The Finch and Pea

The social dimension of type

From Edwards Mendelson in the NYRB, a great piece on an obscure topic that affects us every day – “The Human Face of Type:”

In 1928 the German designer Jan Tschichold championed sans-serif faces in his influential modernist manifesto, Die neue Typographie. The modern man’s vision of the world, he wrote, “is collective-total, no longer individual-specialist.” We need a “typeface expressive of our own age,” and that typeface “must be free from all personal characteristics; it will be the work of a group.” Of all the available typefaces, sans-serif, he wrote, “is the only one in spiritual accordance with our time.” In 1933 the Nazis arrested Tschichold for Communist sympathies, but he escaped and over the next few years renounced his modernist ideas: “To my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism.”

Uh, wow. I didn’t know that the type you use says so much about you. So what does that abominable MS Word default type Cambria say about Microsoft?

Vote for sci-fi favorites at NPR

NPR has a nice list of 100 great sci-fi novels, and they’re trying to narrow it down to the 10 best. Head on over there and vote, or at least scan the list and see how many you’ve read.

A dry eyed goodbye to the Space Shuttle

Point the first: I think NASA should have more funding; but, like everyone else, I’m not going to bother saying what programs I’m going to raid to fund my pet programs.

Point the second: I kind of wish we’d been spending all that money we spent putting people into space on the unmanned, scientific instruments that have actually been illuminating our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe. That is not to say that I really regret the manned space flight program, as I’m not sure all those unmanned scientific instruments would have been built without the big goals associated with manned space flight (e.g., walking on the Moon). I’m just not particularly sad that the shuttle is being retired, nor I am particularly upset that there is no replacement ready to go. Continue reading “A dry eyed goodbye to the Space Shuttle”

Walking in the moonlight. . .with lions

A new paper in PLoS One suggests that we humans may be afraid of the dark and associate evil goings on with the full moon because that is when lions try to eat us. Continue reading “Walking in the moonlight. . .with lions”