Well, it’s about time! It was more than a year ago that I declared “meh” an official word, with only the lowly Wiktionary to back me up. Many of us have been saying it for years — yes, even before its famous inclusion on a 2001 episode of the Simpsons. Shunned by venerable lexicons everywhere, we rebelled, expressing our righteous indifference with an officially unrecognized shrug of the tongue: meh. So it’s a sweet victory, to say the least, to have our word finally recognized by something other than a user-editable online dictionary: it’s been tapped for inclusion in the Collins English Dictionary. According to the Chicago Tribune:

“The dictionary’s compilers said the word originated in North America, spread through the Internet and was now entering British spoken English. ‘This is a new interjection from the U.S. that seems to have inveigled its way into common speech over here,’ McKeown said. [Excellent use of inveigled.] ‘Internet forums and e-mail are playing a big part in formalizing the spellings of vocal interjections like these.’”

For you doubters out there, here’s our original Oct. 2007 declaration of “meh” as a an official word:

Who’s the arbiter of when a “slang” word well ensconced within the popular lexicon becomes a “real” word? The folks who publish the Oxford English Dictionary? Nah … we’d like to think it’s us. In which case, as of today, the word “meh” may now be used in college papers, scholarly journal articles, Vatican sermons, etc. Never heard of meh? I and at least one other floss blogger I know have been saying it for years, and it’s also made numerous appearances on The Simpsons, and elsewhere. Here’s how the Wiktionary defines it:

As an ADJECTIVE

1. Mediocre; lackluster; unexceptional; uninspiring.
   • 2003: steve-o, Jam On The River Mini-Review [1] in rec.music.phish

     They redeemed themselves with this show. The first song or two was meh, but they were on fire after that.

   • 2006: Suzanne D., Recaps: Finals Week 8 Performances, 5/2/2006 [2] in alt.tv.american-idol

     The voice is excellent as always, but the overall effect was meh until the end, where he became a little bit awesome.

   • 2006: FunkyM, Turned on RAW for the first time in forever last night… [3] in rec.sport.pro.wrestling

     Nothing that was supposed to be big and exciting came off as such and the rest was meh at best.

As an INTERJECTION

1. I don’t know (the verbal equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders).
2. I don’t care.

   “What do you want for dinner?” — “Meh. I’m not really hungry.”

3. I don’t particularly like or dislike it.

   “That film was awesome!” — “Meh. I’ve seen better.”

4. I’m unhappy and not very energetic or enthusiastic.

   The Simpsons, “Lisa’s Wedding” (March 19th, 1995):

   (Marge weaves “Hi Bart, I’m weaving a loom!” on a loom)

   Bart: Meh.

5. A vocabularised sigh, commonly used in the online gaming community to represent indifference, or lack of enthusiasm at a certain proposal.

   “Hey, wanna go pwn some noobs?” — “Meh.”

Each of the following three phrases is an anagram of a U.S. city-state combination (like Tacoma, Washington). Can you identify each of them?

“HOT DRAFT KANGAROO”

“SNOOT EXHAUST”

“CANDY VACATIONERS”

HERE are the answers.

Top 10 Amazing Animal Videos. Posted for the off chance that there may be one or two you haven’t seen linked here before.
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The 20 Healthiest Places in America. According to the ranking by the Centers for Disease Control, New England is the place to be.
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Watch 4,345,027 dominos fall to set a new world record. Someone needs to pick up their toys.
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Salps are jellyfish-like animals that reproduce fast and eat a lot of algae. But can they reduce the effects of global warming?
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In the game QWOP, you are our small nation’s sole representative at the Olympic Games. Ideally, you will run 100 meters …but our training program was underfunded.
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A penguin seeks refuge from hungry orcas. Any port in a storm!
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Two ways to be a ladies’ man. Two famous architects each had a number of lovers, but their methods differed dramatically.

Albert Pujols was named the NL Most Valuable Player today, and the American League’s winner will be announced tomorrow. In honor of these awards, we have three quizzes for you. Click on any of the above banners to see whether you’re an MVP when it comes to MVP trivia.

1. Agatha Christie. Agatha was a painfully shy girl, so her mom homeschooled her even though her two older siblings attended private school.
2. Pearl S. Buck was born in West Virginia, but her family moved to China when she was just three months old. She was homeschooled by a Confucian scholar and learned English as a second language from her mom.
3. Alexander Graham Bell was homeschooled by his mother until he was about 10. It was at this point that she started to go deaf and didn’t feel she could properly educate him any more. Her deafness inspired Bell to study acoustics and sound later in life.

4. If Thomas Edison was around today, he would probably be diagnosed with ADD – he left public school after only three months because his mind wouldn’t stop wandering. (more…)

so_many_a_second is a simple online applet that helps you visualize statistics. Most notably, it takes statistics in the form “x items used worldwide per second” and illustrates those items falling down a screen. So for example, 150 trees are cut per second according to Worldometers, and so_many_a_second visualizes that process thusly:

You can also do a split screen view comparing, say, trees cut per second versus babies born per second (4.2). That looks like this:

You can even create your own views by plugging in a name, number of items per second, and an icon. It’s an interesting way to visualize statistics — putting an image to something that is very abstract for most of us. Go and click around!

See also: Visualizing Consumerism and Worldometers.

You know the toys. You’ve seen the commercials. But you definitely haven’t heard these stories. In honor of today’s Monopoly quiz, let’s revisit Tim Moodie’s look at the secrets behind your favorite classic toys.

1. How the Slinky got stuck between a cult and a mid-life crisis

In 1943, naval engineer Richard James invented the Slinky. When a spring fell off of his workbench and began to “walk” across the floor, he figured he could make a toy out of it. His wife Betty agreed, and she came up with the name Slinky. Introduced in 1945, Slinky sales soared (say that three times fast), but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Richard James.

By 1960, despite his success, Richard James was suffering from a serious mid-life crisis. But instead of falling for fast cars, dyed hair and liposuction, Richard James went a different route, and became involved with a Bolivian religious cult. He gave generously to the religious order and left his wife, six children and the company to move to Bolivia.

Stuck with the debts left by her husband and a company that desperately needed her leadership, Betty James took over as the head of James Industries. A marketing savant, Betty James was responsible for additions to the Slinky line including Slinky Jr., Plastic Slinky, Slinky Dog, Slinky Pets, Crazy Slinky Eyes and Neon Slinky. It was great for boys and girls around the world that Betty James didn’t suffer a midlife crisis. In 2001, she was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame, and perhaps even more laudably, her Slinky dog was forever immortalized in Disney’s Toy Story movies.

2. Why Lincoln Logs are the most deceptively named toys in the business

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Forget your commemorative Pokemon/Sesame Street/or NFL Editions. Real, American Monopoly is played on the classic board, with properties named after actual Atlantic City streets (besides, a Sesame Street game that sternly commands players to “GO TO JAIL” is just plain wrong). So raid your memory’s game closet for all 28 properties, utilities, and railroads from ‘original’ Monopoly.

No need to type “Avenue,” “Place,” or “Gardens” (but you do have to type “Railroad”). Good luck!

Take the Quiz: Name the Monopoly Properties

There’s a new phenomenon sweeping internet photography circles: HDR imaging. It’s a technique that produces pictures which look hyper-real, but which most people assume are fake — the result of some arcane Photoshop trickery — when they first see one. But even though Photoshop is involved in realizing the images’ true potential, they’re not fake per se — this image of the Golden Gate bridge, for instance, contains no photographic information that wasn’t actually in this scene when the picture was made:

– and yet, obviously, this isn’t a picture of the Golden Gate that could be made in a single exposure by a traditional camera. Because the trouble with traditional photography is exactly that it relies on a single exposure to record all the information in a scene — all the shadows, highlights and midtones, which on any given day are so disparate from one another that not even your eye — much less a camera — can distinguish all their subtle gradations at once.

So in a simplified nutshell, here’s how HDR works: if you aimed a regular camera at this Golden Gate scene, you could either expose for the sky, and wind up with big blustery clouds but a muddy dark bridge, or expose for the bridge and the water and have a white, blown-out sky. Instead, the photographer put his camera on a tripod and took several pictures, exposing for different parts of the scene, and then carefully married them together in post. (We’re assuming in Photoshop, although I believe there are other tools out there now.) By the way, you can see a larger version of this shot and check out the rest of this photographer’s Flickr photostream here.

More HDR magic to follow:
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In the current issue of mental_floss magazine, Erik Vance profiled nine “New Einsteins”—visionaries who are discovering how to grow organs, peer into black holes, levitate food, cure plagues, and let blind men see. This week, Mr. Vance will be anointing five additional New Einsteins here on mentalfloss.com, one per day. Let’s begin.

Who He Is: Marin Soljačić, assistant professor of physics at MIT

What He Did: Soljačić invented “WiTricity,” the first steps toward wireless electricity. That is, moving electricity without cables. It all started when Soljačić awoke in the middle of the night for the umpteenth time to his chirping cell phone, reminding him to plug it in. It occurred to him that in this day and age, cell phones should be able to plug themselves in and save him the hassle.

There are two primary ways to transmit energy without wires. The first, electromagnetic radiation, is given off by charged particles. It’s hugely wasteful when diffuse and potentially dangerous when concentrated (like in a laser). The second is electromagnetic resonance. This is a magnetic version of what happens when an opera singer blasts the right note and shatters a glass partially filled with water (similarly called acoustic resonance). The idea is if you can get a coil to magnetically resonate in the right way, another specially formatted coil across the room will pick that up, with no interference from whatever is in between. Using this technique in 2007, they were able to power a 60-watt light bulb from 7 feet away.

Why You Should Start Idolizing Him Immediately: (more…)