5IT: dentrifice
1. A mini-doc about Grace Hopper, one of the giants of early computing.
"As a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, Hopper worked on the first computer, the Harvard Mark 1. And she headed the team that created the first compiler, which led to the creation of COBOL, a programming language that by the year 2000 accounted for 70 percent of all actively used code. Passing away in 1992, she left behind an inimitable legacy as a brilliant programmer and pioneering woman in male-dominated fields."
"What if a light pole told you to watch out for an icy patch of sidewalk ahead? What if an app told you the most populated route for a late-night walk to the El station by yourself? What if you could get weather and air quality information block-by-block, instead of city-by-city? The Array of Things (AoT) is a network of interactive, modular sensor boxes around Chicago collecting real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use."
"He’s suggested building something he calls the Freezeway, a 6.8-mile skating lane through Edmonton, Alberta, for residents and tourists who want to commute on ice. You may laugh, but Matt Gibbs has given this a lot of thought—he first proposed the idea two years ago in his masters thesis in landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. For his thesis, Gibbs focused on ways 'to make winter cities more livable, in particular how can we diversify transportation options, focus on active transportation, as well as social activity.'"
4. 25,000 texts published between 1473 and 1700 are now free and open to the public.
"Members of the public, teachers and researchers around the world can now have access to thousands of transcriptions of English texts published during the first two centuries of printing in England. The corpus includes important works by literary giants like Chaucer and Bacon, but also contains many rare and little-known materials that were previously only available to those with access to special collections at academic libraries. The text-only files are a unique resource for members of the public to browse for curious and interesting topics and titles ranging from witchcraft and homeopathy to poetry and recipes."
5. Have humans' faces changed since we started cooking and processing food?
"Changes in the technology of food preparation over the last few thousand years (especially cooking, softening, and grinding) are hypothesized to have contributed to smaller facial size in humans because of less growth in response to strains generated by chewing softer, more processed food. While there is considerable comparative evidence to support this idea, most experimental tests of this hypothesis have been on non-human primates or other very prognathic mammals (rodents, swine) raised on hard versus very soft (nearly liquid) diets. Here, we examine facial growth and in vivo strains generated in response to raw/dried foods versus cooked foods in a retrognathic mammal, the rock hyrax (Procavia capensis)."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
dentrifice is a shop word, occasionally heard also as a GENTEELISM. Tooth powder, tooth paste, are what we say to ourselves.
The Credits: 1. fivethirtyeight.com 2. github.com / @afromusing 3. wired.com / @bldgblog 4. bodleian.ox.ac.uk / @ndalyrose 5. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov / @johndurant
Witchcraft and Homeopathy to Poetry and Recipes