Archive for January, 2008

Winter

Monday, January 28th, 2008

High: -29. Current Temp: -31. Low: -46.

There isn’t enough space on the default Google Weather Gadget to handle a two-digit Celsius temperature with a negative sign. Oops.

Word of the day

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

A word I recently learned is “affordance”. In my own words, an affordance is a visual or other cue that suggests an available action.

For example, the friction-improving bumps on a camera’s battery door are an affordance that indicates that you pull to open the battery door.

Or the three diagonal lines in the lower-right corner of a window are an affordance that the window can be resized. They invite you to drag the corner with the mouse.

Wiktionary has:
affordance: an action that an individual can potentially perform in his or her environment

Coined by J. J. Gibson, apparently.