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filament: Very thin metal wire, usually made of tungsten, emitting light rays when an electric current passes through it.

Picture books and pictorial dictionaries are handy for giving visual representations and dictionary definitions of words.  They are great for preschoolers and elementary school pupils to browse through them or to lookup definitions and illustrations of words.

For older kids and adults, these books are less useful.  Sometimes you know what an object or a part of an object is but you don’t know what it is called.  Merriam-Webster’s (m-w) Visual Dictionary Online can help.

When you visit the Merriam-Webster’s Visual Dictionary Online, you’ll see the familiar Search Box to enter your search word.  Don’t use it.  It is more fun to drill down through the provided visual paths to find exactly what you’re looking for.  These paths are hierarchically organized in over a dozen categories; m-w calls them themes.  Choose from themes like Astronomy, Human Being, Communications, Energy, Sports and Games.

Using my mouse, I clicked on illustrations and drilled down House – Electricity – Lighting – Incandescent Lamp to finally see the graphic above and learn that the illuminated thin metal wire in a bulb is called the filament.  Clicking on the speaker icons next to terms in the dictionary will let you hear their pronunciations.

Merriam-Webster claims 20,000 terms and 6,000 full-color images in the Visual Dictionary Online.  Chances are you’ll find what you’re looking for.

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A very interesting article by Daniel Eran Dilger about Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing over at RoughlyDrafted Magazine.  The one thing I find most interesting is the information regarding the Wall Street Journal’s Consumer Electronics poll (Note: voting is now closed) conducted earlier this month.  The poll asked consumers: Which of these items are you most likely to purchase as a gift?

When the poll started, the WSJ listed the Microsoft Zune Media Player and the Apple iPhone among the eight options on the poll.  Missing was the Apple iPod.  Later, after reader demands and write-ins, the WSJ changed iPhone to iPhone or iPod. 

The iPhone or iPod turned out to be the big winner of the poll grabbing 62% of the vote but the real story for me is that the voting for the Microsoft Zune, according to the Journal, surged from less than 1% for most of the polling to 28% at the end!

In Daniel’s blog entry he reports that with 123,000 votes in, the Microsoft Zune had registered 0% interest.  Inexplicably, a day later, 14,999 out of 16,481 new votes came in for the Zune!  Daniel attributes this to “Microsoft discovering the embarrassment”.

This sheds some new light on how mighty the Microsoft PR machine is and how swiftly it springs into action.  Sadly, it also makes me more skeptical of online poll results and unregistered public voting in general.

Click on the links above to visit Daniel’s entry and the WSJ story.