Skip to main content

Posts

Sophisticated words!

Urbane Definition: notably polite or polished in manner Example: "At first, I was a little thrown by the subtitle of Adam Gopnik’s new book, 'The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.' Since Gopnik, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, has written so urbanely on what seems like every aspect of human creation but in particular those creations called art, I assumed that the mystery he wanted to investigate would be that of the mastery displayed by our most bravura artists." — Adam Thirwell,  The New York Times , 14 Mar. 2023 About the Word: Would you rather be urbane or suave? Here's the difference:  urbane typically suggests composed cultivation and wide social experience, while  suave tends to emphasize smooth frictionless dealings. Urbane  and  urban  both come from the Latin  urbanus , meaning "of the city; refined."   Sagacious Definition: having or showing an ability to understand difficult ideas and situations and to make good decisions...
Recent posts

Vehicle Buying Guide

Torque measures an engine’s turning  force  and horsepower measures its power. Torque is a force applied over a distance. It’s measured in pound-feet (or in metric, newton metres). So what’s turning on your car? The engine’s crankshaft and, ultimately, the wheels.  And what’s the power? Power is the amount of force over a specific amount of time. It’s a measure of how much work your engine can do. To calculate it, you multiply torque by engine speed. And to get the horsepower, a measurement invented by James Watt  to sell steam engines   by showing how many horses they could replace, that’s then divided by 5252 – for math reasons. Wheel torque The torque produced by the engine changes by the time it gets to the wheels. Some is lost along the way.  But mainly, it gets magnified by the transmission, the same way a longer wrench lets you produce more torque on that lug nut. “Different vehicles will have different  gear ratios  and different gear-shif...

Literary Genres

Autobiography An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written biography of one's own life.  Biography   A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events.   Cookbook A cookbook or cookery book is a kitchen reference containing recipes. Cookbooks may be general, or may specialize in a particular cuisine or category of food. Recipes in cookbooks are organized in various ways: by course, by main ingredient, by cooking technique, alphabetically, by region or country, and so on.  Dystopian Dystopian is a subgenre of science fiction writing, but it has become so popular that it deserves its own category. A dystopian book takes place in the future when some cataclysmic event has destroyed society.     Essay . A short...

Display Technologies

The main difference among CRT, LCD, AMOLED displays are the actual composition of each pixel & the working priciples behind it.   CRT or Cathode Ray Tubes uses an electron gun to fire pixels at the screen (remember that big hump at the back of your old TV set). LCDs use liquid crystals (obviously) made on a TFT ( Thin Film Transistor ). When you hear terms like TN ( Twisted Nematic - the cheapest and most common panel used) and IPS ( In-Plane Switching ) , they refer to the display panel being used in the LCD.   LEDs or Light Emitting Diodes uses diodes that release light onto the screen when electrons strike them. The phenomena used for emission of light is the inverse of what happens in photoelectric effect . OLED is just an extension of LED display technology where organic substance - one that has carbon - is used to emit light. The OLED devices are simple solid-state devices consisting of a thin layer of organic compounds in an emissive electroluminesce...