If you read “Newsletter #5”, you know that there was an extensive discussion about the important field of “tribology”. Geoff, in the United Kingdom, sent me information that led to the following internet article about a “TRIBOPEN (tribo + pen)” a Plastic Identifier:
“The automotive industry has moved a step closer to maximum car recyclability following the development of two innovative plastic identifiers by Ford Motor Company and Southampton University.
“The biggest problem when recycling plastics is the sorting and grouping according to material type,” said Professor Walter Brandstetter, Director of Environment and Safety, Ford of Europe.
“Although many plastics look alike, just one percent of an incompatible plastic can be enough to ruin an entire batch of recyclate.”
The Spectrometer unit is the larger of the two. When its nozzle is placed against the plastic part in question, it will identify the exact type of plastic from which it was made. The unit compares the spectroscopic fingerprint with its own integrated database, which consists of more than 200 types of plastic.
The second, pen-shaped hand-held unit, known as the Tribopen, works on the basis of tribo-electric charges that occur when a metal or plastic surface is rubbed against the part. A wide range of different heads are available to cover all possible plastics, from car bumpers to cable shrouding. The portable Tribopen has been designed predominantly for use by dismantlers and recyclers.
Based on information from the University of Southampton with reference to Wolfson Electrostatics.
Since so many subscribers are from non-English speaking countries, the following may answer a question that has puzzled so many, including a few “native speakers”. Nichola of France, wrote:
“A Turkish friend of mine asked if I knew why English is one of the few languages of the world where ‘I’ is always capitalised. ”
Other than making it stand out in a sentence I couldn’t give him a satisfactory answer, could you help, is it based on historical use?"
Scribe answers:
Well, Nichola, and anyone else who is interested, William and Mary Morris, in their Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage explain:
“English is one of the few languages in which the pronoun for the first person, singular, is capitalized. For example, the French ‘je’ and the Spanish ‘yo’ are not capitalized unless they are the beginning of a sentence.
“This has nothing to do with egotism on the part of English-speaking people. Printing and handwriting have everything to do with it. In Middle English the first person singular was ‘ich’ with a lower-case ‘i.’ When this was shortened to ‘i,’ manuscript writers and printers found that it often became lost or attached to a neighboring word. So the reason for the capital ‘I’ is simply to avoid confusion and error.”
Scribe’s note: I would like to add that in English, the first person, “I” (referring to the person who is writing or who is quoted as the speaker), should always be capitalized, whether it is the first letter of a sentence or anywhere within the sentence.