I Am Addicted To Hanzi Smatter

Hanzi analyzes Western tattoos made of Chinese characters and mercilessly points out their often embarrassing errors. Here, the first of two characters has been tattooed on the subject upside down; in other cases there are embarrassing phrases in place of the intended meanings due to a single misplaced stroke. A declared interest in exploring why Westerners would treat Chinese as an "exotic" language to have otherwise banal phrases branded onto their bodies often appears as more of a sadistic urge to expose the ignorance of the tattooed and tattooer, who bastardize the language through their textual transactions. I can't get enough. [Link]

Dog Tail-Wagging: Left Is Bad, Right Is Good, Say Researchers

This is truly fascinating: Researchers from the University of Trieste in Italy have determined that dogs, which wag their tails to express both happiness and displeasure, wag their tails asymmetrically in a consistent manner to demonstrate whether their feelings are positive or negative. The New York Times reports:

When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left. ...

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system. ...

When the dogs saw their owners, their tails all wagged vigorously with a bias to the right side of their bodies, Dr. Vallortigara said. Their tails wagged moderately, again more to the right, when faced with an unfamiliar human. Looking at the cat, a four-year-old male whose owners volunteered him for the experiment, the dogs’ tails again wagged more to the right but in a lower amplitude.

When the dogs looked at an aggressive, unfamiliar dog — a large Belgian shepherd Malinois — their tails all wagged with a bias to the left side of their bodies.

[Link]

Scrabble Furniture

[Via|Link]

Permanent Errors

A tattoo artist in Chicago is being sued for misspelling a customer's requested tat "Chi-Town" as "Chi-Tonw."

This cracks me up because graphic designers are typically very poor spellers. This is either a hemispheric brain thing or just the product of their intense training to look at text as a compositional and graphic element rather than reading it. As an editor I have had designers produce typographically-driven graphics which completely fall apart when a key misspelling is corrected.

The tattoo has been fixed as well as possible, but the lawsuit is still going forward. Meanwhile, fellow tattoo artists are signing up to let the offender replicate the misspelled tattoo on their own skin to show their support. Can't say I've heard of anything like that happening in the design community...

A Brief History of the Emoticon

CNet delves into the history of the emoticon. From the article:

The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.

"Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn't," said Fahlman, who is still on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.

"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been interesting to see (smiley faces) trickle from place to place, and now it's showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been fun to watch that."

More at the link.

A New Tense

Troy Patterson on Ultimate Fighting in today's Slate:

In a clip, Shamrock, a veteran known as "the most dangerous man in the world," expressed his belief that Ortiz is a punk. Meanwhile, Ortiz, a punk, forwarded the notion that Shamrock is over the hill. Cut back to Shamrock: "Tito Ortiz is going to find out who Ken Shamrock is, was, and is now." The "is now" in that sentence wasn't really a redundancy. Shamrock was employing a new tense—the ultimate tense—to describe how he was about to be bringing it, how it was about to have been brung.