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Word of the day: Ommatidia

At work, we were trying to think of a new name for a product we make that shows lots of little images (because we were being sued because of our old name). Thumbnails seem similar to the complex or compound eyes that bugs have, and we started looking for technical terms for that. Comparing our products to a fly eye turned out to be a bad idea, because flies are kind of short-sighted, and blurry vision didn't seem like the kind of thing we'd want to imply about our product. Dragonfly eyesight, on the other hand, is excellent. This name never got used on the product, not because it's not absolutely genius, but because we never suggested it to marketing. We're tech writers, you know. Last I heard, the product was going to be named something about Airwolf.

It would be an awesome name for a collection of short stories.

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