Being MIA on AIM, the popular realtime Internet correspondence software, I am living a hermitic existence at this University. Education-based conversation is mostly what I initiate in encounters with acquaintances, and I'm becoming more conscious of it than when focusing the topic on myself.
Not minding lack of accompaniment in ventures away from campus, I often forget to poll the other dorms for someone also wanting to breathe sub-freezing air in search of a super-boiling beverage. I speak of a lone three-block jaunt to Starbucks, just a day ago. The franchise of which I'm a patron, and affront by doing my best to avoid learning all their cup-size lingo, is built into a hill in the financial district of the north downtown area, has an ice skating rink that doubles as a patio in the warmer, less hermitic, months, and sports a gas fireplace. Starbucks has been trashed everywhere from in the 'real-life' comic strips to bohemian coffee shop wall-poetry. Although this urban professionals' haunt is a bloated plasticine Norman Rockwell panorama, their cup of hot chocolate is a work of engineering.
Pressure steamed chocolate 'espresso' is whistled into a steel cup and mixed with a room-temperature dairy product that falls out of its pitcher rather than pours by its untouched milkfat percentage. Some fluffy white aerosol foam is added to the brim, and capped with a standard 'sippy' cover. One might debate with oneself over purchasing a pastry from the rack or read the first few sentences of the New York Times cover story until the whirring and gurgling of the drink's production settles down. But, I watched it all come together. Skeptical of the temperature-ratio to constituent-ratio... ratio, I suspected it may have turned out luke-warm. As it actually turned out, the first 4 sips gave the esophagus's inverse of an ice cream headache, and the rest were like swallowing from a bucket of down feathers. There was also a touch of fluff in every pull.
As simple as brown antifreeze on a blustery city night is, the science reminded me on which end of the timeline of progress I stood. The processes in refineries to give a city bus its usual drink as opposed to that of an automobile or passenger jet came to mind. Just as the heating and separation of crude oil is called 'cracking' and microwaving a burger at Hardee's is called 'boosting,' there is little doubt mixing cream with molten chocolate in the setting of a standardized service has a slightly silly nickname of a multi-meaning verb, like 'creaming.'
Since school comes to mind often with society on hold on line 2, I have at my fingertips technical and mathematical terminology synonymous with words more readily grasped in their traditional (or even slang) contexts. Some truly uncanny ones stem from working with electronics, my growing expertise. When describing some devices, they may be self-excited or separately-excited. To stop one of these devices, one may want to implement a method called 'plugging.' Amongst technicians, suggestive references are sometimes assigned intentionally. I was hipped that a power meter that 'clamps on' to a wire is sometimes called a 'strap-on.' "It's a matter of preference," he said.
The communications industry as well as technology in general would be wise to invest in Webster's New World. Words like 'server' and 'domain' if put on flashcards would probably yield different associative words than before the advent. Looking into a computer, hard drives must be configured in a 'master-slave' relationship. This may illustrate the furthest we've come in redefinition.
New ideas are only describable in old terms. Eventually terms may pile on top of one another as waves of technological evolution carry on. The first ever cup of hot chocolate may have been 'lumpy,' but reading in a recent science journal, apparently the universe hasn't always been, nor will continue to become any more 'lumpy.' I've got a laboratory session scheduled tomorrow. I'm sure it will be an unpredictable world of 'banana plugs' and 'alligator clips'
