Diacritiques

My friend Michel Valdrighi has been browsing photography web sites. And, as he pointed out to me the other day, he’s found quite a few people who who set their lens focus (or extend their depth of field) to … eternity:

• Likewise, you will find that a greater depth-of-field (bigger f-stop number) will make everything from here to eternity appear in focus. (link)
• At that f-stop, you focused the camera at 5 to 7 feet away and the DOF extended damn near to eternity ;-) (link)
• To increase DOF against far distance/eternity, turn to left side. (link)
• It makes a nice, clean image from corner to corner and closes down to f/22 for depth of field from inches to eternity. (link)
• A couple of them are built as rigidly as possible, allowing for an equivalent F-Stop of 100, which gives me focus from here to eternity. (link)
• Digicam (secret for now)
  aperture ~5
  shutter 1/100
  iso100
  ~100mm
  focus eternity (link)

A blend of time and space conceptualisation into one? The word infinity doesn’t only relate to space, though, but also to number and quantity.

The search phrase "from here to infinity" yields only 24,400 raw Google hits, compared to 717,000 for "from here to eternity" (the results for Yahoo! are even more unbalanced). But the latter the title of a novel and (multiple-oscar winning) film.

Via Dominique at the Petit Champignacien Illustré: The non-profit association graphê is trying to drum up support for their online petition, which asks the French state to preserve the collection and archives of the Imprimerie nationale (the national printing works), an institution that has existed since 1539 and whose premises are currently being sold off:

The historic collection it holds - due to be so dispatched - is a unique, priceless testimony of the history of the written form, from the 16th century to the present. It includes the Cabinet des poinçons, or Punch Room, holding hundred of thousands of letterform and character punches, for both western and oriental scripts; functional workshops - a foundry, presses for typography, lithography and copper-plate engraving work, stitching and binding - as well as a library with over 30,000 volumes, and the archives of the State printing works. Set up in 1539 by King Francis I, at the same time as the Collège de France, the national center of academic excellence, this collection stands as the memory of specialized know-how and expertise, and as a center for creation, now fated to disappear if its continued survival is not ensured.

Typography and its history and know-how don’t have a lobby, not even in such a relatively history-conscious place as France. The petition text is online in 26 languages.

1. Who are you callin’ ungrammatical? — a good article by Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe. The topic is, you guessed it, whom.
2. American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift — an interview with the linguist William Labov by Robert Siegel on (US) National Public Radio. Via Mark Liberman at Language Log; he also reports on the sad news concerning the public access to Prof. Labov’s research, though.
3. Le mot de la fin — this is a four-times-a-week radio editorial by the lexicographer Alain Rey. (His is the name on most of the Robert dictionaries.) About 3 min each, and available as a podcast.
4. Speaking in Minor and Major Keys [.pdf] — via Argonaut, a research paper by Maartje Schreuder, Laura van Eerten and Dicky Gilbers, who have found a correlation between musical minor/major keys and sad/happy emotional speech: “In order to investigate emotional intonation, we recorded and analyzed the performances of five professional readers reading passages from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in Dutch. In pitch contours of all speakers we found intervals between tones indicating minor modality in passages in which the sad character Eeyore is speaking and intervals indicating major modality in passages in which the happy, energetic Tigger is speaking.” A similar study had apparently been done already for Japanese.

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