Via Jason, this fascinating piece on electronic paper. Too cool. The process makes use of an "oily" ink and a water-resistant surface. As a student of the graphic arts, I'm struck by how uncannily the technology--or at least the description of it--resembles lithography--a nineteenth-century planar printing technique that capitalizes on the simple chemical fact that oil and water don't mix.
Enjoying my first cup of Earl Grey in two days. Was tempted to inject it directly into my veins. I've also been ravenous since the lights came back on--guess all the peanut butter sandwiches didn't do much to curb my appetite.
The tornado of 2001, the blizzard of winter 2002-2003, the hurricane of 2003. Anyone care to predict the greater Washington DC metropolitan area's next major weather system?
Came across these retinal twisters while boning up on the human visual system. In addition to the old standbys--the Necker cube and the face/vase toggle--the Gallery includes a range of lesser known optical illusions.
Don't miss the classic afterimage effect--it's a trip!
The context for my question is text markup. We've had raucous discussions about this and related questions of line numbering over at the William Blake Archive. TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) guidelines provide a metrical definition (i.e., a line is a line of verse), while ours is a physical definition, reflecting the visual or material strain of thought in contemporary bibliotextual studies. Earlier this summer I drafted the following description of the line element as part of a larger project documenting the WBA's DTD (Document Type Definition--a specially designed tag set used to describe a document or set of related documents):
Line element: encodes a horizontal row of alphanumeric notation. Line status is a visual rather than semantic determination. The traditional unit of verse counts as a line by this definition, but so does a title or a catchword or a plate number. The formulation leads to potentially unorthodox pairings: if a plate number is lateral to a line of verse, for example, the two are encoded as part of the same line. If, on the other hand, that same line of verse is subjacent to the plate number, it is interpreted as a distinct line. Subjacency, then, is the visual criterion that enables differentiation of one line from another.
It's probably relevant here that the artifacts we're dealing with at the WBA are impressions from relief-etched plates (Blake's illuminated books) rather than typescript pages (well, there are those, too, but the prose above makes explicit reference to the IBs). Of course this definition doesn't sidestep semantics entirely: it encodes for western-style literacy conventions of reading and writing in horizontal lines (Chinese script, by contrast, is written and read top to bottom in vertical columns). But all quibbling aside, I think it does a good job of capturing the editorial zeitgeist of our day.