Lone Gunman

David’s lead encap­su­lates my thoughts on typog­ra­phy per­fectly: “I’m fas­ci­nated by typog­ra­phy even though I don’t under­stand a thing about it”.

Hope­fully this won’t be the case for much longer, as Paul Dean has writ­ten a five-part “type ter­mi­nol­ogy tour de force”.

From the excel­lently illus­trated Anatomy of a Let­ter­form (part two):

They speak the arm (of, say, an E), the crotch (of an M), which could fur­ther be described as an acute crotch or an obtuse crotch, the ear (of some g’s), which might be a flat ear or a floppy ear, the eye (of an e), the leg (of a k), the shoul­der (of an n), the tail (of a j or a Q), and the spine (of an S).

via Link Banana

Return­ing from a trip to Europe, Nate Sil­ver—pro­pri­etor of the polit­i­cal analy­sis web­site FiveThir­tyEight—has promptly com­piled a list of obser­va­tions on Lon­don and Paris from an Amer­i­can point of view.

As an ‘insider’ it appears that I’ve take a lot of these grad­ual changes for granted, not really mak­ing any conclusions.

Lon­don, and the United King­dom in gen­eral, has sort of become ground zero for what is known as lib­er­tar­ian pater­nal­ism, with all sorts of sub­tle nudges to influ­ence behav­ior. For instance, cig­a­rette packs now con­tain not only the phrase ‘smok­ing kills’ in promi­nent let­ters on the front side of the pack­age, but also, a dis­gust­ing pic­ture of rot­ted teeth on the back­side (a prac­tice which is some­what rem­i­nis­cent of an Amer­i­can Psy­Ops oper­a­tion in Afghanistan). There is now a com­muter tax to drive into the city. Tube maps con­tain firmly-worded admon­ish­ments to rid­ers, advis­ing them to avoid chang­ing trains at busy stops like Covent Gar­den or Bank. Black cabs fea­ture doors that lock and unlock auto­mat­i­cally as the car begins to accel­er­ate. The amount of liquor in a cock­tail is strictly reg­u­lated (although this was true when I was there as well). Over­all, one is gen­er­ally more aware of the pres­ence of gov­ern­ment than one is in the United States, even though they have sev­eral free­doms over there (broader tol­er­ance for things like gam­bling and gay mar­riage for instance) that we don’t have over here.

via @zambonini

After becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned by the seem­ingly elit­ist sys­tem of pub­lish­ing in sci­en­tific jour­nals, Jorge Hirsch devised the h-index; a sys­tem to quan­tify the sci­en­tific impact of a researcher’s pub­li­ca­tions (regard­less of jour­nal) and thus the sci­en­tific impact (impor­tance) of the researcher.

There’s a clear peck­ing order [for sci­en­tific jour­nals], estab­lished and rein­forced by sev­eral inde­pen­dent rat­ing sys­tems. Chief among them: the Jour­nal Impact Factor.

Hirsch, like his peers, under­stood that if he wanted to get to the front ranks of his dis­ci­pline, he had to pub­lish in jour­nals with higher JIFs. But this struck him as unfair. […] It shouldn’t be about where he pub­lished; it should be about his work.

[…] In his 2005 arti­cle, Hirsch intro­duced the h-index. The key was focus­ing not on where you pub­lished but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In prac­tice, you take all the papers you’ve pub­lished and rank them by how many times each has been cited. […] Or to put it more tech­ni­cally, the h-index is the num­ber n of a researcher’s papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High num­bers = impor­tant sci­ence = impor­tant scientist.

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, Edward Wit­ten—cos­mol­o­gist at the Insti­tute for Advanced Study—scores the high­est of all physi­cists with 120, Stephen Hawk­ing gets 67, while Hirsch rates a 52.

After read­ing this roundup of research into the psy­chol­ogy of thought sup­pres­sion you will see that the results are fairly con­clu­sive: it’s counter-productive in almost every circumstance.

From research into sub­stance crav­ings, so-called ‘intru­sive’ mem­o­ries, and even depres­sion, thought sup­pres­sion has been shown to not work and the act of remem­ber­ing when attempt­ing to sup­press has been dubbed the ‘post-suppression rebound effect’. The arti­cle con­cludes with:

The irony of thought sup­pres­sion, then, is that actively try­ing to man­age our own minds can some­times do more harm than good. Although it makes per­fect intu­itive sense to try and sup­press unwanted thoughts, unfor­tu­nately the very process we use to do this con­tains the seeds of its own destruc­tion. The more we try and push intru­sive thoughts down, the more they pop back up, stronger than ever.

via Mind Hacks

Leonard Mlodinow—physicist at Cal­tech and author of The Drunkard’s Walk, a highly-praised book look­ing at ran­dom­ness and our inabil­ity to take it into account—has an inter­view in The New York Times about under­stand­ing risk. Some choice quotes:

I find that pre­dict­ing the course of our lives is like pre­dict­ing the weather. You might be able to pre­dict your future in the short term, but the longer you look ahead, the less likely you are to be correct.

I don’t think com­plex sit­u­a­tions like [the cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis] can be pre­dicted. There are too many uncon­trol­lable or unmea­sur­able fac­tors. After­wards, of course, it will appear that some peo­ple had got­ten it just right: since there are many peo­ple mak­ing many pre­dic­tions, no doubt some of them will get it right, if only by chance. But that doesn’t mean that, if not for some unfore­seen ran­dom turn, things wouldn’t have gone the other way. […]

In some sense this idea is encap­su­lated in the cliché that “hind­sight is always 20/20,” but peo­ple often behave as if the adage weren’t true. In gov­ern­ment, for exam­ple, a “should-have-known-it” blame game is played after every tragedy.

As some­one who has taken risks in life I find it a com­fort to know that even a coin weighted toward fail­ure will some­times land on suc­cess. Or, as I.B.M. pio­neer Thomas Wat­son said, “If you want to suc­ceed, dou­ble your fail­ure rate.”

I haven’t had a chance to watch it, but in May 2008 Mlodi­now spoke for the Authors@Google series.