British book chain Waterstone’s Waterstones has dropped the apostrophe from its name, despite the fact that the company was started by someone with the last name Waterstone. The company has decided that keeping the apostrophe in the name is no longer practical in the age of digital communication.

End of an error: Why it’s OK to follow Waterstone’s and ditch the apostrophe

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a nice post on whether you are supposed to have a space between the value and the unit when talking about digital storage. For example, do you write 250GB or 250 GB (or 1.44MB vs 1.44 MB if you’re old school). It turns out that the correct answer is to keep the space.

From the article:

On page 133 of the SI brochure, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures says, “The numerical value always precedes the unit, and a space is always used to separate the unit from the number [...] The only exceptions to this rule are for the unit symbols for degree, minute, and second for plane angle.” (emphasis added)

So this applies to most other units of measurement as well. I know that I never really paid much attention to this in the past and probably switched back and forth or used the incorrect convention.

32 GB versus 32GB: Almost everyone is writing it wrong

This has made my day. Great attention to detail.

via Reddit

Soccer week concludes here on quellipsis with a doozy. It seems an indoor soccer team in Dallas has taken to calling themselves Portman Kunis United after a certain scene in Black Swan between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. If you’re not sure which scene go to their site and take a look at the club crest, the interlocking scissors should be a good hint. I also like the black swan graphic below the number on the back of the jersey. These jerseys actually look much better than a lot of professional team jerseys. And you can add a custom name and number to the back if you order from their website. I have to admit I’m tempted…

Portman Kunis United FC

A little over a month ago I wrote about how Real Madrid defender Sergio Ramos dropped the Copa del Rey off a bus during the victory celebration in Madrid. Well we finally get a close look at what is left of the trophy. The consensus online is that the trophy is on display in a museum somewhere along with a newspaper article explaining what happened, but that this is not the trophy case at Real Madrid headquarters.

There is a lot of good international soccer coming up this weekend, so kick things off with these vintage-looking soccer graphics from Zoran Lucić. I’m impressed with the sheer number of different posters he has made. These need to be made available for purchase ASAP.

Sucker for Soccer (via Typography Served)

Here’s the clip:

What most people know as the hash or pound symbol is in fact called the octothorpe. The  punctuation mark previously best known for its place on touch tone phones has had a renaissance over the past few years thanks to twitter. But where did the octothorpe come from, and what’s with the name?

Robert Fulford has some answers:

It was born somewhere in the Bell system in the 1970s, when touchtone became established. The first half of the name was easy, though rich in cultural reference. Since the # has eight points the name fell within the order of eight, where an eight-sided figure is an octagon, a sea creature with eight suckered arms is an octopus, eight notes are an octave and octopush (an underwater game played by two teams of scuba divers pushing a lead puck on the bottom of a swimming pool) originally had eight players a side.

And where did “thorpe” come from? The American Heritage Dictionary says it honours James Edward Oglethorpe, the 18th-century British general who helped found the colony of Georgia in 1732. A more popular story has an engineer at Bell Labs deciding to honour Jim Thorpe, an Indian athlete who won the pentathlon and decathlon for the U.S. at the 1912 Olympics; he had his gold medals taken from him when his background as a professional athlete was disclosed, a decision that was reversed three decades after his death.

So there you have it. Of course, no one actually calls it an octothorpe anymore, but it’s nice to know the correct name.

So if you ever have some extra space at the end of a tweet, why not use it up with a nice #octothorpe? You’ll be totally cool and ironic, and you just might draw some attention to an aging punctuation mark.

How Twitter saved the octothorpe

This is a post from a grammar blog detailing the history of the name for the little dot at the end of a sentence. In North America it is usually referred to as a period, while in the United Kingdom it is called a full stop.

Stop signs