Featured Links - May 13, 2026

Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Overlooking the marsh

• When the Emperor Has No Clothes and the Cabinet Has No Conscience. "A President in Decline, and Only Six Days Until Beijing." The scary quote: 'Dr. John Gartner, among the most vocal of the professionals tracking this deterioration, offers a formulation that is worth sitting with. The Donald Trump you see today, he says, is the best you will ever see him. It will only get worse from here."'
• On Superpower Suicide. "And the recovery of justice." The call for a new era: "The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future."
• DNA identifies four more crew members of doomed Franklin expedition. "Three served on the HMS Erebus; the fourth was Petty Officer Harry Peglar of the HMS Terror." Modern science and historical sleuthing working together. 
• e.C-200 Ultrasonic 8" Chef's Knife.  High tech meets kitchen knifes. I want this!
• I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment. "The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words."
• How Jeff “Skunk” Baxter took his session guitar experience and inspired a radical digital guitar. "Skunk was involved in designing Roland and Fender's innovative G-5 – an all-in-one guitar offering a plethora of built-in tones and models." No more lugging 15 guitars around on tour. 
• The 'Quick Settings' overhaul is the most underrated part of Android 16. "The changes may not seem like a big deal at first, but after months of using Android 16 on my Google Pixel 8 Pro, I've realized they make a noticeable difference in everyday use." I have found this myself and it's much easier to use than the Apple iPad OS equivalent. 
• Composite Artemis II Animation Shows Just How Much Stuff Is in Low Earth Orbit. "It's like playing dodgeball! Except the ball is traveling at 17,000 mph!"
  
• Meta’s Embrace of A.I. Is Making Its Employees Miserable (gift link). "As it adapts to the artificial intelligence era, the company is pushing many of its 78,000 workers to use the technology, and preparing to lay some of them off."
• The “big one” might not come alone: Double West Coast earthquake threat. "Two major fault systems along North America's West Coast, the Cascadia subduction zone and the San Andreas fault, may be more closely connected than previously believed. A new study suggests that activity on one fault could trigger earthquakes on the other, raising the possibility of closely timed seismic events."
• Free Universal Construction Kit. "The Free Universal Construction Kit is a 3D-printable set of adapters that allow you to connect 10 popular construction toy systems, including Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K'Nex, Krinkles (AKA Bristle Blocks/Stickle Bricks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob."
• Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts. " Before you can start drawing a revival of a typeface originating from any mechanical system, you need to do the math." A great article for typewriter and typography nerds. I occasionally typed on a Selectric in my first job out of university. It was almost a religious experience. The ladies in the office typing pool could hit more than 100 words per minute. I was lucky to do 30. 

Featured Links - July 22, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Sunset along the 401

• Five days, 65 km, 86,000 steps — and one restless city: I walked all the way across Toronto. This is what I saw (archive link). I am waiting for the Eglinton Crosstown to open and plan to ride it across Toronto, perhaps with stops at some of the stations on the underground part of the line. 
• A Juicy Chronicle of the Fat Decades at Condé Nast (gift link). Empire of the Elite, by Michael M. Grynbaum, is a story of (mostly) insider-outsiders who helmed the glossiest American magazines in their heyday." I miss magazines and browsing the racks in stores like Lichtman's, now sadly defunct. 
• Why Did the Rich Pull Away from the Rest? 'This is Part I of Stone Center Senior Scholar Paul Krugman’s series “Understanding Inequality,” which originally appeared on his Substack newsletter.' This is an important series of articles and worth the time to read.
• Published Via Desktop. 'A list of programs from the all-too-brief golden era of desktop publishing that “didn’t make it.” The GUI’s killer app didn’t slay forever.' Out of the 10 programs listed in the article, I used two: Aldus PageMaker and Venture Publisher. 
• The Peptide Craze. "The Surge in Use of Off-Label and Non-FDA Approved Peptides." TANSTAAFL. 
• Terry Gilliam Reflects On ‘Brazil’ As Film Celebrates 40th Anniversary & The Challenges Of Getting Movies Made Today: “I Really Don’t Want Any More Fights” I really must rewatch Brazil; it's one of my favourite movies. 
• Alberta’s Book Ban Is a Blatant Act of Cultural Vandalism. "The push to sanitize school collections erases what literature is for: knowledge, discovery, the freedom to think." I am sad to see this happening in Canada. 
• The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations. "I would like to address the recent slander circulating on social media, in editorial Slack channels, and in the margins of otherwise decent Substack newsletters. Specifically, the baseless, libelous accusation that my usage is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence."
• Radical New Theory Rewrites the Story of the Earliest Universe. "A new theory promises to simplify our approach to the universe's earliest moments, but some cosmologists say further mathematical scrutiny is warranted." Simplification is good. 

Featured Links - February 24, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Model train layout at Ganaraska Railway Modellers show in Port Hope

Cuts to U.S. weather and climate research could put public safety at risk. "Firings and budget cuts could slow emergency disaster response and weaken resilience efforts." This will also affect weather forecasting and climate modelling in Canada.

In 1177 BCE, Civilizations Fell Apart In A Mysterious Simultaneous Collapse. "What caused the late Bronze Age collapse?"

The Smarter AI Gets, the More It Start Cheating When It's Losing. "A recent study by Palisade Research, a research group studying AI safety and ethics, has revealed an unsettling trend: newer AI models can find and exploit weaknesses in cybersecurity on their own, bypassing safeguards and using shortcuts to complete tasks even when they're not technically allowed to."

The Grateful Dead: What a Long, Lucrative Trip It’s Been. "Now with the publication of The Economic History of the Grateful Dead: A Look Inside the Financial Records of America’s Biggest 20th Century Touring Act, we can see the numbers behind the music, at least of the Grateful Dead, the great American proto-jam band that has engendered a vast, multigenerational, cultlike following." They're hitting the top of the album charts. 

New Coronavirus Discovered in Chinese Bats Sparks Alarm. "A new bat coronavirus that has the capacity to spread to humans, similar to the one that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, has been discovered."

The Nerd Reich. "Science fiction has long been the literature of nerds. The dudes in lab coats, the chess prodigies, the guys tinkering with computers. At a time when socially awkward science-obsessives were scorned by society, science fiction was sometimes a refuge … and became a haven for nerd-empowerment fables."

The hardest working font in Manhattan. "Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only. The font’s name is Gorton." And it has a fascinating and unusual history. 

Featured Links - October 21, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A setting harvest moon

• In an era when the natural world collides with the human, we must get to a truer vision of what life means on this planet (gift link). An opinion piece by Jeff VanderMeer, the Florida-based author of more than a dozen novels, the most recent of which is Absolution.
• Complete Planetary Destruction Is Not as Easy as It Seems. "Humans are very bad at taking care of the planet, but the Earth has survived bigger threats than us..." Earth will abide, but will humans?
• Technical Chernobyl animation shows how an RBMK reactor explodes. "Higgsino physics published a straightforward (if not exactly simple) animation showing what went wrong at Chernobyl. It's like a physics equivalent to those 'every day from your favorite war' animations showing the front lines advance and retreat across continents. Except this war happened in a big metal bucket in Pripyat. Turn on closed captions, but not until you have absorbed the legend at the bottom."
• Respiratory viruses: Wastewater monitoring dashboard. "This dashboard provides data about respiratory virus levels, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), influenza (flu) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in wastewater (sewage) in Canada." 
• Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. "Typst is similar in spirit and aims to LaTeX: it’s a typesetting tool that can be used to write and generate documents, usually PDF files. It intends to be used in academic/scientific environments, much like LaTeX is nowadays."
• Walport ahoy! "White smoke over the Health Canada rooftops. But Dr. Naylor has questions." Per Greg Wilson on my Mastodon feed: "The Walport Report on Canada's (mis)handling of the COVID pandemic has finally been released - on the Friday before Thanksgiving weekend, with no official announcement." 
• World Concert Hall ... Every Online Concert in This World. A site that streams online classical music concerts. 

Rescuing the Doves Type

 A famous typeface that was thought to be lost forever has been resurrected. 

Early in the 20th century, London printer T.J. Cobden-Sanderson dumped the beautiful Doves Type into the river during a business dispute. As the only lead they had, that meant the end of the distinctive old-timey typeface. But they were found and restored in the 21st century, and now enjoy a revival thanks to the work of Robert Green.

Due to the efforts of a determined historian, some of the original type has been recovered from the muck of the Thames river. 

The typeface is quite beautiful and would be ideal for some books. You can now buy a digitally recreated version or download an open source variant.  

Producing a Newspaper in the 1950s

If you ever wondered what it was like working for a newspaper in the 1950s, have a look a the pictures in this Facebook post, showing the premises of the Sault Star in the early 1950s. 

My dad worked in the composing room, using linotype machines to produce lead slugs that were laid into beds of type from which the paper was printed. He's in the second picture below, second from the right. I used to have a lead slug with my name on it that he had made me. By the time he retired, the printing technology had gone went from hot lead type, to photo offset, to fully computerized typesetting. Dad had to take a typing course when he was fifty (Linotype machines didn't have a standard keyboard). 

If you look at the other pictures, you'll see that there is no computerized technology at all. The most advanced office equipment in sight is a dictaphone being sed by a typist. Desks are cluttered by piles of paper. The Star would have had teletype machines but fax machines hadn't been invented at the time these pictures were taken. The accounting office might have had IBM tablulators or their equivalent but not computers. (Alogoma Steel had a mainframe in the late 1960s; the first time I saw a computer was when I toured their offices during a high school visit). 

Thanks to the Sault Ste. Marie Museum for posting these pictures. They bring back some memories.

Working on the Linotype machines

The Sault Star composing room in the 1950s

Featured Links - April 8, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The hydro marsh

• Throngs of Himself. "Paul Linebarger wrote science fiction as Cordwainer Smith. His multiple selves did not stop there." Long and fascinating article about an author who deserves to be better known.
• The Far Right Is Crawling With Eclipse Conspiracy Theories. "Everyone has lost their goddamn minds." I guess this is nothing new and I'm not surprised that Alex Jones and all would have fit perfectly into a Babylonian mindset.
• HarperCollins made a tiny tweak to its book design—and has saved thousands of trees as a result. "The publisher is reducing the number of pages in its books by tweaking their fonts and layout." When I was working as a technical writer, I always tried to reduce the page count in long documents, though my font choices were more limited than those at HarperCollins.
• Breakthrough in prime number theory demonstrates primes can be predicted. In terms of significance, this is the mathematical equivalent of Einstein's theory of relativity, assuming their research is verified. The examples in the paper look convincing, but the formal math is far beyond me. However, I have seen reports that people haven't been able to confirm some of the examples, so this may be one of those too good to be true bits of research. Remember cold fusion?
• A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask. 'As “P4x,” Alejandro Caceres single-handedly disrupted the internet of an entire country. Then he tried to show the US military how it can—and should—adopt his methods.'
• Make Beautiful Things: The Aesthetic Drive Behind Rocket Lab’s Rise in Aerospace. "Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck has some unique approaches to innovation—and they seem to be working." Their next rocket is really interesting. 
• Buried rivers flow under Canadian cities, hidden in a labyrinth of tunnels and sewer pipes. "Will we revive them or let the waterways fade from memory? Jaela Bernstien and Emily Chung uncover hidden rivers across Canada.‍" This is an excellent interactive article. 
• Lawsuit filed against LG over appliance malfunction due to allegedly faulty parts. "It's a tremendous hassle. I think they should make it right." We have one of these fridges; I am keeping my fingers crossed we aren't one of the ones who have a problem.

Some Useful Links for Technical Writers

Here are a few links that should be useful for technical writers, especially those who want to improve their technical skills. The first four are from the excellent freeCodeCamp site. 

• How to Make Your Web Sites Accessible. " Roughly 1 out of every 7 Americans lives with a disability. As developers, we should keep these folks in mind when building our apps. Thankfully, there's a well-established field called Accessibility (sometimes shortened to “a11y” because there are 11 letters in the word that fall between the A and the Y). This nuts-and-bolts freeCodeCamp course will teach you about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, Semantic HTML, and other tools for your toolbox. (2 hour YouTube course)" This should be useful to those writers who are producing web-based help or documentation as well as web sites.
• JavaScript in the Browser – How the Document Object Model (DOM) and Events Work. " The Document Object Model (DOM) is like a big Christmas tree that you hang ornament-like HTML elements on. This front-end development handbook will teach you how the DOM works, and how you can use it to make interactive web pages. You'll learn about DOM Traversal, Class Manipulation, Event Bubbling, and other key concepts. (full-length handbook)." Most high-end writing tools now use JavaScript or something close to it as a macro language (Word excepted, of course).
• Regular Expressions (RegEx) in JavaScript – A Handbook for Beginners. "freeCodeCamp just published another full-length handbook – this time on Regular Expressions. RegEx are one of the most powerful – and most confusing – features of modern programming languages. You can use RegEx to search through data, validate user input, and even find complex patterns within text. This handbook will teach you key concepts like anchors, grouping, metacharacters, and lookahead. And you'll learn a lot of advanced JavaScript RegEx techniques, too. (full-length handbook)" Regular expression syntax can vary depending on the application but the basic concepts are similar. 
• Advanced Prompt Engineering for Content Creators – Full Handbook. "But you don't have to learn a ton of Statistics and Machine Learning to get more out of AI. You can first focus on just getting better at talking to AI. This new Prompt Engineering Handbook will give you practical tips for getting better images, text, and code out of Large Language Models like GPT-4. (full-length handbook)"
• BookMaker Demo for Desktop Publishing. "This video will demonstrate the use of BookMaker, a software developed by Jack Lyon, to create a professional book design using Microsoft Word, starting from your own manuscript. You will be able to create a properly formatted book according to industry standards with a minimum of effort. However, the more you know about proper book formatting, the better you will be able to use this tool." I haven't used this tool, but I have used other tools of Jack Lyon's and he produces high-quality software. 
• Making a LaTeX document appear as though it were typeset in MS Word. Some advice on how to dumb down LaTex. 
• Intel One Mono. "Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, the Intel One Mono typeface was designed for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors." I like it though my personal preference would be for a higher x-height. It is especially good at distinguishing symbols and brackets. 

Featured Links - November 13, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

CJ, who does not like the news this week either.

• Crypto Slang: 25 Crypto Terms and Their Meanings Explained. It seems that crypto has developed its own slang very quickly. What the slang tells us about the world of crypto is more interesting than the words themselves.
• Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, influence and the new American Dream. "The fast-growing platform represents the creator economy at its most bluntly transactional, where sex is just another unit of contento monetize."
• How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco. "When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out."
• The Case for Amplifying Trump's Insanity. "The "Banality of Crazy" has warped American politics, as few voters recognize just how deranged, delusional, and dangerous Donald Trump is...because the press rarely reports on his routine insanity." And if recent public appearances are any indication, he also has dementia.
• The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore. "She loved books. And in a time of spreading book bans in public schools, that’s why this Florida librarian had to quit."
• Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution. "The new House speaker has longstanding ties to the evangelical inspired Convention of States cause." Gilead rising. 
• monaspace. "An innovative superfamily of fonts for code." This is an excellent monospaced font, and I will probably use it in place of Consolas. 
  
  

Featured Links - October 23, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Autumn colours

• Doomscroller vs. Windtunneler. "How to expose the fallacies of "it'll never happen" arguments." Some good advice from science fiction author and futurist, Karl Schroeder.
• Anesthetists discover how NOT to use Excel. "A British medical office has made a right mess of selecting trainee anesthetists by the misuse of Excel. Let’s look at what happened and some ways you can avoid similar mistakes." Data analysis is not for amateurs.
• How can we be alone in the universe? You may be surprised at the answer.
• The gentrification font: how a sleek typeface became a neighborhood omen. "The clean, modern typeface has adorned the New Yorker, Shake Shack and even. HBO’s Girls – now it might bedeck your last home."
• The Dangerous Mystery of Hamas’ Missing ‘Suicide Drones’. "Hamas has long touted its military drones, but little is known about the true scale of the threat. The answer may have consequences for people on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border." impacting our climate, new research suggests."
• Metals from spacecraft reentry in stratospheric aerosol particles. "Measurements show that about 10% of the aerosol particles in the stratosphere contain aluminum and other metals that originated from the “burn-up” of satellites and rocket stages during reentry. Although direct health or environmental impacts at ground level are unlikely, these measurements have broad implications for the stratosphere and higher altitudes. With many more launches planned in the coming decades, metals from spacecraft reentry could induce changes in the stratospheric aerosol layer."
• Elizabeth May: Good Riddance to the Impact Assessment Act. "The Greens co-leader explains why she cheered when the Supreme Court slammed the Liberals’ environmental review law C-69."

Featured Links - October 10, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Harmony Bay

• Microsoft’s font substitution for Aptos really sucks. "Microsoft’s alternatives for the new Aptos fonts range are very poor. In some cases, the substitions make no sense at all.  We’ve looked at what happens if a document with Aptos fonts is opened Office 2016 and earlier versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook."
• The Plain View. "The best virtual reality experience I’ve had this year was not with the $500 Quest 3 or the $3,500 Apple VisionPro, and it didn’t even require a headset. Sure, it cost $2.3 billion. But it came with a live soundtrack from an iconic rock band." Attending a concert at The Sphere is now on my bucket list.
• How to add Markdown support to Google Docs. "You have an alternative to keyboard shortcuts." Markdown continues its inexorable march to world domination. 
• Cats first finagled their way into human hearts and homes thousands of years ago – here’s how. If you are a cat person, you will find this article quite interesting.
• Disney+ censoring classic Disney cartoons to reflect modern sensibilities. This is just wrong.
• Adobe and Microsoft break some old files by removing PostScript font support. "PostScript Type 1 fonts are decades old, but apps supported them until recently." This could be a problem if you have old documents that you are trying to open.
• Terry Bisson’s History of the Future. "For more than two decades, one of pulp sci-fi’s masters has delivered headlines from a time line defined by the absurd." Bisson gets profiled in the New Yorker. See my blog post about his novel, Fire on the Mountain. 

Featured Links - July 17, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Downtown Port Hope

Sorry, Elon: Chinese Company Becomes the World's First to Launch Methane Rocket to Orbit. "The Zhuque-2 rocket beat other methalox-fueled rockets, such as SpaceX's Starship, to orbit."

When Norman Rockwell Got Woke: The Story Behind 'The Problem We All Live With'. "In the 1960s, America's most famous artist defiantly transformed himself from an inadvertent white supremacist into a radical civil rights activist."

‘Heart-stopping’: censored pages of history of Elizabeth I reappear after 400 years. "British Library uses new technique to uncover passages of Camden’s Annals, the first official account of Elizabeth’s reign." 

The Top 14 Android Secret Security Codes You Need to Know. "Looking for the best Android secret codes and hacks? Here are the top USSD codes to sharpen your smartphone's security and privacy." I've had an Android phone for more than a decade, and I didn't know about these codes.

Potential Setback for Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin as Rocket Engine Explodes in Test. "The company's BE-4 engine is meant to power ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket, the inaugural flight of which has already been delayed several times."

Stunning Wet Bulb Temperature Update. "The Danger Zone is Far Lower Than We Thought." This is important to know considering the extreme hot weather that many of us have been experiencing.

Microsoft Announces a New Default Font, Aptos. It's about time; I dislike Calibri.

Some Historic Printing Technology

Glenn Fleishman, a tech journalist who is occasionally on the This Week in Tech podcast, is also an amateur historian of early printing technology. In this blog post, he writes about something called Stanhope moulds and plates. I had never heard of them until seeing his post.

The so-called Stanhope process relied on plaster molds made from forms of type—full pages or smaller laid-out arrangements. A liquid plaster mixture was poured on the form in a special frame, then baked in an oven and removed. Liquid lead alloy could then be poured into the mold in yet another specialized frame, cooling almost instantly. The plaster mold would then be broken off and the remains of the plaster chiseled out. The result solid plate could go directly on press. Any number of molds could be made from the same plate.

This technique was used across the 1800s but still had significant limits—time, cost, and complexity, based on my research. It’s unclear how widely it was employed. The perfection by the early 1860s of a paper-based method, called flong, had a very quick uptake because a flong could be bent into a hemisphere and cast as a curved plate used on a high-speed rotary press.

Featured Links - June 19, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Typefaces based on the London Underground's dot matrix train signs. I'm surprised that TFL hasn't been selling their own version of the typeface. 
• Is Generative AI Bad for the Environment? "A computer scientist explains the carbon footprint of ChatGPT and its cousins."
• The Fires Here Are Unstoppable. "The first foreign firefighters to reach Quebec amid Canada’s worst wildfire season on record said that some of the blazes were 100 times bigger than any they had ever seen." (Gifted article-no paywall)
• The dark side of Amazon returns: Boxes getting sent back has metastasized to an $816 billion yearly problem. 
• Rethinking the Universe: Astronomers Disturbed by the Unexpected Scale of James Webb’s Galaxies. "The first results from the James Webb Space Telescope have hinted at galaxies so early and so massive that they are in tension with our understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. Various explanations have been proposed that may alleviate this tension. But now a new study from the Cosmic Dawn Center suggests an effect that has never before been studied at such early epochs, indicating that the galaxies may be even more massive."
• Study finds that COVID-19 could cause brain cells to fuse, leading to permanent damage. "The real-world implications of this study and many others done on the neurological impacts of COVID-19 are staggering. The damage to brain cells shown in the study is irreversible. Repeated bouts of COVID-19 are likely to compound the effect, leading to progressive neurological decline in individuals who are repeatedly reinfected, not to mention effects on other organ systems."
• Why is the North Atlantic breaking heat records? "Some spots are nearly 4 degrees Celsius above normal for this time of year."
• How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. "Lauren Davila made a stunning discovery as a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an ad for a slave auction larger than any historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction."

Featured Links - March 6, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

McGee relaxing

• Yes, everything in physics is completely made up – that’s the whole point. "A physicist's task is to constantly create equations that keep up with our observations of physical phenomena."
• High-resolution image reconstruction with latent diffusion models from human brain activity. "We demonstrate that our simple framework can reconstruct high-resolution images from brain activity with high semantic fidelity, without the need for training or fine-tuning of complex deep generative models."
• The gray swan: model-based assessment of the risk of sudden failure of hybrid immunity to SARS-CoV-2. "Our findings suggest large jumps in viral evolution may cause failure of population immunity resulting in sudden increases in mortality. As a rise in mortality will only become apparent in the weeks following a wave of disease, reactive public health strategies will not be able to provide meaningful risk mitigation."
• Apparently the AI wants me dead. When science fiction writers are getting scared of AI, it's time to worry.
• We tested 43 old USB-C to USB-A cables. 1 was great. 10 were dangerous. "Here’s why you may want to destroy your entire collection of USB-C to USB-A cables."
• "The narrative had to be baked into the corridors": Marc Laidlaw on writing Half-Life. "Also yeah, he does regret posting that Episode 3 story."
• You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time. They aren't kidding; this is truly strange.
• Recent Submissions to the Oxford English Dictionary. A look about some terms used in printing and typography. My favourite word: "flong".

Font Wars At The State Department

The US State Department is changing the font used for internal documents and it's causing some controversy. The State Department has been using Times New Roman since 2004 but is now switching to Calibri. The change is ostensibly to make it easier for employees using screen readers or who have other perceptual issues that make it hard to read a serif font.

Not everyone is happy. 

The change comes as a means to help employees who are visually impaired and was recommended by the secretary’s office of diversity and inclusion. However, the announcement has received criticism and complaints that the Calibri font is not aesthetically pleasing.

One Foreign Service officer told The Post that a water cooler discussion about the font change “took up, like, half the day,” and ranged on both ends of the approval spectrum, while another said, “I’m anticipating an internal revolt.”

Although the change is facing pushback, this is not the first time the State Department has implemented a font change to internal documents. The font was exchanged for Times New Roman in 2004, but at that time had received criticism because it was changed from the Courier New 12 font, otherwise known as the typewriter font.

If they are really concerned about legibility, they should be looking at Atkinson Hyperledgible, which I'm now using as the default font on my browser and on my Kindle. At least they aren't going back to Courier New.

Featured Links - November 7, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

The last of the fall leaves

• Ancient Egyptian “Lost Golden City” Called Biggest Find Since Tutankhamun's Tomb. "The city was discovered on the west bank of Luxor near the Colossi of Memnon, depicting Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who would have ruled over the city."
• The "Windcatcher": Bigger Than The Eiffel Tower And Can Power 80,000 Homes, Say Developers. One benefit of this design is that it should be more visible to birds.. 
• Font Survey: 42 of the Best Monospaced Programming Fonts. "This article presents commonly used programming fonts with examples of each font in ClearType and non-ClearType." FWIW, Consolas is my preferred monospaced font.
• Which COVID studies pose a biohazard? Lack of clarity hampers research. "Controversy surrounding a study that involved modifying the SARS-CoV-2 virus has prompted researchers to call for better guidance from funders."
• High-Tech Cars Are Killing the Auto Repair Shop. "New vehicles are rigged out with sensors and computer chips—and they're costlier for shop owners to fix. Get ready to wait longer for repairs."
• Doug Mastriano’s Prophets In Pennsylvania. "A shocking weekend with the supporters of the nominee for governor — full of swords, demons, and wild prophecies — shows the theocratic future of the GOP."
• How AI Brought Prime Video’s The Peripheral to Life. "The use of futuristic technology adds flavor to the dual futures of Prime Video sci-fi series The Peripheral."
• Far-Right Hindu Nationalism Is Gaining Ground In The U.S. "Hindutva, an extremist ideology, takes many cues from white nationalism — and it’s endangering millions of Muslims and other religious minorities."

An Ode to Casey's Rubber Stamps

Rubber stamps are one of the oldest printing technologies and yes, they are still around. My first job out of university was working for a company that made them, among other printing gear, so I got quite familiar with how they were made. But nothing that Barnard Matthews made compares with the stamps made by John Casey of Casey's Rubber Stamps in New York City.  

See how stamps are made inside NYC's iconic Casey Rubber Stamps. The shop has been owned by John Casey for nearly 20 years. It's located on East 11th Street in downtown NYC. I loved watching Casey make his stamps in the video. So much care and focus goes into his process. Residents and tourists can make their own rubber stamps in the shop, too. Nothing beats handmade items, so if you're in need of some high quality stamps, you can check out the shop's site here or stop by in person.

 

Researching the Earliest Printed Books

Printing has been with us for more than 600 years but not a lot is known about the earliest printed books. Researchers are using new technology to discover more about how the earliest books were produced.  

The typed word dominates our lives today, but it’s still a relatively fresh invention in the timeline of humanity—and despite how drastically printing altered our societies, there’s still a lot we don’t know about its early history. Recently, a team of scientists put some of the earliest known printed documents through a high-powered X-ray examination at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, to better understand how these texts were produced.

The first printed documents were made in Asia using woodblocks by 600 CE, a process called xylography. Centuries later, Johannes Gutenberg used a retooled wine press and a set of metal pieces to make a couple hundred bibles using movable type, an innovation that drastically sped up the rate at which information could be printed.

Films About Type and Vintage Typesetting Machines

Those of you who have grown up with desktop publishing software and computer printers may have never seen some of the technology showcased on the PrintingFilms.com website. Over 30 films showcase the printing and typesetting technology of the 1950s through 1980s ranging from handset type and Linotype machines through to the first phototype and computerized typesetting systems.  

A few of the films:

• Farewell etaion shrdlu (1978): A film created by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss documenting the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times. This film shows the entire newspaper production process from hot-metal typesetting to creating stereo moulds to high-speed press operation.
• The Eighth Wonder (1961): Made for the 75th anniversary of the Linotype in 1961, this film shows the impact that the invention of the Linotype had on the printing industry and the world. There are excellent sections on typeface design, cutting steel punches, using the Benton engraving machine, and the manufacture of Linotype matrices.
• Graphic Communications We Used to Call it Printing (1969): The film features the printing of The Wall Street Journal in California showing the way that the articles are transferred using phone, microwave, and paper-punch tape. All forms of printing are displayed from small, letterpress jobs to printing on pharmaceutical drugs and packaging for toothpaste.

I have seen the transition from hot metal type to computerized typesetting in my own life. My father worked at the Sault Daily Star and I remember the composing room full of Linotype machines when I was a child. I can remember him showing me the first computer at the newspaper. By the time he retired, it was all completely computerized, and I had a PC and was using Venture Publisher to produce a science fiction fanzine.