Month: August 2004

‘Everybody knows’ that we read by recognising the shapes of words, right? It’s common knowledge in the design and typography worlds, I thought.

Turns out, the designers and typographers either misinterpreted early psychology work in the field, or the psychology work was plain flawed. This excellent overview article explains all, and I think it has me convinced that I, for one, have been parroting rubbish for years.

A few comments: first, I wish I was more surprised that some psychologists had adopted the ‘Not A therefore B’ fallacy early on – there’s some genuinely bad science on show in there, happily exposed by later work but more specifically by clearer thinking. I’m reminded of a truly dreadful paper I once saw presented at the British Association, which purported to study comprehension rates when listening to human speakers. The study concluded that comprehension did not fall off with speaker distance, which would have been surprising and interesting. However, a minute’s back-of-the-envelope examination of the size of their video screen, the likely line resolution of their dodgy camera, the resolving power of the human eye, and the distance range of their study… The casual assumption that the greater the distance, the less information the subjects had to work with was not, in that study, the case. There was, in essence, no difference between their tests.

Secondly, I’ve said before that I admire Microsoft’s efforts in typography and font design, and this is no exception. Given this work, I find it mystifying that Word continues to set type so badly, but I guess that’s backward-compatability for you. At least we have Verdana and Georgia, two of the very best screen fonts available.

As for ClearType, Microsoft’s type anti-aliasing system that uses the arrangement of red, green and blue dots on LCD screens to increase the effective horizontal resolution: it’s not something I’ve had the opportunity to use in practice. Anyone care to comment? I have used Apple’s similar rendering options (System Preferences → Appearance → Font smoothing style, for all you Mac OS X heads), but find the colour fringing distracting. Thus, I turn it off (‘Best for CRT’).

I read somewhere, recently, that British Olympic hopeful Michael Faulds was tipped for stardom in clay pigeon shooting very shortly after he picked up a shotgun. In those first stands, he hit 17 of 25 clays.

Pfff! I’m not impressed.

Mind you, he was nine years old at the time.

Every now and then, I remember why I don’t watch very much TV. Turning over from ‘My breasts are too big’ on C4, I hear on BBC1 ‘Mark once trained to be an astro-physicist. He’s been a rail cop for eleven years.’ Mark then proceeds to gallantly check the toilets for offensive graffiti.

At least on ITV1 we have celebrities trying to cook for 250 schoolkids without serving them all chips. ‘Celeriac? Sounds like a disease.’ Quality.

Sanderson’s Fifth Postulate goes like this:

All stereotypes are true.

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One of the things we’ve been trying to do in the public understanding of science community is dispel the mythical image of ‘the scientist’ as being white, male, bearded, and wearing a labcoat. Oh, and probably also sandals. With socks.

In this endeavour we have, of course, been spectacularly unsuccessful. Scientists, in the public’s eye, are still male, still wear labcoats, and still, more often than not, talk in strangled German accents. A dozen or more years of concerted effort by some seriously effective communicators has had pretty much no effect I can discern. Why? Well, there’s the somewhat inconvenient problem that the stereotype has at least a vague connection with reality, with the possible exception of the strangled German accent. It’s unpopular to point this out, but if I believe it to be the case, words like ‘flogging’ and ‘equine’ and ‘deceased’ come to mind. In combination.

However, it doesn’t appear that we’ve been uniformly unsuccessful. Sure, everyone still thinks scientists are men with bubbling test tubes, but the generation heading through school and university now will change that. Why? Because they’re girls. Boys’ results in science and maths have been tending downward in exactly the same way oil prices haven’t; girls, in comparison, are doing rather well. And, reasonably enough, they see interesting and varied careers in… well, often medicine, actually, but nobody realises medicine isn’t really a science until far too late, and that’s a whole other kettle of smelly fish anyway.

As a result, a significant majority of newcomers to the public understanding of science industry are women, and guess what? They’re all intent on dispelling the myth of the male scientist. Because… why, exactly? Just what are we trying to achieve here?

Perhaps we should be adopting the Action Man approach: taking an old, tired, somewhat crufty image, and updating it to make it more appealing to today’s kids. Specifically boys, since the girls seem to have the sense to get along quite well anyway, thanks very much.

(This post summarises a deliberately inflammatory remark made in discussion at the BIG Event a couple of weeks ago.)

I’m guessing most (both?) readers here won’t know of Audioscrobbler, but: (a.) it exists; (b.) it’s kinda cool in a geek-hip sort of way; (c.) they’re taking new memberships again; and (d.) I’m one of the new sign-ups. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Currently listening to: Home from the album When It Falls by Zero 7.

Holy cow, Scotch Bonnets are hot. Around the quarter-million Scoville mark, up there with Habanero; cf. wussy Jalapeno at 2,500 or so.

They also have a delightful fruity taste. No, really, they do. In those brief moments between stuffing one’s face with yoghurt in a vain attempt to quell the sensation of imminent death, there’s something almost summer-fruit about them.

I love them.

In moderation.

(One of these days, I really will get into posting categories.)

Oh, so many things I should have posted over the last few weeks. Stay tuned for: Bashing trees with sticks! Square-wheeled bicycles! Unexpected children! Windows trojans! Cameras! Insulting comments from my dad!

If you’re really good, dear reader, I may even… [pause for effect]… no, I always do pause for effect, that’s a given. No, I may even… [pause again for effect] … write something that’s actually interesting.

But I wouldn’t count on it.