Why do designers spend thousands on typefaces?

I don't understand the justification of spending $1,000 on a font like Helvetica Neue. Is this something your business purchases for you and even then, why is it better than the myriad of free fonts you can find?

It mostly comes down to two things: attention to detail, and scale.

For example, a good, professional quality font that is designed for screen use will contain “hinting” information so that it fits well to the pixel grid at smaller sizes, including at typical body text sizes for on-screen reading. If you drew your perfect font in a vector format but then just scaled it directly without regard to the limited number of pixels available, you’d see all sorts of ugly artifacts.

A good font designed for printing, on the other hand, will probably be full of small adjustments like ink traps where lines cross and having curves actually go slightly outside the design rectangle for a particular glyph, because these minor distortions make the font appear cleaner and more consistent in design to the human eye, even though under a magnifying glass you’d see that the opposite is actually the case.

If you asked a lot of designers for an acid test, they’d probably tell you to look at the kerning, i.e., the spacing between glyph pairs. In a good, professional grade font, the spacing will be even, and so will the colour of a text block set in that font. Awkward spacing is the hallmark of amateur work, and is unfortunately so common that serious DTP software like Adobe’s InDesign now includes an “optical” kerning option that overrides the settings built into the font and makes its own guess at how to even things up based on the shape of the glyphs.

As far as scale goes, consider that a typical free font contains enough glyphs to support a few Western languages: the Roman alphabet, digits 0–9, common punctuation, and perhaps a few accented characters. A professional font designed for international use might offer 1,000+ glyphs, covering a much wider range of alphabets, ligatures, specialised punctuation marks, different kinds of digits (believe it or not, there are at least eight common variations of the digits 0–9), multiple variations of the same letter or digit, and if you start getting into the wizardry of modern OpenType fonts in styles like calligraphic scripts, the sky is the limit.

As a final example, again a matter of scale, a typical amateur font family might include regular, bold, italic and perhaps bold italic fonts. A professional font family probably offers a wider range of weights, sometimes as many as nine or ten. You’ll usually get a true-drawn italic if there is an italic at all, where amateur fonts often just slant the regular version, particularly for sans serif designs. You’ll probably also get true-drawn small capitals if you’re talking about a font intended for setting body text. You might even get a whole set of subtly different designs, sometimes called optical variations, intended for use at different sizes. As with many of the other details, the idea is to exaggerate or tone down certain aspects of the design so that for example a caption version doesn’t look too fussy, while a large version to set a book title doesn’t seem too clunky.

Ultimately, this kind of scope and level of detail takes a huge amount of time to get right, not to mention having the skill and good judgement to do it at all. Since there’s a relatively limited market for really good work in typography — plenty of people will settle for “good enough” — those who offer it charge accordingly.

And so, to my answer to the original question. If I had to pick five “go to” fonts today, and assuming we are really talking about font families here, these would be the ones for me:

1. Arno Pro Opticals: my favourite serif design at the moment
2. Myriad Pro: a flexible, general purpose humanist sans
3. Avenir Next: a reliable geometric sans, clean but somehow not as chunky as say Futura
4. Verdana: tried and tested screen-optimised font for web sites, which is installed and renders well on just about anything (except the occasional mobile device, but they all have good alternatives you can fall back on)
5. Consolas: anyone in software needs a good monospace font, and this one works well both on screen and, if you need it to, in print

Not coincidentally, my first three choices there all come with a comprehensive range of weights and styles, including gorgeous italics and swash variations for the serif, and condensed variations for both Myriad and Avenir. It’s a shame that Adobe seem to have an aversion to designing useful small caps (Arno’s are really petite caps, and Myriad doesn’t have any at all) but apart from that there’s very little missing for typesetting non-specialist jobs anywhere in the Western world.

by Chris_Newton

Why you shouldn't be afraid of MSG

MSG is not bad for you at all.

MSG- Mono Sodium Glutamate. Glutamate being Glutamic Acid, a non-essential amino acid. Non-essential meaning your body produces it naturally. That's right, glutamates are in your body right now! Mono-sodium meaning it is bound to sodium rather than protein or say potassium.

Glutamic Acid is a neurotransmitter. You need it for your brain to work. Without it, you'll die.

Now being non-essential, it is true you do not need to consume it, like you would say tryptophan. However, being an amino acid, which are the building blocks of protein, glutamic acid must exist in a lot of food right? Well yes it does, and plenty of it! Tomatoes, Cheese, Meats, Fish, Algae, Soy, all of those contain good old glutamic acid, aka MSG. You are consuming MSG whenever you eat any of the these foods!

To make MSG, you basically just must isolate glutamic acid, then add sodium. This was originally done in the late 1900's by the Japanese from seaweed in order to purify the "umami" flavor. They would dehydrate seaweed and being high in glutamic acid and sodium, MSG would form crystals on the top. Today, we use more modern and efficient means through bacterial fermentation.

Now that whole "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome"(CRS) thing. First things first, it doesn't exist. In 1968 Robert Ho Man Kwok reported feelings of "numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations." This occurred after he ate a Chinese-american meal and blamed the culprit MSG. Thus CRS was born.

Ever since then, CRS has scared millions of Americans though the medias portrayal of MSG and CRS. Now you will see almost every single Asian restaurant with a "no MSG" sign on their establishment or Menu.

The fact of the matter is, and regardless of what you have heard, there is no proof(read: none, zip, zilch) that MSG causes CRS or any other symptom. An exception would be if you consume ridiculous quantities, i.e. several ounces(which would taste unpalatable!). In fact it is far less toxic than salt(5 times less!, 15-18g/kg vs 3g/kg), its cousin in seasoning. Again, there has been several double blind studies proving that not only did CRS not exist, but so called "MSG sensitivity/allergy(Fun fact: If someone ever says they have an allergy to MSG, you're talking to a ghost because they are died)" didn't exist.

Conclusion/TL;DR: MSG is not even remotely dangerous to humans.

by unseenpuppet

Why is Nazism illegal - doesn't this violate freedom of speech?

Since that point sometimes seems to bring up confusion across the Atlantic, as someone from a concerned country, I will try to explain. There are historical reasons why Nazism became a crime in some European countries, and there are reasons why it still remains one.

After WWII, Germany had a bit of a problem. Admittedly, it had more than one problem. But among short food supplies, and an infrastructure that consisted mainly of rubble and craters loomed the question: What do we do with all the leftover Nazis?

The leading brass, the war criminals and mass murderers, went to Nürnberg. They were not a problem. But they were only the tip of a big Nazi iceberg. You had several levels of administration in all fields that had been part of the regime, been associated with the Nazi party, and had been functioning as well oiled cogs in the Reich.

And beyond that, in the totalitarian state that was Nazi Germany, nearly everyone had collaborated with the regime in some way, often more out of fear, necessity, or for career advancement, than because of a belief in Nazi ideals. Imprison every collaborator, and you would have had to imprison everyone.

Who was how much of a Nazi was a pretty hard question to answer. This was complicated further; as my grandmother put it: "When the Allies came, there had never been any Nazis, only resistance fighters who cleverly had pretended to be Nazis"

Long story short: Instead of cleaning up the Nazi mess, purging, imprisoning, and investigating, Nazism was made illegal from now on. With that the problem was considered solved. Nazis remained in high positions everywhere in Germany and Austria, they just couldn't make their views public. Since nobody wanted to talk about the war, remember the war, or stir up any trouble, that was seen as a good solution (until the late 60s).

That's how the criminalization of Nazism came to be. So why is it still there?

Because currently there are few good arguments for abolishing it. The only good reason is referring to the basic principle "freedom of speech": "Everyone simply should be allowed to express his opinion"

But Nazism has left its mark in some European legal systems (and European thought) here. Many people here don't subscribe to freedom of speech the same way Americans do. A more (central) European definition of freedom of speech would be: "Everyone should be allowed to express his opinion, unless he does it in a way that disturbs public peace, by degradation or defamation of a group"

Many people here agree that freedom of speech should end when you become literally Hitler. "We don't want it. We don't need it. It doesn't contribute anything useful. It can be damned dangerous. Let's keep it illegal."

There is also a political dimension: The people who want to abolish those laws, are almost exclusively on the far right. Usually they don't particularly care about freedom of speech, unless in this special case where they are hindered in what they want to say.

And those who do care about freedom of speech, and are subsequently not on the far right, generally don't dare to touch those laws, since they might be labelled as Nazi sympathizers...

tl;dr: First some states thought it was a good idea to forbid Nazism. They haven't yet found good reasons to abolish those laws.

by Wollff

Why doesn't fencing seem realistic?

That's actually a more complicated question that you think.

Western sword dueling (vs battling with a sword against an opposing army, or eastern martial arts), has a lot of caveats to it. You're not just trying to kill the other guy. Depending on the duel, you might be fencing to first blood. You might not be allowed to do certain things. You might be fencing until submission. You might be prize fighting.

It was a very rare case indeed where two people would fight with swords, with the sole intention of killing the other guy anyway they could, or escaping unharmed.

As such, it's hard to say what techniques are "realistic". There aren't a lot of duels on film, but there are some. Here's an interesting comparison:

This is an early 1900s epee duel to first blood. Honour is at stake, and each fencer is trying to wound the arm, but probably not kill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rElNQuBvFeQ&feature=relmfu

Normally the epees are disinfected (you don't often disinfect something if you plan to kill the other person), and the action is halted to inspect and treat wounds.

By contrast, in chilean prisons apparently they like to make swords. I can't even begin to imagine what social structure rules come into play here (maybe if you back down, you won't get stabbed, but will have to suck the guys dick - your choice I guess)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ8MK6JWIFA

It's pretty clear that these guys want to cause serious damage, and are incredibly aggressive, where as the 1900s duel, they are much more reserved. In the chilean prison fights, no one seems to stop the action if you get touched (see :50), so maybe there is good incentive to be the guy doing the attacking in a fight like that.

Modern fencing is about making touches, not about wounding or not being wounded, so it has different goals than these duels. Epee is different to sabre, is different to foil - but it's interesting how even though all these things are basically sword fighting (i.e. trying to hit and not get hit), just a slight change in the context can drastically change the style at which people approach it.

by venuswasaflytrap

Is a musical conductor just human metronome?

Believe me, MANY people don't understand it, even if they've been in a musical ensemble. At the level of the New York Phil, you're exactly right. They just need someone to say "go." Every conductor, however, has their own interpretation of the music. One may want more cello here, less woodwind choir there, a faster tempo in movement 3, a more edgy sound from the trombones here, etc. That said, a good conductor can influence the music of even the most mature players. They can provide energy, which the ensemble returns, and then it becomes an endless circle. It's all about helping the ensemble create energy in the sound. Also, in more complex works, conductors act as time keepers when the meter changes often or there is a marked accelerando or ritardando.

The conductor really makes the performance better if they're good. One group that is notorious for having poor conductors are the military bands. I saw the traveling Marine band play an exciting transcription of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite and nearly fell asleep. They can play the shit out of it with their stunning technique, but it was musically boring.

With marching band the DMs are there for keeping the group together. As you know, sound is lights retarded cousin...it takes him a little longer to figure it out. When a band is spread out over the field, it becomes more important for them to play with what they see from the drum major than with what they hear. If someone on the back sideline waits to play with what they hear, they will sound behind to the audience. They must actually play a bit ahead of what they see to make sure their sound reaches the audience at the same time as the rest of the ensemble. They're more important than many people realize.

by kasmith2020

How does NASA deal with packet loss when it comes to transmissions to/from Mars?

They use error control codes, which add redundant information to the transmitted data. The receiver uses this redundant data to detect and correct up to a certain fraction of erroneous bytes.

Reed-Solomon codes are a widely used error control code and one of the backbones of deep-space communications. They're handy because they can naturally operate on blocks of 8-bit bytes. An example Reed-Solomon code will take 223 input bytes and append 32 redundant bytes to transmit a total of 255 bytes. The receiver can correct up to 16 errors in the received block.

A Reed-Solomon code is described by (n, k), where n is the block length and k the number of data symbols. Only certain combinations of n and k work out mathematically. The above example is (255, 223). A Reed-Solomon code will correct (n-k)/2 erroneous symbols. Encoding is fast and easy—simple matrix multiplication. Decoding is not something you'd want to try by hand. The code can also detect up to (n-k) errors with 100% confidence. This is useful if you want to request retransmission, but that's not usually an option when the sender is a couple of light minutes or hours away!

Deep space missions usually couple a Reed-Solomon code with a convolutional code. Convolutional codes operate on streams of bits instead of blocks like the Reed-Solomon code. The convolutional encoder takes in one data stream and outputs two or more. So for every input bit, you might get two or three output bits. During encoding, you first pass the data through Reed-Solomon encoder, then run it through the convolutional encoder before it's sent out over the air.

Convolutional decoders tend to produce bursts of errors when overloaded, and block codes are very good at fixing such bursts. On the receive side, the convolutional decoder will fix most of the errors. Any that get through are (hopefully) fixed by the Reed-Solomon code. This is the technology that got us the pictures from Voyager. Picking the codes is a combination of art and science (mostly science).

Every CD player includes a Reed-Solomon decoder to correct read errors. The decoding algorithms were pushing the limits of purpose-built semiconductors around 1980 but are no big deal today.

These approaches are getting phased out for more powerful but far more computationally difficult to decode Turbo Codes. Turbo Codes are like convolutional codes, but with a very clever decoding algorithm that wrings out some extra performance.

Did my Ph.D. on error control coding back in the day…

Edit (history lesson): Block codes like the Reed-Solomon code mentioned above draw from abstract algebra and field arithmetic. It's an example of where a mathematical curiosity from the 1800s suddenly became an integral part of everyday life with the advent of digital communications and storage. Évariste Galois gets of the credit for discovering the math. He has quite an interesting and tragic life story.

A fun thing about Reed-Solomon codes is that the original paper showed that these codes had terrific error control properties, but the decoder presented by the authors was little better than an exhaustive search and completely intractable in practice. The race was then on to design a practical encoder. This ended up being the Berlekamp-Massey Algorithm (BMA), which students of error control call the Black Magic Algorithm. It effectively reverse engineers a linear-feedback shift register. And that's the simple explanation ;-)

The math behind convolutional codes is a bit more varied. Designing the encoder comes from abstract algebra, but the Viterbi decoder used since the '60s came from pure brilliance and maximizing expected values (that goes back to Gauss & least squares). Andrew Viterbi, who developed the namesake algorithm, went on to found a company that you might have heard of: Qualcomm. The algorithm is used wherever you need to find the maximum-likelihood path through a Markov chain, which occurs in speech and character recognition.

I didn't do much with Turbo codes and can't say too much about them. The idea behind the decoder is that two decoding units work on the problem separately and periodically share their best guess and confidence regarding the transmitted sequence. It would be like you and a friend working on two copies of the same crossword puzzle and periodically comparing notes about your guesses and how confident you feel about them.

by Stubb

How different would the movie Jurassic Park be with today's information?

Paleontologist here.

The appearance and behavior of dinosaurs is largely a factor of speculation. There are a few things that would be updated. The Velociraptors would have some sort of feathery integument, as would the baby T. rex. Maybe some of the animals would show more color than gray, brown or moss-green. But that doesn't take much thinking, and the science of paleontology hasn't been able to ascertain much about dinosaur color, unless preserved feathers are found (they have been and colors include black, white, and sort of an umbery, rusty color- I believe someone else mentions this in a post.)

Jurassic Park is now 20 years out of date. If you're looking to update the science and still retain a compelling story, you're going to end up with something like this:

The crucial part of Crichton's idea was that the amber which preserved the mosquito served as a preservative barrier- a seal which locked away the precious dinosaur blood from contaminants and harm- a simple idea which ultimately proved very compelling for a story.

Now there are definitely issues with this. You're not going to set up a lab and get extinct animal blood from a dead bug anytime soon. Plus, after sitting in a chunk of resin for millions of years there is certainly going to be some mingling between the mosquito DNA and the DNA of whatever it fed on and anything else trapped in the sap. Wouldn't it be nice to see THAT come out of an egg? Yeesh! I degress.

The one thing that people have heard about Jurassic Park if they've heard anything in the last 20 years, is that "you cannot clone dinosaurs from blood in mosquitoes trapped in amber." So how do we move away from that, bsoftut still make dinosaurs? Because no one is going to be amazed by the trapped mosquito/dino DNA idea anymore. They know it. It's part of popular culture, like "don't cross the streams" or "He's been dead the whole movie!" How do we make the core part of Jurassic Park new?

Easy.

One of the biggest developments in paleontological research in the last few decades has been the discovery of soft tissues preserved in fossil bone interiors. These bones come from the badlands, like any other dinosaur fossil, but they are excavated using sterile field techniques and without polymer consolidants (glues) to keep contaminants from entering the bone' interiors (I know this because I have done it). The fossils are then taken back to a sterile lab where the mineral components are dissolved in baths. If the dinosaur bones were truly permineralized (eg- all 'rock') then the entire fossil would basically dissolve in solution. BUT! That didn't happen when the first lab tests of this kind were conducted back in the early 2000's. There was stuff left over after the mineral components had dissolved away. Spongy, squishy, stretchy, soft stuff. Paleontologists have documented what appear to be bits of collagen (connective tissues), and remnants of blood and bone cells from those samples. There are also bits of proteins that may be preserved. This was absolutely unheard of when Crichton wrote Jurassic Park 30 years ago. Now, in the real world accessing DNA hundred million year old soft tissue is not yet viable, but in 1990, neither was sucking out a fossilized mosquito's guts. But it was brilliant science fiction. And while no one has ever actually pulled blood from a fossilized mosquito...

I'm sorry but take a moment and get ready for this realization:

WE HAVE ACTUAL HONEST-TO-GOODNESS DINOSAUR TISSUE AND CELLS. HOLY SHIT!!

What does this mean? It means that there's no more need for the old amber-bug-blood plot line! Now, instead of mining for amber in the jungle playing roulette with mosquitoes (there's no way of knowing what kind of animal a mosquito had bitten just by looking at the thing--Hammond would have had to sort through thousands of mosquitoes before finding one that had actually bitten a dinosaur), you can go to the badlands and look for soft tissue from ANY DINOSAUR YOU WANT. How's THAT for an overhaul? It completely updates the heart of Jurassic Park's story and allows it to remain a sort of beacon for trendy Sci Fi (yes, and you can have your cloning morality play too). It also removes a lot of inconsistencies, like "How did they clone extinct plants? Mosquitoes don't drink plant blood" and for scientists, it seems more plausible because if you want a park with, say, a Triceratops in it, all you have to do is go to Montana, South Dakota or Wyoming, poke around until you find some Triceratops bones poking out from a nice, thick sandstone unit, and BAM- pretty damned good chance you could get some soft tissues out of there.

The second big change for Jurassic Park would have to be the DNA gap-filling. No more amphibian DNA. Birds. They would need to use a more ancient bird, like an Emu, Cassowary, Rhea or Ostrich. These large, flightless birds (collectively known as Ratites) are some of the most primitive-looking birds living. There has been a lot of genetic work done on chickens lately, and chicken DNA might work as well because we know so much about it. In a Sci Fi story it would not be much of a stretch to say that we have control over the chicken genome, and thus could reduce it back to a sort of "stem" state, where the genetic instructions basically say to build a archosaur-like animal, and the combination of the Dinosaur DNA with the trimmed chicken genome causes the dinosaur DNA to take over and build a dinosaur.

If I had my way and could write a Jurassic Park sequel, it would go like this:

Soft tissue in fossil bones has changed paleontology. Alan Grant and co. are leaders in this area of research do to their years of field experience.

Lewis Dodson is the bad guy who never got his chance. He was instrumental in the first two books, but gets 3 minutes of screen time in the first movie. He's sinister, greedy, selfish, and cares only for profit. He has no moral scruples, other than his desire to make a profit for himself. Use him as the antagonist for the 4th movie. He's never gotten over his loss at Nedry's Hands. He never really gave up cloning dinosaurs. He sees money in them. His company has been sequencing genomes, and he has focused on birds- domestic fowl, endangered species, you name it. He spends a long time waiting. Then he hears about soft tissue preservation in fossil bones- blood cells, proteins...could there be DNA? Perhaps he is tempted to sneak out some of Grant's specimens without permission...

Point is- not only could you clone dinosaurs with the soft tissue story line, but marine reptiles, too. Giant ichthyosaurs, mososaurs, plesiosaurs...there's a lot of scary stuff in the ancient sea! For the purpose of Sci Fi, anything that's fossilized could be fair game! There's a lot of cool, extinct animals out there, people. Big, scary extinct animals...

by paleeoguy4