Sunday, February 22, 2009

Femtocell

Small base station that plugs into a home Internet connection to improve the speed and clarity of cellphone connections inside the building.

Femto is a decimal prefix that denotes one quadrillionth. The femtocell is so called because it is smaller than the picocell (which denotes a trillionth), which is used to improve indoor coverage in a larger area like a shopping mall.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Feng shui

A Chinese system of beliefs in the influence of stars, geography and the location of objects on people's lives.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Spirit of 76

painting known as Yankee Doodle by Willard (from Ohio)

first exhibited at Columbian Exposition 1876

The Great Gatsby artwork

novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald first published 1925

covert art Celestial Eyes by Francis Cugat

Celestial Eyes is most celebrated and widely disseminated jacket art in 20th century American literature. The artist's image preceded the finished manuscript.

Cugat - born in Spain 1893, raised in Cuba, death date unknown
brother of orchestra leader Xavier Cugat
no other Cugat jackets have been identified
one man show in New York in 1942

Sunday, February 8, 2009

anniversaries

Abraham Lincoln, 16th American president, born February 12, 1809

Charles Darwin, British naturalist, born February 12, 1809
published The Origin of Species 1859

Edgar Allan Poe, American writer and poet, born January 19, 1809

Felix Mendelssohn, German composer, born February 3, 1809

Miami University (Ohio) established February 17, 1809

The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today 1873 a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America.

The term "gilded age", commonly given to the era, comes from the title of this book. Twain and Warner got the name from Shakespeare's King John (1595).

The book is remarkable for two reasons 1) it is the only book Twain wrote with a collaborator 2) it's title quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism and corruption in public life.

source Wikipedia

Saturday, February 7, 2009

How fast does a compact disc rotate?

A disc spins at about 500 rpm when read near the center, decreasing to about 200 rpm when read near the circumference - producing a linear velocity equal to 3 to 8 rpm.

(Vinyl records spin at rates of 33,45 and 78 rpm.)

rpm = revolutions per minute

source The Columbus Dispatch February 7, 2009 (Encyclopedia Americana)

First female judge to swear in a president

Sarah T. Hughes, a U.S. District Court judge from Texas, administered the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson on Nov.22, 1963, aboard Air Force One.

source The Columbus Dispatch February 7, 2009