As mediated experiences overtake most of our waking hours, the power of a huge mass experience in real life rises in meaning. [from the CT2 blog]

The point Kevin makes is a good one. But… to be honest.. what entranced me was the use of the term mediated experiences. It’s a powerful term. Experience is so defined by the personal feelings and senses, and mediation is so defined by the intervention or removal from personal experience, that the combination just fascinates me.

I did a little poking around on line to get a sense of how mediated experience is used. I got as far as finding it to be an expression used in psychology to refer to a person’s [internal or external] filtering of life’s experiences. But that doesn’t quite convey the punch conveyed to me.

The best I could find was this definition in Spanish:

Mediated experience es una forma de experiencia indirecta. En el caso del arte, es la experiencia donde el artista se ha interpuesto “en medio” entre la experiencia y el que la experimenta.

My very rusty Spanish understands that as:

Mediated experience is a form of indirect experience. In the case of art, it is an experience wherein the artist has interjected the artistic medium itself into the experience and into what is being tested.

I’m not completely certain that I’ve grasped the full concept, but I am really drawn to what I see. A description of the influence that the medium itself (video, computer, television, telephone, news source, whatever) has upon how the information or event is experienced.

YES.

Menticulation: the chemical reaction generated by the interaction between Diet Coke and Mentos.

Related word:

Menticulator: an experimental environment designed to promote menticulation.

If you like the word, you’ll love the context: Robert Woodhead’s Zero-G menticulation tests. I really believe his claim that his kids get better than A+ on their “What I Did in the Summer” essays.

And absolutely don’t miss the video.

[via Geekdad]

“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” (Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon)

We’re celebrating 300 posts in the Really Sarah Syndication blog since November! Thanks for reading!

Ischia. The newest Motorola handset to clear FCC certification. Good grief, who thought of “Ischia”? How do they plan to pronounce it?

Being medically-minded, I look at that brand name and think instantly: Ischemia.

(Ischemia: A decrease in the blood supply — and therefore oxygen flow — to an organ, tissue, or body part. Ischemia is often associated with tissue destruction or death.)

An ischemic limb might be blue or black… you get the point. “Ischia” is not evoking pretty pictures in my mind.

The only other word that comes to mind is eschar (eschar: a necrotic mass of tissue).

Ew.

[via Crave]

“Poised between the Scylla and the Charybdis”: Why anyone would choose to be poised there, I don’t know. But it must provide a gratifying feeling of importance to be able to express your lose-lose situation so dramatically.

Oxymoron (ooh, that should have been Word of the Day): a figure of speech that combines two opposing or contradictory ideas, such as “old news” or “extensive briefing”. My step-dad used to put in that category “military intelligence” and “civil war”. And there’s always the deadpan “criminal justice”.

Seen in Shaare Tzedek Hospital’s Emergency Room, Jerusalem:

Unfortunately, as with most ER waiting rooms, an oxymoron.

Normobs: normal mobile users

…as opposed to early adopters and industry insiders, who think that everyone sends email / uploads pictures to Flickr / posts to blogs on his or her mobile phone.

I don’t know where the term began; I saw it used first on SMSTextNews a year or so ago.

Today’s word: isthmus.

A narrow land bridge connecting two larger bodies of land.

I was thinking about my visit to Gibralter, if you must know.

or, rather, Term of the Day:

Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia: Pain in the forehead and face caused by rapid cooling and rewarming of the blood vessels of the palate, eg, by  quickly eating something cold, like ice cream.