Monday, April 27, 2020

Heraclitean River: The Chicago Manual of Style and a single space after periods

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Back in 2015, I blogged about the history of sentence spacing, citing a 2011 article as my source.

More recently, this subject arose on another forum in response to news that Microsoft Word will start treating two spaces after a period as an error and will flag text as such.

As a part of participating in this discussion, I cited that article. I also started looking over other articles on the archived Heraclitean River site and I ran across a followup article that I hadn't noticed back in 2015. This article responds directly to many of the modern-day justifications for single-space sentence separation pointing out that they are either logically incorrect or are inconclusive.

The Chicago Manual of Style and a single space after periods

In a previous post, I explored the history of spacing after sentences, where we saw that the common practice for centuries was to include a much wider space after a period (or other mark that ended a sentence).  Since a double space nowadays imitates that practice—which comes from the era where the forms of many of our modern fonts were created—a double space should at least be considered an acceptable choice when typing or typesetting text.  Others will prefer the single space, but it is merely a preference.  I submit that there is room for both, and there is actually room for better typography in general, which could return to a more detailed distinction between different types of spaces with different widths.

I also summarized the history of the Chicago Manual of Style, which demonstrates the shift in preferences and values from 1900–1950, leading up to their current judgmental position where they only include information on sentence spacing to condemn anyone who would try to make such a distinction.  In a Q&A post, one editor explains this position and offers a number of rationales in favor of it:

Friday, April 24, 2020

ARS Technica: How Homeworld Almost Got Lost in 3D Space

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How Homeworld Almost Got Lost in 3D Space

On this episode of War Stories, Ars Technica sits down with Rob Cunningham to revisit the groundbreaking 1999 3D real-time strategy game, Homeworld. When Rob and a group of friends founded Relic Entertainment, they set out to marry the gameplay of Command & Conquer with the feel of Battlestar Galactica - all in a full 3D environment. On top of the everpresent memory limitations of the day, the team needed to get creative in figuring out how to orient players when, in space, no direction is up.

Back when it was a new game, I loved Homeworld, although like most such games it was too difficult for me to have ever completed even once.

And after having watched this video, I want to play it again. I wonder if there's a way I can play my old disc. Unfortunately, it's PowerPC Mac software and my modern Intel Mac doesn't have an emulator. But maybe there's a way. If you know of a solution, please let me know.

Friday, April 17, 2020

Why a 5G phone is not important (at least not today)

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On the MacInTouch community forums, I recently wrote an article about why I don't think Apple's lack of a 5G iPhone matters to most people. For your benefit, I'm sharing the content (edited slightly) here as well.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

FiveThirtyEight: A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling

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A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling
By Zach Weinersmith, Maggie Koerth, Laura Bronner and Jasmine Mithani. Published Apr. 13, 2020

Here we are... In the middle of a pandemic... Staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The questions on everybody's minds: "How bad will this really get?". "How long am I going to have to live cooped up like this?"

We all want answers. And given the volume of research and data being collected about the novel coronavirus, it seems like answers ought to exist. And numbers are certainly out there. Trouble is, they're kind of all over the place.

A great comic-narrative explaining why we have no straight answers and are not likely to get any for quite some time. It's nobody's fault, but the result of lots of people trying to draw meaningful conclusions based on data that is inconsistent and highly uncertain.

h/t Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Wednesday, April 01, 2020

Daily Caller: World Health Organization Spends Twice As Much On Travel As On Medical Supplies

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World Health Organization Spends Twice As Much On Travel As On Medical Supplies
Peter Hasson, Editor. March 31, 2020, 7:36 PM ET

The World Health Organization (WHO) spends twice as much on travel as it does on medical supplies, according to its most recent financial report.

Eight percent of the WHO’s budget in 2018 went to travel expenses, while just 4% went to medical supplies and materials, the report shows.

“Of total travel expenditure, only 45% was for staff travel, the rest was incurred for non-staff travel, mainly for meeting participants nominated by Member States,” the report states.

I've never been a big fan of anything the UN does, but good Lord, do they do anything other than flush money down the toilet? Any private charity that acted this way would be called a scam.