Egg Day

The last Monday of February is "egg" day...

Anachronicons 4

This is a tricky one; is the following an anachronicon?

Microphone icon

There's obviously a "retro" vibe going on here (it reminds me of microphones from 1930s/1940s radio sound stages) but I have a suspicion that even modern high-end microphones have similar cradle-like mounts. Nonetheless, I'm guessing very few people have seen a microphone looking like this in real life that wasn't aimed at the "retro" market.

Anachronicons 3

Telephones haven't looked like this for a long time:

Telephone icon

But if you search for a telephone emoji in a Unicode font, you're likely to find something much like that. In fact, mining for "telephone" in the Unicode character set delivers a rich seam of nostalgia:

• TELEPHONE SIGN, U+2121
• TELEPHONE RECORDER, U+2315
• BLACK TELEPHONE, U+260E
• WHITE TELEPHONE, U+260F
• TELEPHONE LOCATION SIGN, U+2706
• TELEPHONE RECEIVER, U+1F4DE
• LEFT HAND TELEPHONE RECEIVER, U+1F57B
• TELEPHONE RECEIVER WITH PAGE, U+1F57C
• RIGHT HAND TELEPHONE RECEIVER, U+1F57D
• WHITE TOUCHTONE TELEPHONE, U+1F57E
• BLACK TOUCHTONE TELEPHONE, U+1F57F

And my favourite:

• TELEPHONE ON TOP OF MODEM, U+1F580

Anachronicons 2

Here's another common anacronicon:

File Save icon

Everyone knows it's the icon to save a file; but when was the last time you saved anything to a 3.5" floppy disk?

Anachronicons 1

If you look at icons and symbols in everyday use, you'll notice something strange. A few of them use old representations of a concept in order to differentiate them from similar visual elements. I call them "anachronicons". Take, for example, the speed camera UK traffic sign from The Highway Code:

Speed Camera Traffic Sign (UK)

Everyone (in the UK, at least) knows what it means, but isn't it strange that the graphic designer used the image of a late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century camera? It's not as if the sign just hasn't been updated; cameras of this form were already defunct when speed cameras (and presumably their signs) were introduced to the UK.

Tellingly, it only seems to be the UK that uses an old-fashioned camera in this way; other countries use words, radar "waves" or images of more modern cameras.

Double Negative T-Shirt

There ain't nothing worse than a double negative

Synthetic Phonics Audio Resources

Chilli recently volunteered to help adults learn and improve their English reading and writing skills. This meant having to teach herself about synthetic phonics.

Looking at the various free resources available on the web, it quickly became apparent that there wasn't a single page where you could easily listen to the forty-two phonic sounds using a nice clean interface. The BBC has an excellent interactive phonics tool, but it relies on Adobe Flash which makes it unsuitable for some devices.

Fortunately, the good folks at Jolly Learning Ltd have made available audio files that I've wrapped in a minimum of HTML5 for use on most devices (including iPads).

The forty-two sounds are divided into their seven groups and can be played with either a British or American accent: here.