Thom's Blog

Really, why didn’t I do this before?

If you’ve ever stopped and wondered “is there really, really a German word for everything?” Well, yes, apparently there is.

The Arrow Stork

Once upon a time, people in the Northern hemisphere were baffled by the apparent disappearance of (migratory) birds. Where did they go? Greek braniac Aristotle even suggested that they might hibernate at the bottom of the sea. Little did he know that they flew halfway across the globe to somewhere a bit warmer.

The Pfeilstorch

Very occasionally certain large birds (it has been suggested that smaller birds couldn’t have survived the er, encumbered flight) would appear with a spear through them. An African spear, from half a word away.

A white stork, shot on the Bothmer Estate near Mecklenburg, was discovered with an 80-cm-long Central African spear embedded in its neck. The stork had flown the entire migratory journey from its equatorial wintering grounds in this impaled state. The arrow-stork, or pfeilstorch, can now be found, stuffed, in the Zoological Collection of the University of Rostock. It is not alone. Since 1822, some 25 separate cases of pfeilstorches have been recorded.

atlasobscura.com

So there you go – there really is a German word for everything.

I noticed something today…

I’m left handed, which apparently means I’m ‘right brained’ and ‘creative’. I do a creative job – sort of – but I got into it by accident, not via art school etc. So I’m not really a creative.

Part of my job involves designing the look of websites, but I also have to code them, which I suspect is a rather more ‘left brained’ task. It must be said though, that I’m hardly stellar at with the designing or the coding, I’m just ok.

Anyway the computer I use at work has two monitors, and I’ve long since noticed that sometimes if I move a code, or a design, window from one monitor to the other it becomes easier to solve a problem – be it a tricky layout problem, or getting a piece of javascript to work. I didn’t put too much thought into this, and just assumed I was looking at things from a different angle.

Until today, when I did this to one of my monitors…

Cool eh? I did it because I got frustrated not being able to see the whole length of a web page I was designing (I have used the BBC website as an illustration here – I can’t show you in-progress client work).

And suddenly….. durrr, despite the very welcome change to a full-length web page, I found it loads more difficult to design. This might because it is actually a rather difficult piece of work, but I suspect that my brain prefers to deal with design work viewed to my left. I’ll keep the monitors set up like this for another day, and then switch over, then report back. Or not.

Do you think you are right, or left brained, and do you have any examples like mine?

If you have read all the way to the bottom of this, I’m sorry for rambling, but it sort of interested me.

I like this so much that I now say “stop hitting thyself” when I’m playing that “game” with the boy.

(via Boing Boing)