to gather up the past and celebrate the present and open us to the future.
There is the short-term future, when there will be room for seconds. Then there is the longer term, a time for blossoming and ripening, for new friends, new family, new love, new hope. Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.
It snowed last night.
It was theraputic to watch the snow flakes falling from the sky...it's beginning to feel like Christmas :)
Google doodle in UK features Sesame Street stalwart Cookie Monster
Sesame Street, here's to 40 more years
Cookie Monster Google doodle. Photograph: Google
The US children's TV show Sesame Street has been paid the ultimate compliment of being featured in different Google doodles in different regions.
Sesame Street has earned its place in the Google hall of fame on account of celebrating its 40th birthday.
While the UK initially appeared to have been ignored - its homepage featured Wallace and Gromit celebrating their 20th birthday instead - it has now been brought in from the cold, with a doodle of the Cookie Monster having apparently taken a bite out of a Google logo. (Made out of cookies, naturally.)
The US and Canadian Google homepage features the distinctive spindly legs of Big Bird, and other characters are in the spotlight on other countries' homepages.
The popular television series actually celebrates its birthday on 10 November, when there will be an anniversary show featuring US First Lady Michelle Obama.
New York City has proclaimed 10 November "Sesame Street Day", and will announce a temporary street naming (at Columbus Avenue and 64th Street) in honour of the programme. Sesame Street: A Celebration of Forty Years of Life on the Street, and Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street are the latest additions to the literary.
The show is now broadcast in more than 140 countries and has won 122 Emmy awards.
Posted by
Haroon Siddique
Thursday 5 November 2009
===
Here's more logos:
1) Big Bird
2) Kami
3) Boombah Chamki
4) Abelardo Montoya
5) Abigal
7) Ernie & Bert
8) Oscar the Grouch
9) Elmo:
10) Count Von Count:
11) Sesame Street
(via Making Light)
(Fortune Magazine) -- Long before orange made its debut as a hot
hue, Leatrice Eiseman spotted it in several unlikely places: on fences
and front doors in Italy and Germany, in Morocco's natural dyes, and on
monks cloaked in saffron robes. At the time the color wasn't associated
with spirituality or trendiness in America, thought Eiseman, but rather
with discount stores like Big Lots.
As she began to notice it in multiple places and in different contexts around the world, Eiseman and her team at the Pantone Color Institute -- the forecasting and consulting division of Pantone Inc., which is part of the $261 million company X-Rite (XRIT) -- decided to put it at the top of their 2003 forecast.
Since then, orange has gone mainstream, blanketing such unlikely products as videocameras, KitchenAid blenders, and Ford's new F-150 SVT Raptor, now available in "molten orange."
"Product manufacturers finally understand that color really grabs consumers' attention," says Eiseman, the institute's executive director. "It's a way to entice people."
The Color Institute's parent company, Pantone, invented a numeric system to codify a spectrum of hues for graphic designers and publishers in the 1960s. In the 1980s companies like Elizabeth Arden (RDEN) started to look to Pantone's color array for shades of lipsticks, and Pantone realized that it needed to create a system for other industries. That's when names for colors -- cognac, parsnip, cameo pink, and more -- were added to the numbers. Today there are more than 1,900 Pantone hues.
To find the next color du jour, Eiseman and her team traverse the globe. They frequent trade shows, follow the production of upcoming movies, and read everything from tech magazines to psychological studies.
While the team is scattered across the country (Eiseman is based in Seattle, creative director John DeFrancesco in New York City, and the rest of the team in New Jersey), they're in constant contact either by phone, e-mail, or in-person meetings to discuss their findings.
"Forecasting is a marriage of trend directions," Eiseman says. "It's about how many places I'm seeing a color -- if it's popping up in graphics and products. Not just on the runway."
Once thought of as a mere service for its parent company, the Color Institute now publishes five reports a year that sell for up to $750 per issue. The highly anticipated reports have become a must-read for product designers across numerous industries.
Instead of sticking with a traditional blue -- America's favorite color -- manufacturers of skillets and skis alike look to the institute to guide them on how to give their products a "new" blue, in periwinkle, perhaps, instead of navy.
Fashion designers, of course, play a key role in determining color trends, and the institute relies on their input. The semiannual Pantone fashion color report surveys 50 top designers about what colors they'll be using for the upcoming season. The Pantone team takes the information and calculates the top 10 choices. Hot for spring and summer 2010: tomato pur�e, aurora (yellow with a tint of green), and turquoise.
Consumer psychology plays an important part in color forecasting too. Take brown, as an example. For years the color connoted images of wood and dirt. That changed in the late 1990s, with food trends like the rise of Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500) and the success of the romantic flick Chocolat, says Eiseman. A color that was once seen as dull or unattractive transformed into a shade that became synonymous with high-quality food and good taste.
The state of the economy might have the largest impact on the colors consumers favor. When the market tanks, people often retreat to neutrals, says Eiseman. But lately, instead of ignoring color -- think back to the grunge trend during the downturn of the early 1990s -- people tend to be cautious with big-ticket items but add color through less expensive purchases.
"Color is a way to build up your confidence," Eiseman says. "It makes you feel better." That may be why the institute chose mimosa yellow as its 2009 color of the year; according to Eiseman, it's a hue that carries psychological overtones of change and enlightenment for consumers.
As for next
year's color, Eiseman isn't telling. But she did share a few hints as
to what will factor into her team's decision. "People are wanting
someplace to go, somewhere to retreat to," Eiseman says. "My challenge
is to come up with a color that speaks to how we can create a feeling
of escape -- to get away from the problems of the everyday world. Even
if it's a fantasy." 
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Find this article at:
http://www.mutual-funds.biz/2009/10/15/news/companies/pantone_colors.fortune/index.htm |
Dave sez, "As part of Sesame's 40th anniversary, we have a 5-week poll in which Sesame Street fans can vote for their all-time favorite segment over the past 40 years. Each week for four weeks, fans will vote for their favorite video from a selection of pre-selected 40 videos. In the fifth and final week of voting, fans will choose from the 40 highest overall ranked videos from the previous 4 weeks. At the end of the 5th week, through out the 6th week, and onwards, we will feature the winning video and 39 ranked runner ups."
Vote - Best Sesame Ever (Thanks, Dave!)
I pass my Google Advertising Professional (GAP) test!!! :)
I have been reading FT for so many years and I didn't realise that they have this. Cool! :)
===
Browse thousands of words and phrases selected by Financial Times editors and suggest new terms for the glossary.
For today’s mathematical puzzle, assume that in the year 1956 there was a children’s magazine in New York named after a giant egg, Humpty Dumpty, who purportedly served as its chief editor.
Mr. Dumpty was assisted by a human editor named Martin Gardner, who prepared “activity features” and wrote a monthly short story about the adventures of the child egg, Humpty Dumpty Jr. Another duty of Mr. Gardner’s was to write a monthly poem of moral advice from Humpty Sr. to Humpty Jr.
At that point, Mr. Gardner was 37 and had never taken a math course beyond high school. He had struggled with calculus and considered himself poor at solving basic mathematical puzzles, let alone creating them. But when the publisher of Scientific American asked him if there might be enough material for a monthly column on “recreational mathematics,” a term that sounded even more oxymoronic in 1956 than it does today, Mr. Gardner took a gamble.
He quit his job with Humpty Dumpty.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/10/20/science/20tierney_puzzle.ready.html
On Wednesday, Mr. Gardner will celebrate his 95th birthday with the publication of another book — his second book of essays and mathematical puzzles to be published just this year. With more than 70 books to his name, he is the world’s best-known recreational mathematician, and has probably introduced more people to the joys of math than anyone in history.
How is this possible?
Actually, there are two separate puzzles here. One is how Mr. Gardner, who still works every day at his old typewriter, has managed for so long to confound and entertain his readers. The other is why so many of us have never been able to resist this kind of puzzle. Why, when we hear about the guy trying to ferry a wolf and a goat and a head of cabbage across the river in a small boat, do we feel compelled to solve his transportation problem?
It never occurred to me that math could be fun until the day in grade school that my father gave me a book of 19th-century puzzles assembled by Mr. Gardner — the same puzzles, as it happened, that Mr. Gardner’s father had used to hook him during his school days. The algebra and geometry were sugar-coated with elaborate stories and wonderful illustrations of giraffe races, pool-hall squabbles, burglaries and scheming carnival barkers. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for some examples.)
The puzzles didn’t turn Mr. Gardner into a professional mathematician — he majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago — but he remained a passionate amateur through his first jobs in public relations and journalism. After learning of mathematicians’ new fascination with folding certain pieces of paper into different shapes, he sold an article about these “flexagons” to Scientific American, and that led to his monthly “Mathematical Games” column, which he wrote for the next quarter-century.
Mr. Gardner prepared for the new monthly column by scouring Manhattan’s second-hand bookstores for math puzzles and games. In another line of work, that would constitute plagiarism, but among puzzle makers it has long been the norm: a good puzzle is forever.
For instance, that puzzle about ferrying the wolf, the goat and the cabbage was included in a puzzle collection prepared for the emperor Charlemagne 12 centuries ago — and it was presumably borrowed by Charlemagne’s puzzlist. The row-boat problem has been passed down in cultures around the world in versions featuring guards and prisoners, jealous spouses, missionaries, cannibals and assorted carnivores.
“The number of puzzles I’ve invented you can count on your fingers,” Mr. Gardner says. Through his hundreds of columns and dozens of books, he always credited others for the material and insisted that he wasn’t even a good mathematician.
“I don’t think I ever wrote a column that required calculus,” he says. “The big secret of my success as a columnist was that I didn’t know much about math.
“I had to struggle to get everything clear before I wrote a column, so that meant I could write it in a way that people could understand.”
After he gave up the column in 1981, Mr. Gardner kept turning out essays and books, and his reputation among mathematicians, puzzlists and magicians just kept growing. Since 1994, they have been convening in Atlanta every two years to swap puzzles and ideas at an event called the G4G: the Gathering for Gardner.
“Many have tried to emulate him; no one has succeeded,” says Ronald Graham, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego. “Martin has turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children.”
Mr. Gardner says he has been gratified to see more and more teachers incorporating puzzles into the math curriculum. The pleasure of puzzle-solving, as he sees it, is a happy byproduct of evolution.
“Consider a cow,” he says. “A cow doesn’t have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole.
“Evolution has developed the brain’s ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.”
Mr. Gardner’s favorite puzzles are the ones that require a sudden insight. That aha! moment can come in any kind of puzzle, but there’s a special pleasure when the insight is mathematical — and therefore eternal, as Mr. Gardner sees it. In his new book, “When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish,” he explains why he is an “unashamed Platonist” when it comes to mathematics.
“If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared,” he writes, “there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime even if no one had proved them prime.”
I share his mathematical Platonism, and I think that is ultimately the explanation for the appeal of the puzzles. They may superficially involve row boats or pool halls or giraffes, but they’re really about transcendent numbers and theorems.
When you figure out the answer, you know you’ve found something that is indisputably true anywhere, anytime. For a brief moment, the universe makes perfect sense.
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