I recently discovered Practical Typography [1] and Typography for Lawyers [2] by Matthew Butterick which have changed the way I've approached presenting information. I would highly recommend each for anyone who uses text to communicate. Butterick is a Tufte for text.
Butterick introduced me to Bitstream Charter for which I'm very greatful. However, I would very strongly urge people to disregard his recommendations for representing hyperlinks.
Instead of just underlining hyperlinks, he has this demented nonsense:
> Cross-references, denoted with small caps, are clickable.
> Links to outside material are denoted with a red circle, like so.
Hyperlinks are almost universally distinguished by underlining them. There is no rational reason to invent a new design language and expect people to learn it. And for what benefit? The seemingly random capitalisation of words and weird circles in the middle of the text makes it much more jarring than simple underlining.
Smallcaps hyperlinks is even worse than it might initially sound: many ESL speakers have difficulty with text written in all-caps, and it totally makes sense why, if you think about it.
All-uppercase distorts the shapes, making them unfamiliar to ESL readers who have less practice. You must know that famous meme about how you can read English perfectly fine if the letters (besides first and last) of each word are scrambled: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy..."
Granted, I'm not an expert in this area. I'm actually just relaying what an ESL ex of mine told me. She hated whenever she had to read things like "Calvin and Hobbes" which use all-caps, for this exact reason. Come to think of it, she was Japanese, I wonder if it has to do with growing up with a logographic writing system.
Uppercase doesn't distort shapes, they're just the uppercase shapes. Reading in all-uppercase is a basic skill that you quickly learn, since it's extremely common in signs, titles, etc.
I can understand that learning separate letters for lowercase and uppercase is something that students coming from other writing systems have to learn, the same way I had to learn both uppercase and lowercase in Greek.
But it's just a year-one skill you have to learn. You learn it, fairly quickly, and then you're fine. It's not a reason to avoid using small caps. Generally speaking, by the time your English skills are good enough to read an average paragraph, text in all-uppercase has not been a problem for you for a long time. Vocabulary is the thing that takes a long time to learn, not recognizing words in uppercase.
So while I don't doubt that your ex was telling the truth about Calvin and Hobbes, I think that was just a personal annoyance of hers. It's not a widespread problem. But everybody winds up having their own idiosyncratic annoyances with foreign languages.
Yes, all-caps and lowercase have different word shapes. This is something that slightly slows down native or highly experienced speakers (readers), because they have so much exposure to reading the language that they use the word shape to help.
This is not something ESL students are doing to any appreciable degree. They have not put in the 1000's of hours of reading in the target language to read even faster by identifying word shapes. That is a level of optimization they are nowhere near.
It is kinda funny you recommend those books as a reaction to the linked book.
> Nowadays, we expect such matters to be determined by empirical evidence, not by majority opinion. This book is concerned with the empirical evidence concerning the relative legibility of serif typefaces and sans serif typefaces
Meanwhile Buttericks books are very much "some guys opinion". Granted, that guy has a big passion, but at the end of the day, his books are not grounded in empirical evidence.
Because there are societal costs to poverty, regardless of how people arrive there. Gambling can be as addictive and personally and societally destructive as any drug.
Same. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to take a course on the Economics of Gaming from William Eadington [1] , who was the founder of Gambling Studies.
Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source of a large part of their revenue?
It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in somehow.
Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol - one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives against putting this cat back in the bag.
>Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.
Explain this more? Let's assume you're Nate Silver and predict the 50 state outcome perfectly - you have a 50% in the class, so failing? Then the only way to "win" is to wager 50 points on the stock market (doesn't matter which way it goes). Wagering less makes no sense, because you start at 50 and so going "up" 25 to 75% protects nothing as the downside is still way below failing.
It sounds like a game theory question - you should be able to get 40 points on the states easy enough even if you get the toss-up ones wrong, and then gamble the full total on the stock market (which in general should go up, the market loves certainty and hates uncertainty).
It was exactly a game theory question, and a perfect exercise in real world betting markets. You’ll never have the most information and you’ll never be the biggest fish.
I learned the lesson that day, and I’d argue that even Obama with 365 electoral votes and control of the legislature learned it soon afterwards. Being a naïve hopeful Obama supporter, I bet 50 points on up and lost my ass.
Nate Silver came into the national spotlight after his analysis that year. There were other polling prediction models out of Princeton, but I heavily relied on Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight. I remember predicting every state correctly except North Carolina.
Interestingly in the context of this post, the University of Iowa has been hosting a market for real monetary binary options on US political outcomes for 30 years now. [1] It’s probably some small stakes fun for Midwest market makers looking for some action during off season corn futures.
Other things we learned:
- The players club at Harrah’s marked the beginning of the rewards points programs available at nearly every single seller of goods today.
- Casinos, in cracking down on card sharp teams playing blackjack with a mathematical edge and who had been 86’d but often returned in disguise, developed software to identify people from security camera footage by their stride. This was in 2008.
- Bet the pass line, and stack the odds behind your number. It’s the best odds in the casino and nobody likes the guy betting Don’t.
Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam is currently at 23.6% of capacity.
Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is currently at 29.7% of capacity.
Given the current state of the Upper Colorado River basin snow pack, there is a not-insignificant chance that Lake Powell will recede below a minimum power generating level by the end of this year for the first time ever.
Flock was valued at $7.5 billion last year, and it's probably worth more now. It's absolutely one of YCombinator's success stories.
YCombinator's goal is to make a lot of money by causing there to be more startups, and therefore more successor startups. "Make the world a better place" is not one of their success metrics. They're investors, not altruists.
This is YC we're talking about. They'd fund payday loans with organs as collateral for African orphans if they could. Seriously, they have NO scruples.
That sounds like honest business compared to getting paid by the government to circumvent the laws that prevent the state from spying on it's own citizens at scale.
They do. The political and economic environment (edit: in the US) is currently supporting the idea that mass surveillance is an extremely lucrative investment opportunity.
Why would they? There’s no “pro-social” enforcement in their funding terms, so they’re just as “morals aren’t applicable to profit” as any off-the-shelf C-corp is. If they required their startups to found B-corps then I’d understand trying to apply human ethical concerns to them, but they don’t, so human morals simply don't apply.
I'll name a specific highly developed country in the western hemisphere: The United States. There's no need to bend over backward trying to blame some perceived degradation in quality of discussion on international adoption of the internet.
According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy [1] 130 million Americans — 54% of adults between the ages of 16 and 74 years old—lack proficiency in literacy, essentially reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
[1] https://practicaltypography.com
[2] https://typographyforlawyers.com.
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