Why do we say Hello

Thomas Edison wrote a letter to the president of the Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh, PA. In it, he suggested that the word, 'hello' would be a more appropriate greeting than 'ahoy', as was suggested by Alexander Graham Bell for answering the telephone. That is why we pick up the phone anywhere in the world and say: 'Hello, Allo. Alo. Bueno. Pronto. . . wazzup!

Computer Cookies

Cookies are used to save a user’s information and relay this information between your computer and a website. This is used to authenticate a user, provide easier access to password controlled sites, or save various preferences of the user. Cookies are also used to track the sites you visit as well as what you buy online, and then can be read by companies to send direct ads to you, based on your visits. There are many other uses for cookies, but they are all for the web site owners and not users.

The reason the word cookie is used seems to come from a comparison to fortune cookies – the dessert common from fast-food Chinese inside which there is a slip of paper with a fortune. Early internet programmers likely noticed the similarities of a program that saves information within its code and the fortune cookie slips of paper. Cookies are placed on your computer and you are not told. I have an aversion to anyone saving anything on my computer so I regularly delete all cookies. All browsers have a delete cookies feature.

Reduplication

Computer Cookies comes close to some familiar nonsense words that have become part of the language called reduplication, such as, heebie jeebies, okey dokey, zig zag, fuddy duddy, hocus pocus, itsy bitsy, mumbo jumbo, and more. These repeat some sound from one word and make another. Most take on their meaning from usage. I have my bling bling, but I am not trying to be hoity toity.

What's in a Name, TelePromTer

Hubert J. Schlafly Jr. was the onetime “director of television research” at 20th Century Fox. One day, in the late 1940s, he received a request from the vice president for radio and television at Fox, Irving Kahn. Kahn had been talking to a Broadway actor named Fred Barton, who told him that he had an idea for a mechanical device that could help him remember his lines. Kahn asked Schlafly if he could build the contraption.

He attached a motorized scroll inside a suitcase shell, printed half-inch letters on the scroll, and set the device next to the television camera and the teleprompter was born.

Schlafly, Kahn, and Barton all quit their jobs and founded the TelePrompTer Corp., which revolutionized not only television production, where it was first used on a soap opera. President Herbert Hoover was the first prominent politician to use a teleprompter in a speech at the 1952 Republican national convention. Later Lyndon Johnson was the first president to use one during public appearances.

Wiki

As you may or may not know, a wiki on the internet is a group of interconnected sites that is built from user interaction. Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica and Metapedia are all examples of this “wiki” model. WikiLeaks has recently been in the headlines for its collection of unclassified, classified information. Wikipedia is a brilliant collection of facts that are donated, then editable by anyone. The idea is that the masses will keep the information honest and correct.

In Hawaiian, “wiki wiki” means “quick.” Creator Ward Cunningham decided that a “wiki” online would be a quick way to access and manipulate vast amounts of information.

Pants, Britches, and Trousers

A friend of mine, Bill Biermann asked me why pants and shorts are always plural while a shirt is singular. It sent me to the web, my favorite personal library. It seems that in the beginning, pants, shorts, trousers, knickers, and the like were made of two pieces of material and fastened at the waist, like modern chaps. The plural just stuck. Shirts were always made of one piece of material. So, we have one shirt and one (pair of) pants.

Incidentally, pants is short for pantaloons, which in the beginning were closer in shape to stage tights. The name comes from a Venetian character in Italian comedy, who was the butt of the clown’s jokes and who always appeared as a foolish old man wearing pantaloons. Later the word was applied to fashionable pants.

Trousers came into the language in the seventeenth century from the Gaelic trowse, a singular word for a slightly different garment and a later version of it was trews, taken to be a plural because of the final s. Breeches, or commonly britches, has always been plural and were originally warn as undergarments, then the name was given to shorter pants that ended about the knee and were fastened at the bottom with a broach or string,  Breeches is really singular word that uses a plural form.

Some tailors, such as in London’s Savile Row, often refer to a trouser and the singular pant. A few fashionable tailors in the US also use the singular. I am sure they do it, just so people keep asking the question.

John D. Rockefeller

Two months before his high school graduation, history's first recorded billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., dropped out to take business courses at Folsom Mercantile College. He founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870, made his billions before the company was broken up by the government for being a monopoly, and spent his last 40 years giving away his riches, primarily to causes related to health and education. This high school dropout helped millions get a good education.

Recovery.Gov

The government has a mobile app for your iPhone that shows details of how the stimulus money is and is not being spent. It also has many other details on the web site for your reading pleasure. Did you know that over a hundred billion dollars from the Stimulus has still not been spent?

The Eyes Have It

Do you remember in the early days of TV that many studies predicted that children would ruin their eyesight by sitting too close to the TV. Those studies have long since been debunked as they proved to be false.

Now, a new study shows that habitual smartphone usage dulls vision as users generally hold their devices too close to their eyes. The study says people hold papers and magazines 16 inches away from their eyes, but smartphones at 14 inches. One ophthalmologist suggested that people get reading glasses. Hmmm. . .

What's in a Name, Luke Short

This guy from the old west had a stature that matched his last name. Luke started out hunting and trapping in Nebraska, but discovered his skill at gambling when he would regularly clean out his acquaintances on the trail.

Gambling led to gunfights and he was a gambler/gunfighter for the rest of his life. He went to Colorado mining camps, visited the Earp Brothers’ Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, AZ and ended up in Dodge City, KS in the 1880′s. Luke bought an interest in the Long Branch Saloon and during an ongoing feud with a rival saloon owner, Luke’s friends Bat  Masterson and Wyatt Earp came to town to help him end it.

Short eventually moved on to Fort Worth, TX and bought the White Elephant gambling hall. He famously gunned fellow gunfighter Long-Haired Jim Courtright when Jim tried to extort protection money from him.

In 1893 Luke sold the White Elephant and moved to Kansas City, MO, where he died in bed the same year at age 39 from an unknown ailment.

Back in the old days, 'seeing the elephant' meant having a great adventure. Also, a 'white elephant' was a worthless investment. In the wild west, white had a racist subtext, because frontier saloons tended to be very segregated. Back then, Fort Worth also had another bar called the Black Elephant.

Finally, the White Elephant bar insides were regularly seen in the Chuck Norris, Texas Rangers series. Elephants are more afraid of Chuck Norris than mice.

IBM PC Anniversary

Today in 1981, IBM introduced the Model 5150 PC (personal computer). The IBM PC ran on the Intel 8088 microprocessor at 4.77 mHz with one or two 160K floppy disk drives. It had 16 kilobytes of memory, no built-in clock, no built-in serial or parallel ports, and no built-in video capability -- it was available with an optional color monitor. Prices started at $1,565. Thirty years ago it forever changed the face of computing and the changes keep coming.

Show Me The Money

Every time we fill up our tanks, we wrestle with one of life’s thorniest mysteries: Why do gas prices end in 0.9 cents? Unfortunately, the origins of the increment are murky. Some sources attribute the practice to the 1920s and 1930s, when the gasoline tax was nine-tenths of a cent.

Stations would simply slap the extra 0.9 onto the advertised price of a gallon to give Uncle Sam his cut. Others theorize that slashing 0.1 cent off the price undercut competitors back in the days when gas was just a few cents per gallon.

Although most drivers simply ignore the extra 0.9 cents, oil companies certainly don’t. In 2009, Americans consumed 378 million gallons of gas per day, and that extra 0.9 cents per gallon was collectively worth nearly $3.5 million a day. On the flip side, you could also argue that customers collectively saved around $340,000 per day, thanks to stations’ reluctance to round up to the next penny.

Vanilla Extract

Here is a trick that some realtors use to get rid of unpleasant odors and make a house smell better. Put two caps full of vanilla extract in a coffee cup, then place it in the microwave or the oven at 300 degrees for about one hour. Within twenty minutes the whole house smells pleasant. If it gets too strong, turn it off sooner. I found that cooking bacon has the same pleasant effect for many people.

Dumpsters

The Dumpster was invented in Knoxville Tennesee by the Dempster brothers. The original name was the Dempster Dumpster. The Dempster-Dumpster system is a way of mechanically loading the contents of standardized containers onto garbage trucks.  The Dempster Dumpmaster, was the first successful front-loading garbage truck, which really brought the word into everyday language.

A dumpster is a large steel waste receptacle designed to be emptied into garbage trucks. The word is a trademark of Dumpster, an American brand name for a type of mobile garbage bin.

Dumpster diving involves people voluntarily climbing into a dumpster to find valuables, or useful items, including food and used clothing.