Helvetica is one of the most famous typefaces in the world. Designed in 1957 by Swiss type designer Max Miedinger, with a little help from Eduard Hoffmann, it was intended to be a neutral typeface suitable for a wide variety of signage. It was originally named Neue Haas Grotesk, and Mergenthaler Linotype licensed it almost immediately. However, they (actually German Linotype in particular) didn’t like the name, and one could hardly blame them.

The answer to this question is not Sir Edmund Hillary. We’ll begin our exploration of who this could be at a certain point — namely, the decimal point.

But then I was reminded (at least for the sake of this essay) that in Victorian England, similarly cryptic conversations were carried on using hand fans. Yes, hand fans. In fact, there was said to be a whole “language of the fan,” and, as with texting abbreviations and (I would imagine) emoji, dictionaries were needed to define it.

Origami, the Japanese art of paper-folding (it also has a long Chinese tradition), dates to sometime after the 6th century A.D. Initially a feature of only special celebrations — largely due to the high cost of paper — it didn’t become mainstream until somewhere around the 17th century. The earliest reference is a 1680 poem by Ihara Saikaku about origami butterflies.

Interestingly, insects and paper share a close relationship.

· – – · – ·

I’ll tell you later.

Today, everyone talks about the importance of “multichannel marketing,” but as far as I know, in only one case has Morse code actually been one of those channels.

One of the iconic structures in downtown Los Angeles is the Capitol Records Building, constructed to look somewhat like a stack of LPs, albeit made of white vinyl. On the roof of the building is a tall spire with a blinking light at the top. Since the building opened in 1956, the light has flashed HOLLYWOOD in Morse code — and in fact, the light was first switched on by Leila Morse, granddaughter of old Samuel himself. The coded message has only been changed twice in the history of the building: once in 1992 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Capitol Records (flashing CAPITOL 50), and again as part of a summer 2013 multichannel marketing program launched to promote Katy Perry’s then-forthcoming album Prism, where the light flashed KATY PERRY PRISM OCTOBER 22ND 2013.

Secreting people inside machines is actually a not unknown ploy; conversely, the idea of making machines look and behave like people goes back millennia.

The halls, they are decked, the silver bells, they are ringing, and throughout the land a festive Christmas spirit is finally descending upon us. It’s also the electric company’s favorite time of year, I would guess, and it’s always entertaining walking or driving around and seeing how extravagantly some homeowners festoon their homes — tastefully, garishly, and everything in between — with all manner of lights, inflatables, and giant electric snow globes. I’ve seen entire houses wrapped like presents — that’s gotta take a lot of rolls of wrapping paper.

There are even large illuminated Christmas dioramas. Indeed, the Nativity scene is perhaps the most popular diorama.

We use the word “diorama” today to refer to a three-dimensional scale model of some kind of scene. However, when it was invented in 1822 — and the word “diorama” was coined — it actually meant something quite a bit different.

We all know that our five senses don’t operate independently of each other, and, specifically, how important the sense of smell is to the sense of taste. We know this intimately because food tastes awful, if we can taste it at all, when we have a cold.

Interestingly, the sense of hearing is also involved in taste; sound can affect the taste of food. In study conducted by Cornell University’s Department of Food Science, it was found that when noise levels reach about 85 decibels, such as that found inside an airplane cabin, sensitivity to sweet tastes was diminished, and while saltiness, sourness, and bitterness were generally unchanged, the fifth taste, savory or umami, was enhanced.

On April 3, 1973, as part of a Manhattan press event demonstrating a new portable cellphone (distinct from a carphone, which had been coming into vogue among Hollywood player types), Martin Cooper, an engineer working for Motorola, walked out onto Sixth Avenue with a prototype of what would become the bricklike Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, and, while walking down the street, called Joel Engel at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Engel was working on AT&T’s competing cellphone initiative. “I’m calling you from a cellphone,” Cooper said into the phone. “A real, portable, handheld, personal cellphone.” So, basically, “nyah nyah nyah.” Maybe it doesn’t have the poetry of its predecessors, but there it is.

It would be another 10 years before it became commercially available, so for Cooper and his team, it was back to the salt mines.

The other day, someone asked me, “what’s the good word?” and usually my response is “penultimate,” as I think it’s a really good word. (It sounds so ominous and demands to be spoken by someone with a deep, sonorous voice like James Earl Jones — and yet it only means “next to last.” You have to admire a word like that.) However, I recently came across another good word that I rather like, although it’s perhaps even less useful in normal conversation: “aposematism.” Coined by British evolutionary biologist Edward Bagnall Poulton in his 1890 book The Colours of Animals: Their Meaning and Use Especially Considered in the Case of Insects, it refers to an animal’s warning coloration. You know all those yellow, red, or other vibrantly colored frogs and newts and other critters? Non-green frogs or other unusually-hued creatures are so colored as a kind of advertising display: it identifies to would-be predators that they’re poisonous. You can see the advantage to this. It doesn’t do a frog much good if the creature that eats it later dies from poisoning.

So the perception of color in the animal world can very often be a matter of life and death. It can be for humans, as well, particularly in our dealings with the natural world.

To identify these changes, we’ll start down in some English mines, and quickly ascend to an abandoned German monastery.

That’s not a joke; printmaking actually was, at one time, part of the Olympics.

The obsession with checking “mobile devices” goes back centuries — at least — whilst some (OK, maybe just me) can’t help but think of the smartphone as a kind of Pandora’s Box — especially when I use it to play music through the Pandora app.

Lenticular images use a plastic sheet that contains very thin (millimeters wide or smaller) lenses, called lenticles. Underneath the lenticles is a printed sheet containing one or more images that have been sliced up into tiny stripes the same width as the lenticles, and interlaced such that each stripe lines up with a lenticle. The lenticles then refract the image in such a way that from one angle you see one image, and from another you see a different one. The lenticles can also be used to impart a 3D effect. Lenticular is a variety of what is known as autostereoscopic imaging — or, in essence, “glasses-free 3D display.”