Eigengrau

The background brain colour you see in complete darkness.

Also known as dark light or brain gray - "it is perceived as lighter than a black object in normal lighting conditions, because contrast is more important to the visual system than absolute brightness. For example, the night sky looks darker than eigengrau because of the contrast provided by the stars."

Quantified Self

aka Lifelogging

A movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person's daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical)
- from Wikipedia

* Invasion of the body hackers
* The quantified self: Counting every moment | The Economist



Image : meta*

Prisca Theologia

A Latin phrase meaning 'the old/ancient theology'

The doctrine within the field of comparative religious studies that asserts that a single, true, theology exists, which threads through all religions, and which was given by God to man in antiquity - from wikipedia


Image uknown origin... via tumblr

Skeuomorphism

Visual metaphor or skeuomorph?

Philosopher of technology, Dan O'Hara's paper on Skeuomorphology and Quotation

How We Started Calling Visual Metaphors “Skeuomorphs” and Why the Debate over Apple’s Interface Design is a Mess

The Economist explains What is skeuomorphism?

Photic Sneeze Reflex

Sometimes referred to using the backronym Autosomal Dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Syndrome (ACHOO Syndrome), and colloquially known as "sun sneezing". A condition of uncontrollable sneezing in response to numerous stimuli, such as looking at bright lights, affects 18–35% of the population. Its exact mechanism of action is not well understood.



Hinode Observes 2011 Annular Solar Eclipse by NASA Goddard Photo and Video, on Flickr

Outside Context Problem

The kind of problem "most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."

From Iain M. Banks novel Excession

Rube Goldberg Machine

Rube Goldberg Machines complete a simple task in the most inefficient way possible... according to Wikipedia "a deliberately over-engineered or overdone machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction. The expression is named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg."

Melvin the Magical Mixed Media Machine (Melvin the Machine or simply Melvin for friends) is the world's smallest Rube Goldberg Machine...



Via Co.Design

What is Historicity?

The girl gingerly picked up the two lighters and examined them.

“Don’t you feel it?” he kidded her. “The historicity?”

She said, “What is historicity?”

“When a thing has history in it. Listen, one of those lighters was in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has histrocity, a hell of a lot of it.”

- Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

Metatron's Cube

Metatron's Cube is a two-dimensional geometric figure created from 13 equal circles with lines from the center of each circle extending out to the centers of the other 12 circles. Six circles are placed in a hexagonal pattern around a central circle, with six more extending out along the same radial lines.




Image via Sacred Geometry, Quantum Magic

Legendary Psychasthenia

From Twitter:
Legendary psychasthenia – the fear of being eaten up by space.

Anthropomorphobia

From What is Next Nature?

"Anthropomorphobia is the fear of recognizing human characteristics in non-human objects. The term is a hybrid of two Greek-derived words: ‘anthropomorphic’ means ‘of human form’ and ‘phobia’ means ‘fear’.

Its symptoms are irrational panic attacks, disdain, revulsion, and confusion over things that change what it means to be human: plastic surgery, robots, and intelligent animals. Will anthropomorphobia eventually become public disease number one?"

Read more about this 'theme' at NextNature.net »

Semantic Satiation

The thing that happens when you say a word over and over and then it doesn't sound like that word anymore...

From Wikipedia:
The explanation for the phenomenon was that verbal repetition repeatedly aroused a specific neural pattern in the cortex which corresponds to the meaning of the word. Rapid repetition causes both the peripheral sensorimotor activity and the central neural activation to fire repeatedly, which is known to cause reactive inhibition, hence a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition.

Singularity

Mathematician and author Vernor Vinge on the notion of an 'intelligence explosion' in the January 1983 issue of Omni magazine:

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. This singularity, I believe, already haunts a number of science-fiction writers. It makes realistic extrapolation to an interstellar future impossible...

Vernor Vinge's essay on the coming technological singularity (1993): The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era

Technological Singularity according to Wikipedia

Fascinating (recent) post by science fiction author Charles Stross on why he thinks the singularity isn't going to happen: Three arguments against the singularity

One Jot or One Tittle

Did you know the dot on top of the letter 'i' is called a tittle...

From Wikipedia:

The tittle first appeared in Latin manuscripts in the 11th century, to distinguish the letter i from strokes of nearby letters. Although originally a larger mark, it was reduced to a dot when Roman-style typefaces were introduced.

The word "tittle" is rarely used. Its most prominent occurrence is in the introduction to the Antithesis of the Law in the Gospel of Matthew (5:18): "For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled". The quotation uses them as an example of extremely minor details. The phrase "jot and tittle" indicates that every small detail has received attention.

Libration

The Moon always keeps the same face to us, but not exactly the same face. Because of the tilt and shape of its orbit, we see the Moon from slightly different angles over the course of a month. When a month is compressed into 12 seconds, as it is in this animation, our changing view of the Moon makes it look like it's wobbling. This wobble is called libration:



This animation shows the geocentric phase, libration, position angle of the axis, and apparent diameter of the Moon throughout the year 2011, at hourly intervals.

Duration: 2.5 minutes.
Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Via Wired.com

Congruence

Numbers are equal. Geometrical objects are congruent.

Two shapes are congruent if one can be moved or rotated so that it fits exactly where the other one is. If one of the object has to change its size, the two objects are not congruent. They are called similar. Also, every two objects which are congruent are similar at the same time. Geometrical objects can be equal, too, but only if they are in the same place, so an object can only be equal to itself.

Via the Simple English Wikipedia


Norman Ives design from three congruent shapes (rotated) interwoven, that are also similar but clearly not equal.

Cosmogony

Cosmogony, or cosmogeny, is any theory concerning the coming into existence or origin of the universe, or about how reality came to be. In the specialized context of space science and astronomy, the term refers to theories of creation of (and study of) the Solar System.

wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmogony



Walter Russell was an American polymath, known for his achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, and for his unified theory in physics and cosmogony.





Walter Russell - In The Wave - Flickr set

Voronoi Diagram

"A Voronoi diagram is a division of a space determined by distances to a specified set of points. It is the mathematical construct that determines bubbles, cellular growth and most other "packing" models of fluid substances. Each entity (bubble, cell, etc.) is marked by a point, and the space is constructed around that point such that it tries to balance the divides between the points."

How to: Draw the Voronoi Diagram »





Might have to give this a go myself...

Artilects

Artilects: artificial intellects, i.e. godlike massively intelligent machines with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of times above the human level.

Via From Cosmism to deism | KurzweilAli by Hugo de Garis

"Robot artificial intelligence is evolving a million times faster than human intelligence. This is a consequence of Moore’s law, which states that the electronic performance of chips is doubling every year or so, whereas it took a million years for our human brains to double their capacities.

It is therefore likely that it is only a matter of time before our machines become smarter than we are. It is also likely that this development will occur this century if humanity chooses to allow it to happen."

Extract from Building Gods or Building Our Potential Exterminators? | KurzweilAli

Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was–Available Forever

Kyle Munkittrick explains in his article 'The First Decade of the Future is Behind Us':

"Jean Baudrillard, an impenetrable post-modern French philosopher who lived long enough to see his predictions in Simulacra and Simulation come true, described our current situation as hyper-reality. The present is overloaded with information and everything becomes meta-ironic-underground-mainstream-old-retro-cool faster than we can process. As all the sources of meaning get their wires crossed, the past is mined for the Next Big Thing because we know what worked once before, where as no one has any idea what the future actually holds. Patton Oswalt describes the phenomenon as “Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was–Available Forever.” The past can become new because we didn’t have enough time to understand it’s value the first go around."

Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die | Magazine - Oswalt goes on to describe the Etewaf singularity where pop culture becomes self-aware...