The biohazard symbol had to be “memorable but meaningless” says its creator, Charles Baldwin. He was working on containment systems for the Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health in 1966. The symbol was developed with the help of Dow Chemical’s marketing folks who surveyed people’s reactions and remembrances for various symbols. I always thought it looked like something out of a sci-fi TV show.

If mouse gestures do become the next big thing in user interfaces, I’d like mine to be customizable. Mozilla’s Optimoz has gestures and pie menus (which boil down to gestures) and the promise of Easter egg gestures (imagine that!). StrokeIt, a gesture recognition system for Windows, does have a learning mode. There’s an obvious junction between gestures and handwriting recognition and I hope it will be a seamless one.

Busy busy, so just this today: Nifty educational pieces on color: Causes of Color and Pigments through the Ages.

I noted here in January that Princess had started running an Alaskan cruise from San Francisco’s port. Now other cruise companies have seen the potential for attracting passengers who want to drive instead of fly to embark on their cruise. Cruises to Mexico are being planned and these will be winter trips, so you can take off on a cruise year-round from the city by the bay.

Stanford’s Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts has opened an exhibit of Venetian glass. These works of art were gifts to Leland and Jane Stanford from the Salviati and Company glassblowers. The Stanfords visited the Salviati shop in 1884 and struck up a friendship with employee Maurizio Camerino. He helped the family as a translator when Leland Jr died in Florence. Jane called on him to design mosaics for Memorial Church. Over time, Camerino sent Jane Stanford some 450 glass pieces. Sadly, many were broken in the 1906 earthquake. Some were sold to pay for museum restoration work. 245 are still owned by the museum and 120 will be on display in the exhibit.

Laquetta Shepard stands in silent defiance amid Ku Klux Klan members praying for white supremacy in Bowling Green, Ky. This photo had me stunned for many minutes. (news item with more details)

Aimee Mann fans take note, reliable sources say that she will make an appearance on this week’s episode of The West Wing. Staff member are making a trip to “Rock the Vote” (it being an election year in the alternate liberals-take-over-the-White-House universe) where Aimee and her band will perform.

Faced with dwindling numbers, the Sisters of Carmel of the Resurrection in Indianapolis have hired a development director to do a little publicity to attract new members. It has been twelve years since someone joined their community. Despite the nuns’ modest plans for a simple brochure, the development director brought in a set of advisors to propose new-fangled publicity such as a website. Now you can find out what books the sisters are reading, read their perspectives on current events, and apply to visit and learn more about life as a Carmelite nun (“If you are a single woman between 20-45”). Breaking a tradition of seclusion was not easy, but these women love their way of life so sincerely that they wish for it to continue. An ad agency took on the challenging job for free and found the sisters to be witty and even irrevent at times. Their interest in current events gave them the hook for an intriguing website and now some of them have a weekly deadline to write essays on current events. No sisters seem to regret their new exposure to the outside world. Whether or not their goals of recruitment will be achieved remains to be seen.

The handwriting recognition software in Microsoft’s new Table PCs matches your letters with preloaded samples in the database on the machine. Bill Gates thinks that the database should be augmented to learn from the user’s handwriting. But others at the company want it to remain closed, with periodic updates that the company itself controls. They’re not sure if the recognition will be better or worse if the software tried to understand individual handwriting quirks. Also, and perhaps more importantly to Microsoft, if they don’t control a central store of samples, they won’t learn which additions improve overall accuracy. Meanwhile, IBM is pushing for a digitized handwriting standard (InkXML) so that companies can collaborate and produce better results. I am happy having the handwritten ink stay as it is for me to peruse later, but I would definitely want searching capabilities for it so I’d need recognition. But perhaps it wouldn’t have to be completely accurate if it was exhaustive enough to include the correct results in its various guesses for what my scribbles may mean.

Follow Me Here linked to an article which I can’t access anymore about how orchestras are getting louder and louder. A portion of the article discussed musicians’ hearing loss, which some orchestra members combat with special earplugs. An online article I found claims that “As many as 52 percent of professional orchestral performers have been diagnosed with hearing problems. 26 percent of high school seniors who participated in band had measurable hearing loss.” Orchestras have gotten louder over time in order to fill huge halls. Sitting in front of the brass section or even sometimes the winds can be an ear-ringing experience, and that ringing can stay with you permanently. You’d think that rock musicians would have worse hearing loss, but their amplifiers are typically pointed towards the audience, and they aren’t playing directly into each other’s ears. Orchestras can reach 120-137 decibels.