Why was a Nazi swastika on the ends of those cracker boxes?

It is not what you might think, and demonstrates how our perception of symbols can change. The ad for Snowflakes shown above is from back in 1914, before a swastika carried that historical baggage. Pacific Coast Biscuit Company was up to something completely different. According to the entry for the National Biscuit Company in a 2007 book called The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries, back in 1898:

“A several month-long national advertising campaign introduced the public to the Uneeda Biscuit, the company’s signature soda cracker, which was the first national cracker brand. Ads also promoted the innovative package, which was made of moisture-proof cardboard with an air-tight, waxed paper inner seal devised for freshness. The biscuits became an immediate success, and a succession of new products followed throughout the first half of the 20th century.”

Ends of National Biscuit packages had a trademarked IN ER SEAL label with clipped corners, as is shown above. (The label actually was red).  

Starting in 1907 Pacific Coast Biscuit Company put a swastika label (also with clipped corners and in red) on the ends of their packages, perhaps to suggest they were using similar packaging. 

But that provoked a trademark infringement lawsuit by National, with court records including the color image comparison (from page 174, which I retitled) shown above. Pacific lost, was enjoined to stop in 1915, and in 1930 was bought up by National. I stumbled over that Pacific Coast Biscuit Company ad when I looked up images of crackers on Wikimedia Commons while writing my last blog post about A simple geometry demonstration using crackers.  

In this decade snowflake became a slang term that implied a person felt he was unique, special, and entitled. My wife Elaine told me that on Reddit it sometimes gets a special spelling -  sneauxflake.  

A simple geometry demonstration using crackers

Props used for demonstrations don’t have to be complicated or expensive to be effective. As is shown above, the Pythagorean theorem say that, for a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse (c ) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides (a and b).

In Bobby Mercer’s new book, Junk Drawer Geometry: 50 awesome activities that don’t cost a thing, he has a clever demonstration of it on page 60 using fifty square cheese crackers. (You can read it on Google Books). As shown above, this example is for a = 3, b = 4, and c = 5.  I used 1” square Kellogg’s Reduced Fat Cheez Its. Of course, you could instead use larger crackers like Saltines.

Junk Drawer Geometry was preceded by two other books by Mr. Mercer with the exact same subtitle on the topics of Physics (2014) and Chemistry (2016).

When you look on YouTube for demonstrations of that theorem you can find another version using square Starburst candies, one with 4.5 mm diameter bearing balls, and several using water in connected flat containers. In The Wizard of Oz the scarecrow incorrectly states the theorem as being for an isosceles triangle. So does Homer Simpson, but he gets corrected immediately.

An image illustrating the theorem was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons.

Is this gizmo a walker or a rollator?

In my blog post on November 24, 2018 titled A very competent and cheerful medical center I referred to the $70 gizmo shown above as a four-wheel walker. (Its maker Harbor Freight calls it a Sit-or-Stand Behind Rolling Walker). It is useful for getting around after you have been off your feet, or after surgery (like a knee replacement). Hand brakes lock the rear wheels in position, and you can sit and rest on the seat, or use it as a platform for holding objects like a plate of food. But when I looked at the Wikipedia page for Walker (mobility), I found it instead calls that a rollator. That is insider medical jargon for those involved with orthopedics or rehabilitation.

They call this other two-wheel gizmo a walker. Web pages from equipment suppliers or manufacturers describe choosing a walker or rollator. GrahamField has an article discussing The Great Gait Debate: Walker vs. Rollator and the Avacare Medical Blog has another article titled Walker vs. Rollator: How to Choose with a nice infographic.

That Wikipedia page also claims walkers began appearing in the 1950s, based on looking up patents. When I looked instead at PubMed Central, I found a 1990 article by professor Graham Mulley on Walking Frames in the British Medical Journal which reported they originated three decades earlier:  

  
“The first walking frame was designed and make in 1924 by a 12 year old Cincinnati boy, Charles Williams. His aunt had broken her hip and after hospital treatment could move around her hospital room only by standing at the back of her armchair and pushing it in front of her. Charles fashioned a simple wooden walking frame that enabled his aunt to walk with more ease and confidence. The local hospital was impressed with his design and made several metal frames out of gas piping. In the 1950s aluminium frames were produced, and subsequently many modifications and additions were developed. The frame is now one of the most widely used walking aids in the world.”

Professor Mulley also humorously noted:

“Frames are used not only for ambulation. Other uses have been as plant stands, as a television aerial (apparently they give good reception), and as a clothes horse to dry ‘smalls.’ “

A rollator with only one wheel appeared in a Heath Robinson cartoon on the Habits of the night moth.

Free cartoon images of people presenting graphics at Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday I blogged about Free cartoon images of public speakers at Wikimedia Commons.

That huge Wikimedia Commons database also includes dozens of cartoon images of people presenting graphics, two dozen of which are shown above. A few examples are a man with a flip chart, a man with a bar chart, a woman with a line graph, and a woman with a pie chart.

Those presenting are described as a Guy, a Man, a Businesswoman, or a Woman. Other keywords include presenting, presents, and discussing, and either graph or chart.

Free cartoon images of public speakers at Wikimedia Commons

At Wikimedia Commons there is a collection with more than a dozen free cartoon images showing public speakers. Two examples are Charismatic Male Public Speaker Cartoon and Pretty Woman Public Speaker Cartoon. You can find more by searching with the terms Public Speaker Cartoon.

Those images can be downloaded either in the Portable Network Graphic (.png) or Scalable Vector Graphic (.svg) formats. I horizontally rotated them to face to the right, recolored some (with Photoshop Elements) and used PowerPoint to create the two images of Toastmasters shown above. Cartoon images also can be found elsewhere at Wikimedia Commons, like the Clueless Cartoon Man I used as a befuddled speaker by erasing the background.     

When you see the phrase ‘a fully-immersive experience’ what do you think of?

Many of you likely would say a baptism, like the sailor shown above. But on January 6, 2019 at The Verge there was an article by James Vincent titled Kohler’s smart toilet promises a “fully-immersive experience.” He got that phrase out of their thoughtless press release for the $7000 Numi 2.0 Intelligent Toilet shown in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

To me the combination of toilet and ‘fully-immersive’ sounds like a small child’s nightmare about potty training. The only worse thing would be going down the drain. Fred Rogers had to reassure kids that can’t happen.

A good (but not great) article on how to give a scientific talk

In an editorial supplement to the venerable Nature magazine called the Nature Events Guide 2019 there was an article by Nic Fleming on December 19, 2018 titled How to give a great scientific talk (which also can be downloaded as a two-page pdf file). He provides a good grab bag of advice from several people. But curiously he doesn’t provide links to any of those advisors.  

Nic opens by describing how PhD candidate Eileen Courtney was a bundle of nerves, and realized she needed help getting over her fear of speaking. Then he mentions Susan McConnell, a neurologist at Stanford who for over a decade has been doing presentations on how to give a talk. This would be a good point for a link to her five-minute YouTube video on The importance of giving a good talk.

And then he has an insert from Ramona J. Smith, the 2018 Toastmasters World Champion, with her Top 10 Tips. In the next to last paragraph he talks about Toastmasters International, and how Eileen Courtney joined them, got over her fear, and was runner-up in the 3 Minute Wonder Competition held by the Institute of Physics with her presentation on Graphene you can watch on YouTube. There is another insert with Eileen Courtney’s tips on how to Conquer Nerves.

Then he gives some advice from Dave Rubenson, who has a company called nobadslides.com. You will find more specific advice from Dave in an article from 2016 on the naturejobs blog titled A David Letterman-like countdown to the 10 biggest pitfalls in scientific presentations.  

Then he goes back to Susan McConnell and mentions her popular 42-minute online video, which is from 2011, is titled Designing effective scientific presentations using PowerPoint and structuring your talk, and can be viewed here on YouTube. He says that that Matt Carter’s 2013 book Designing Science Presentations is another source of advice. But McConnell relied instead on (and referenced) Michael Alley’s book The Craft of Scientific Presentations. Her slide design method (at 22:50 in the video) is Alley’s, which I blogged about on February 19, 2014 in a detailed post titled Assertion-Evidence PowerPoint slides are a visual alternative to bullet point lists.   

On October 3, 2012 I had blogged about a Free ebook on Communicating Science and other geeky topics. That 33-page publication still is available from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund as a free .pdf file.

An image of a mad scientist holding a key came from Openclipart.