👓 The New Familiar Quanta | Quanta Magazine

Read The New Familiar Quanta by Thomas Lin ( Quanta Magazine)
Today Quanta unveils a completely re-engineered and redesigned site to better serve our readers and the journalism we produce.
I’m not quite sure I’m a big fan of the new site either. The other one was a bit crisper in look and feel. The typography and readability has improved a bit though. I think it’s almost a travesty that they’ve begun using Disqus.

While nice for some, I don’t think the bookmarking functionality is worth it for me; I’ll continue to bookmark articles on my own website to read for later. Other than gaining people’s email addresses, I’m not sure what Quanta gets out of the functionality. Readers have to be regulars to even consider bothering with the functionality.

👓 Butterick’s Practical Typography

Read Typewriter habits by Matthew But­t­er­ick (Butterick’s Practical Typography)

I’ve claimed through­out this book that many bad ty­pog­ra­phy habits have been im­posed upon us by the type­writer. Here, I’ve col­lected them in one list.

  1. Straight quotes rather than curly quotes (see straight and curly quotes).
  2. Two spaces rather than one space be­tween sen­tences.
  3. Mul­ti­ple hy­phens in­stead of dashes (see hy­phens and dashes).
  4. Al­pha­betic ap­prox­i­ma­tions of trade­mark and copy­right sym­bols.
  5. el­lipses made with three pe­ri­ods rather than an el­lip­sis character.
  6. Non-curly apos­tro­phes.
  7. Pre­tend­ing that ac­cented char­ac­ters don’t exist.
  8. Us­ing mul­ti­ple word spaces in a row (for in­stance, to make a first-line in­dent.)
  9. Us­ing tabs and tab stops in­stead of ta­bles.
  10. Us­ing car­riage re­turns to in­sert ver­ti­cal space.
  11. Us­ing al­pha­bet char­ac­ters as sub­sti­tutes for real math sym­bols.
  12. Mak­ing rules and bor­ders out of re­peated characters.
  13. Ig­nor­ing lig­a­tures.
  14. un­der­lin­ing anything.
  15. Be­liev­ing that mono­spaced fonts are nice to read.
  16. Abus­ing all caps.
  17. Think­ing that the best point size for body text is 12.
  18. Ig­nor­ing kern­ing.
  19. Ig­nor­ing let­terspac­ing.
  20. Too much cen­tered text.
  21. Only us­ing sin­gle or dou­ble line spac­ing.
  22. Only us­ing the line length per­mit­ted by one-inch page mar­gins.

New Look for Boffo Socko

For a while I’ve been contemplating a change in the look of the site, particularly given the changes in the internet for the past several years.

I generally wanted something that has the following attributes:

I’m sure there will be some hiccups and problems in the transition, but I hope to get these ironed out shortly. If you notice something bothersome, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note.

An Asterisk Does Not Denote a Hard Problem†

Richard Millman & George Parker in Elements of Differential Geometry

 

Dagger Graveyard by Natalie Slack
Dagger Graveyard by Natalie Slack