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There’s a Name for That?
10 things you may not have known have a name.
Those bars of color when the station isn’t broadcasting anything are called SMPTE Color Bars, and similar ones are known as Test Patterns/Cards. Usually, a tone of 1000hz or music accompanies the design. In the early years of television, the camera was pointed at a physical card with a design printed on it, and these patterns serve as guides for adjusting and tuning television color.
Image by author.
Those hung over bits on some fonts are called Serifs and serve an aesthetic purpose and for some people make reading large amounts of text easier. You’ve probably come across fonts in word processor programs with “Sans” or “Sans Serif” on the end of the font name – this is what that suffix is referring to. Serifs have been in use for at least 2000 years (see example Arch of Titus, inscribed ca 81 AD).
That thin bendy hinge on plastic containers is properly called a Living Hinge. It’s the simplest type of hinge to produce on plastic containers, as it’s molded at the same time as the container with no extra parts. Because of minimal wear to the plastic during closing and opening, the hinge can flex over 1 million times without breaking when molded correctly.
Seeing tiny floating lines and specks in your field of vision? They’re called eye floaters (medical name myodesopsia), and many people have them. In most cases they’re benign, though may be dangerous if they distract during activities that require attention, such as driving. There are multiple sources of eye floaters, the most common being deterioration of the collagen in the eye which in turn remains trapped in the eye fluid. A second possible origin of eye floaters is the hyaloid artery: an artery which is present during the fetal stage which connects to the eye’s lens but regresses during the tenth week of development. Occasionally bits remain.
Those tips on the ends of your shoelaces are called aglets. Often made of plastic, they keep the shoelace fibers from unravelling at the ends, allowing the shoe to be laced easier. Broken aglets may be repaired a variety of ways including tape, glue, melting the ends, and heat-shrink wrap.
Having dreams where while you dream you know you’re dreaming and can control what goes on? That’s called lucid dreaming. These are perhaps the most enjoyable of all dreams as the dreamer chooses what happens to them, allowing you to fly, speak with your favorite celebrities or anything one desires. Lucid dreams are rather rare when they are left to happen naturally, but there are techniques one can use to increase the likeliness of getting a lucid dream.
Have you ever noticed that one particular scream is used over and over in many Hollywood movies? This scream is called the Wilhelm Scream. Turned into a sound editor in-joke, this stock sound effect was first used in 1951 and has since been used in over 149 films, including all 6 Star Wars movies, the 3 Indiana Jones movies, Spaceballs and more.
Website text appearing garbled? This goes by the name of mojibake and happens when computer software fails to render a text correctly according to its associated character encoding. Most often, languages with foreign letters are affected where the language is not installed on the computer viewing the document.
That tool that shoe fitters use to measure the size of your foot is called a Brannock Device, named after its inventor Charles F. Brannock who filed a patent for it in 1929. Brannock formed the Brannock Device Company to manufacture and sell the device, and headed the company until 1992 when he died at age 89.
The person in the above image is not real. She is a computer generated image. Most people would agree that there is something not quite real or right about her look; some may say she looks unreal and creepy. This effect is called the Uncanny Valley and can be explained by the notion that if an entity is sufficiently non-human-like, then the human-like characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer.
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