Mar 12, 2021

Etcetera #7: Coinage, Dundee United, Prince

Matthew Culnane

I had my COVID-19 vaccination this morning, and I’m feeling ever so slightly under the weather, so apologies if this makes even less sense than normal.

See you next Friday,

Matthew

Making up new words is easy. Getting them used is harder

A short piece in The Economist about modern etymology and the people who coined the words. Essentially a series of anecdotes in search of broader patterns, there are a few here that I’m not sure how I had never come across before. For example in 1949 Fred Hoyle derisively used the phrase ‘Big Bang’ while arguing that the universe did not begin with such an event. Disappointingly for him it stuck, even surviving an early ‘90s competition to replace it.

www.economist.com

The Savor of Memory

Laleh Khalili draws on memories from childhood, her experience of leaving Iran and her ongoing interest in cooking to review a series of classic and contemporary Iranian cookbooks. Through them she reflects on the politics of identity in the Iranian diaspora and the global circuits of foodways reflected in Iranian regional cuisines.

merip.org

See also: I’ve included several links about food and authenticity in previous issues. Introducing ‘food grammar’ attempts to understand which foods are most closely associated with which cultures; one of the more interesting comments in the MERIP piece above is the idea that “the more a cookbook claims to be authentic, the more purist it becomes in determining what is considered part of the Iranian canon of cookery. And the more it claims this form of purity, the less it includes the varieties of foods that have been adopted and adapted by Iranians.” In short, food authenticity is an inherently conservative practice, a false nostalgia of sorts; it seeks to preserve a specific time in a particular food culture, ignoring the imports and exports that build a more regional and even global cuisine.

What do we do with the science of terrible men?

Social genetics is a contested subject to say the least. Huge swathes of it are clearly outrageous and should be dismissed out of hand; other aspects of the work have persisted, either as ‘normal science’ in the Kuhnian sense or bubbling just under (often controversially so). The piece explores the scientists who advanced these ideas and, more generally, the interplay between terrible people and their contributions to science and culture.

aeon.co

Triangulating Math, Mozart and ‘Moby-Dick’

A profile of Sarah Hart, the first woman to hold the Gresham professorship of geometry, the oldest mathematical chair in England. Her work often explores the intersection of mathematics with music and literature.

www.nytimes.com

See also: this 2006 episode of In Our Time on the relationship between maths and music; my Twitter pal Ethan Hein (more on him later) created the groove pizza to better visualise rhythms.

The unlikely story of how 'Dundee United' became an insult in Nigeria

If ever an article was written for me, this is it. For the last generation or so, ‘Dundee United’ has been used as a gentle insult in Nigeria—the odd thing being that it is the name of a professional football team in Scotland around 5,000 miles away. This is the Guardian football version of that type of “let’s solve this niche cultural mystery!” podcast which always seems to get good numbers on This American Life et al.

www.theguardian.com

Claudia Roden's orange and almond cake

I’ve made this cake twice in the past 10 days or so. It’s unusual (to me) in that you boil the oranges whole and blitz them up before combining with the rest of the (flourless) mix. It’s from Roden’s 1984 book “Everything Tastes Better Outdoors” and was published in the NYT later that decade. I don’t have an NYT Cooking subscription, and the ingredients are probably listed in US-favoured units such as hectares and gallons, so here’s a link from The Guardian. Highly recommended—you can eat this as a cake with a cup of tea, or you could have it as a dessert with some berries or creme fraiche or dark chocolate.

www.theguardian.com

Three-dimensional model of electricity consumption in Manchester

A wonderful piece of data visualisation. Planners at the Central Electricity Generating Board used this 3D model to record daily electricity demand in Manchester in the 1950s.

collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk

Why I'm losing faith in UX

I can empathise with this. I’ve previously presented UX work to clients which has been rejected or modified in favour of something laden with dark patterns. UX is quickly becoming an area that uses good (or, more accurately, neutral) tools, technologies and practices for more nefarious ends; to that extent it is not far removed from platforms such as Google moving from their previously stated desires to not be evil and to organise the world’s information through to their current position of watching everything you do and using that to serve their real customers, the advertisers.

creativegood.com

See also: on overly long and invasive search engine URLs.

The best guitar solo ever recorded

According to Ethan Hein, the best guitar solo ever recorded is in Prince’s 1986 classic “Kiss.” This piece looks at the song’s birth, including the version performed by the band he originally gave the song too, followed by a more in-depth look at the solo itself—which is easy to learn on a note-for-note basis but hard to replicate the feel of. Of particular interest to me is the impressively low number of tracks that make up the song: just nine, compared to dozens on other similar songs of the same era, and over a hundred now.

www.ethanhein.com

See also: Prince’s guitar solo on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, playing with Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others at the 2004 Hall of Fame Inductions, is for my money a better moment:

Prince, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and others -- "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

Eating staplers for lunch

This Canadian restaurant sells burgers and other items through Uber Eats with names like ‘Mini Dry Erase Whiteboard’ and ‘Non-Slip Rubber Mouse Pad’ so that you can expense them as home office supplies. Wonderful stuff. Give these people a Nobel prize.

www.ubereats.com

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Matthew Culnane @coldbrain

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