This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Down, with texting — Want to guess what might happen if someone walks while texting? If you prefer a formally educated guess to an autodidactic supposition, Paulo Pelicioni and his colleagues at the University of New […]
We bask in the admiration of readers like Jenn, who sent us this butt note. If you have a blog, maybe you receive many notes from readers like Jenn. If you don’t have a blog, maybe you receive many notes from readers like Jenn: Dear Editor, My name is Jenn and I’m an Editor at […]
At last, someone figured out how to make money from the physics crank letters she receives! That someone is Sabine Hossenfelder. She tells about how she does it, in an article in Aeon called “What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists“. BONUS (possibly related): “A Fundamentally Eccentric Premise“, by L.X. Finegold. BONUS […]
If you’re not a professional typographic practitioner, you might fall into the trap of thinking that certain upper-case letters (such as H, I, N and O) will look exactly the same upside down (i.e. when rotated 180 degrees about their z* axis). But subtle complications can, and do arise when there are serifs involved. One […]
We recently had the honor and pleasure of meeting Professor Mel. B Yoken — the very same Mel B. Yoken whose collection of several hundred thousand letters from great personages is housed at Brown University. The Mel. B. Yoken Collection was profiled, some years ago, in The Indy, a Brown student newspaper, by Ellora Vilkin. The full article […]
The Canadian academic institution known as UOIT is somewhat secretive about what those letters — U O I T — stand for. Visitors to the institution’s web site http://www.uoit.ca/ can spend a happy quarter of an hour or more exploring the site hardly ever (except by extraordinary luck!) running across a page that spells out […]