Where Were You When Google Was Born 13 Years Ago Today? [Google]

Anyone notice the party that is going on at Google's website today? In case you forgot, September 27th is the date Google chose for their birthday.

It's an arbitrary date selected in 2005 to celebrate Google's September milestones. Google first registered Google.com on September 15, 1997 and the company was incorporated on September 7, 1998. Instead of either one of those two dates, Google selected the 27th because they're Google and they can.

It's hard to believe the search engine is now officially entering the troubled teens. I remember when Google first launched. I was enjoying a fast university internet connection and using both Alta Vista and Yahoo as my main search engines. With Google's minimal interface and lightning fast search results, I was a convert from day one. [Google.com]

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Microchip Implant Brings a Lost Kitten Home After Five Years and 1,800 Miles [Cats]

Five years ago, a cat named Willow went missing in Boulder, Colorado. She turned up this week 1,800 miles away in New York City. How'd her owners track her down? A tiny microchip, and huge heaping helpings of luck.

Willow is (must be) some kind of Achillean battle kitty. Her estranged owner explained that the family gave up hope after a while because of the "tons of coyotes" and owls in the area, assuming she'd been eaten. Nope. She was living it up in New York City.

We'll never know exactly how she got to New York. Maybe she just hoofed it the whole way; maybe she fell in with some kitty-lovin' hitchhikers; or could be she rode the rails and lived off of cans of baked beans cooked over barrel fires the whole way across the country. A spokesman for the New York's Animal Care & Control said Willow's in "very good condition, clean, a little chunky," so obviously she's had someone taking care of her once she got to the city.

Pet microchips are passive RFID devices, and don't require an internal power source, so they can last the lifetime of a pet. They're about the size of a grain of rice and generally cost under $100. Scans for the chips are standard when a lost or stray animal is found by authorities, and the biggest hassle is figuring out which of the why-are-there-this-many services has the owner's information.

Willow's owner joked that all of his pets are microchipped, and he'd microchip his kids if he could. But really, if it's this easy to reunite a cat with its family across five years and half the country, why aren't we microchipping basically everything in our lives? [NY Times, The Atlantic, Wikipedia, LA Times]

Image credit: Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

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Awesome Sandcrawler Building Is George Lucas' First Good Idea in 28 Years [Video]

Yes, this eight-story building looks like a Jawa sandcrawler made of glass and steel because it is a sandcrawler made of glass and steel. Lucasfilm is now building it in Singapore. It will be their first overseas production facility.

The sandcrawler-inspired complex was designed by architectural firm Aedas. It's actually quite beautiful, especially its Endor-ish interior patio. The complex will house production offices for Lucasfilm, LucasArts, TV and feature animation teams, as well as a 100-seat movie theatre.

After the dumbest changes ever in the Blu-ray edition of Star Wars, it's nice to know that George Lucas and his cronies can approve something as cool as this—unless this means that they would change the sandcrawler from rusty metal to shiny glass in a future special edition of Star Wars. That will actually make me go to California and tear down the Skywalker Ranch with a M1 Abrams tank.

In fact, this may very well be the first cool idea to come out of Lucas and Co. since Return of the Jedi in 1983. Not that Return of the Jedi was that cool. Only half of it is cool. You know, the half in which there are no fucking Ewoks.

The complex is now being built in Fusionopolis and it will be completed by late 2012. [Aedas and Lucasfilm via Inhabitat]

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This Clock Won't Be Late for Another Ten Million Years, Give or Take [Time]

That hunk of metal to the right is the world's most accurate clock, say people with more knowledge of time and atomic clocks than anyone else.

Called a cesium fountain clock (aka atomic clock), this British ticker is accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second and won't lose a second for the next ten million years or more. I hope someone is around to wind it at that time, otherwise things could get awkward when our bioconstruct kin are zipping around with their FTL drives and arrive in Alpha Centauri a full second late.

Back on Earth, on our side of the pond, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which last reported an accuracy/uncertainty of 3 x 10-16. That's about 100 million years between losing or gaining a second to the layman. I'll take one for my wrist, please. [CNET]

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Bubble Boys Treated With Gene Therapy Still Healthy After Nine Years [Science]

It's been a big month for gene therapy: first a breakthrough for leukemia last week, now today scientists announced they've successfully treated kids with "bubble boy" disease.

We've heard this before - back in 2000 gene therapy successfully treated the same immune disease, but by 2007 five out of the 10 boys had developed leukemia (ironically, the disease successfully treated in the study announced last week), and one died. This time, the researchers smartly waited NINE YEARS to declare success with 14 out of 16 boys. It's hard to argue with nearly a decade of good health.

The boys reportedly are in school like normal kids, which without treatment could have killed them. That's because they have an immune disorder called severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID, a rare inherited disease that leaves them with basically no immune protection. (You know The Boy in the Plastic Bubble was true, right?).

Today's studies (there were two, both published in Science Translational Medicine) is exciting news both for boys (only boys inherit the gene that causes it, and many die in infancy) with the disease but also for gene therapy, which researchers have been trying to make work for 20 years. Jesse Gelsinger's death following a gene therapy clinical trial in 1999 was a huge setback, as was the development of leukemia in the SCID boys after the 2000 clinical trials.

Scientists have modified the gene therapy to try to prevent patients from developing leukemia, but the risk of developing the disease still exists - one boy in the latest study developed it. But parents are choosing gene therapy over the alternatives: a bone marrow transplant could cure SCID, but only one in five patients finds a match; with a partial match, one in three will die.

[Science Translational Medicine; Image: Jaman]

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The Woot On Cougars, Sext and Other English Words In the Last 100 Years [Video]

By Angus Stevenson Aug 23, 2011 11:00 AM 9,519 18

Last week, the new edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary included words like sexting, retweet and mankini for the first time. This article explains the many weird changes that the dictionary went through since its first edition in 1911.

Since the publication of its first edition in 1911, the revolutionary Concise Oxford Dictionary has remained in print and gained fame around the world over the course of eleven editions. This month heralds the publication of the centenary edition: the new 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary contains some 400 new entries, including cyberbullying, domestic goddess, gastric band, sexting, slow food, and textspeak. These additions are just carrying on the tradition of a dictionary that has always sought to be progressive and up to date.

The Edwardian period to Generation Y

Although the first edition of 1911 drew on the great historical account of English, the Oxford English Dictionary, it was not simply an abridgement: it was a completely different kind of dictionary, one that sought primarily to cover the language of its own time. It recorded new words of the Edwardian period such as aeroplane, carburettor, motorist, radioactive, rag-time, and Zionism, although there are no entries for words such as computer, television, or cinema. There is, however, one for kinematograph, ‘contrivance for projecting in rapid succession on screen a series of instantaneous photographs, so as to give effect of motion', while marconigram, ‘message sent by Marconi's system of wireless telegraphy', was 1911's hi-tech equivalent of cloud computing.

The editors of the first edition, brothers Henry and Frank Fowler, stated that ‘we admit colloquial, facetious, slang, and vulgar expressions with freedom, merely attaching a cautionary label'. Among the slang words they included were flapper, ‘girl not yet out [in society]', foozle, ‘do clumsily, bungle, make a mess of', mag, ‘halfpenny', piffle, ‘talk or act feebly, trifle', and potty, ‘trivial, small'.

Sadly, the new edition has no room for tremendous words like brabble ‘paltry noisy quarrel' and growlery ‘place to growl in, private room, den' – what we might call a man cave these days. But the preoccupations of today's Generation Y have opened the door to some equally colourful vocabulary – how about momo, noob, nurdle, and woot?

Monks in frocks: changes in meaning

Much of the first edition still seems surprisingly modern, but meanings of many common words have of course changed, and definitions have a period charm. Take that for terrier, ‘kind of active & hardy dog with digging propensity', or greet, ‘accost with salutation'. A blouse then was a ‘workman's loose linen or cotton upper garment', while a frock was a ‘monk's long gown with loose sleeves'.

Among the new meanings added to the 12th edition of the Concise is one for follower, ‘someone who is tracking a particular person, group, etc. on a social networking site'. In dictionaries of current English some senses which have fallen into disuse have to be removed to make way for new ones such as this: for example, we no longer give the first edition's sense of ‘man courting maidservant'. Another new sense is at friend, where the primary meaning hasn't changed much since the first edition, though the definition there has a poetic quality that the current one perhaps lacks: ‘one joined to another in intimacy & mutual benevolence independent of sexual or family love'. It's the secondary senses that have changed – the new meaning is ‘a contact on a social networking website', while the first edition had ‘person who acts for one, e.g. as second in duel'.

Indecent dancing in the naughty nineties

In 1911 the cancan was a relatively new thing, associated with the ‘naughty nineties' (the 1890s) in Paris. The Fowlers were in no doubt about their opinion of this racy French craze – they defined it simply as ‘indecent dance'. (They weren't the only Oxford authors with a lofty attitude towards the cancan: Percy Scholes, editor of the first Oxford Companion to Music (1938), wrote that ‘Its exact nature is unknown to anyone connected with this Companion.') The Fowlers weren't puritans, but they were men of their time, and it's not certain what they'd have made of the new sense of cougar – now no longer their ‘large American feline quadruped' but now also ‘an older woman seeking a sexual relationship with a younger man'.

Angus Stevenson is the editor of the new, twelfth edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. This post appears courtesy of OUPblog, where it originally appeared.

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The Woot On Cougars, Sext and Other English Words In the Last 100 Years [Video]

By Angus Stevenson Aug 23, 2011 11:00 AM 9,519 18

Last week, the new edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary included words like sexting, retweet and mankini for the first time. This article explains the many weird changes that the dictionary went through since its first edition in 1911.

Since the publication of its first edition in 1911, the revolutionary Concise Oxford Dictionary has remained in print and gained fame around the world over the course of eleven editions. This month heralds the publication of the centenary edition: the new 12th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary contains some 400 new entries, including cyberbullying, domestic goddess, gastric band, sexting, slow food, and textspeak. These additions are just carrying on the tradition of a dictionary that has always sought to be progressive and up to date.

The Edwardian period to Generation Y

Although the first edition of 1911 drew on the great historical account of English, the Oxford English Dictionary, it was not simply an abridgement: it was a completely different kind of dictionary, one that sought primarily to cover the language of its own time. It recorded new words of the Edwardian period such as aeroplane, carburettor, motorist, radioactive, rag-time, and Zionism, although there are no entries for words such as computer, television, or cinema. There is, however, one for kinematograph, ‘contrivance for projecting in rapid succession on screen a series of instantaneous photographs, so as to give effect of motion', while marconigram, ‘message sent by Marconi's system of wireless telegraphy', was 1911's hi-tech equivalent of cloud computing.

The editors of the first edition, brothers Henry and Frank Fowler, stated that ‘we admit colloquial, facetious, slang, and vulgar expressions with freedom, merely attaching a cautionary label'. Among the slang words they included were flapper, ‘girl not yet out [in society]', foozle, ‘do clumsily, bungle, make a mess of', mag, ‘halfpenny', piffle, ‘talk or act feebly, trifle', and potty, ‘trivial, small'.

Sadly, the new edition has no room for tremendous words like brabble ‘paltry noisy quarrel' and growlery ‘place to growl in, private room, den' – what we might call a man cave these days. But the preoccupations of today's Generation Y have opened the door to some equally colourful vocabulary – how about momo, noob, nurdle, and woot?

Monks in frocks: changes in meaning

Much of the first edition still seems surprisingly modern, but meanings of many common words have of course changed, and definitions have a period charm. Take that for terrier, ‘kind of active & hardy dog with digging propensity', or greet, ‘accost with salutation'. A blouse then was a ‘workman's loose linen or cotton upper garment', while a frock was a ‘monk's long gown with loose sleeves'.

Among the new meanings added to the 12th edition of the Concise is one for follower, ‘someone who is tracking a particular person, group, etc. on a social networking site'. In dictionaries of current English some senses which have fallen into disuse have to be removed to make way for new ones such as this: for example, we no longer give the first edition's sense of ‘man courting maidservant'. Another new sense is at friend, where the primary meaning hasn't changed much since the first edition, though the definition there has a poetic quality that the current one perhaps lacks: ‘one joined to another in intimacy & mutual benevolence independent of sexual or family love'. It's the secondary senses that have changed – the new meaning is ‘a contact on a social networking website', while the first edition had ‘person who acts for one, e.g. as second in duel'.

Indecent dancing in the naughty nineties

In 1911 the cancan was a relatively new thing, associated with the ‘naughty nineties' (the 1890s) in Paris. The Fowlers were in no doubt about their opinion of this racy French craze – they defined it simply as ‘indecent dance'. (They weren't the only Oxford authors with a lofty attitude towards the cancan: Percy Scholes, editor of the first Oxford Companion to Music (1938), wrote that ‘Its exact nature is unknown to anyone connected with this Companion.') The Fowlers weren't puritans, but they were men of their time, and it's not certain what they'd have made of the new sense of cougar – now no longer their ‘large American feline quadruped' but now also ‘an older woman seeking a sexual relationship with a younger man'.

Angus Stevenson is the editor of the new, twelfth edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. This post appears courtesy of OUPblog, where it originally appeared.

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