With apologies for the quality (and now I know not to take videos in portrait…):¹ a ridiculously simple man falling down a ladder:

And a slightly more complicated, but correspondingly much cuter, elephant:

The elephant has only one moving part (the back leg), and as far as I can see that’s just a simple joint. (Presumably there’s some subtlety to the balance and the curve of the feet.)

The falling man is even simpler, as you see in this photo:

So who has some woodworking tools and wants to try making some of these?

Notes:

1. Yes, the videos and photo are from my fancy-schmancy new phone. I tried to upload this post from it too, but ran into difficulties with the video uploads.

[I]t is to little purpose, that an engine amuses the philosopher by the subtilty of its mechanism, if it requires so much knowledge in its application, as to be of no advantage to the common workman. —Samuel Johnson

Johnson was talking about dictionaries, but the same principle goes for a lot of design work — computer user interfaces perhaps in particular.

Might it have something to do with this?

Here’s the other end of the spectrum. (I tried to do this recently with books: pages-per-day estimated from page counts and start/finish reading dates. Scrapped the project for a number of reasons: (a) I had to fill in pagecount manually, (b) my reading records were patchy and have since gotten even patchier, (c) given a small data set and not much continuity (tendency to finish one book before starting the next) the colours are not as informative and interesting, and (d) my attempt at making graphed area precisely informative turned out more confusing than I expected.)

So you might expect that I might know some other typography geeks. And in fact I do: two folk who actually make fonts, as part of their professional activities.

The funny thing is, typography has nothing to do with how I know these guys. George Triantafyllakos is an old friend of Olga’s, we hang out and discuss comics when we’re in Thessaloniki. And Donald Roos has joined forces with some Amsterdam friends of mine for a cookery club — yours truly has volunteered for the demanding task of “Quality Evaluation”, a.k.a. “the eating bit”.

If you read Dutch, check out the Koninklijke Nederlandse Bitter Bal Bond (“Bij het officiele bitterbalwerpen dienen de volgende regels in acht te worden genomen:”…). My favourite piece of George’s work doesn’t have a link, but on his design page open the “Selected posters” tab and click the head wearing sunglasses against a yellow background. Powerful.

The awesome design is by Hanna de Vries, from an idea of mine (actually I misread “hardcore” on someone’s hoody…). Now I’m going to try to put it on a t-shirt — if anyone local has experience or tips I’d love to hear ‘em.

If you do know, then be reassured: the photograph after the fold is only revolting by association. It’s an advertisement for the “Over het IJ festival”, which just happens to put some abstract design elements in a familiar configuration.

It’s tempting to see this as a deliberate in-joke by some designer. I mean, otherwise, what are those hands doing?

(Snapped in Amsterdam Noord, just beside the Buiksloterweg ferry wharf.)

That’s the genius of Dutch design on display, that is. Just try spelling your name on that, let alone a seven-letter random code! And what is that arrow doing? My suspicion is that they added it after focus-testing showed that people had difficulty understanding the system: “Perhaps it will help if we show them where the alphabet starts?”

Why not?

The spacing is wrong. It’s usually only slightly, subtly wrong. But around an ‘f’, it’s grotesque. The reason is that in math mode TeX assumes individual letters represent individual variables, so it doesn’t use the kerning information that would otherwise tell it to close up the spacing around the ‘f’, since its ascender and descender stick out sideways. This behaviour is fine if the ‘f’ is a function variable, but it doesn’t work in ‘infold’, for instance.

Aren’t you being a bit picky?

Nope. I have in front of me page 307 of Type Theory & Functional Programming, which contains a function definition beginning in f old f st… or possible inf old f st, or (as in fact intended) infold f st, where infold is the function name, f is a function argument, and st is a state argument. The link takes you to an online PDF copy, go check it out. I’ll wait.

See it? If you look closely you might notice some weird spacing on the right-hand-side also — it would be truly picky to call that out, but the oddity on the left really interferes with the interpretation. (Why that page? It happened to come out on top of a signature as I was folding the book up for binding. And 307 is a nice number, don’t you think?)

What should it look like then?

Simple answer: use \mathit{} and \mathrm{} to get properly spaced words, italicised or roman, in math mode. (Thanks Tom for the reminder.)

Slightly more complicated and pedantic answer: it’s worth carefully considering whether you need italics at all. Traditionally these are used for variable quantities or entities; a function variable f which can take many values, a state variable st likewise (although I’d prefer s), and so on. It’s flatout wrong to use italics for well-known functions like sine and cosine, which is why LaTeX provides primitives \sin and \cos which typeset these in upright roman. So if you’re defining a function “infold”, which will always have the same definition, it might make sense to put that in roman too. Another case which crops up often (in the same line of TT&FP, for instance) is an equality symbol subscripted with ‘df’ or ‘def’ or similar, for “definitional”. Here there’s really no reason to use italics at all, and of course the spacing is again messed up by the ‘f’.

All right, now I am being picky.

Can I go now?

Yes yes, run along.

Oh, one more thing. I don’t mean to pick on Simon Thompson, who after all has written a textbook that I just downloaded and printed and expect to learn quite a lot from. I use that example because it shows that it’s not just students writing term papers who do this stuff, it crops up also in books with editors, that get published and that people pay money for. And it’s so easy to avoid, once you know there’s a problem. So do try, please? You’ll do wonders for my blood pressure.

• Design: flowerlike lightbulb unfurls as it warms up. [via sensory impact]
• Craziness: every year two Greek monasteries bombard each other with fireworks. [via Nemo Ramjet]
• Life/art mutual imitation: A British explorer disappears in the Amazon jungle, while looking for a lost city. Attempts to find his remains, and the city he searched for, are complicated by the fact that he kept his travel plans a secret — even to the point of releasing false coordinates. And this around the time that everyone was reading H. Rider Haggard. Just who was fooling who, here? BLDGBLOG has the story.
• Gadget-lust: a comfy chair mounted on tank treads. For the long trek to the coffee machine, naturally. [via fosfor gadgets]
• Gadget-lust redux: the coffee machine. Includes the important observation that the coffee apparatus has to be simple enough to be operated by a person who hasn’t had any coffee yet.
• Bird-brained: I won’t comment without reading the paper, but the blogosphere is aflame about the abilities of starlings to learn non-regular grammars, and the inabilities of the popular press to report this stuff competently. (Exhibits A, B, C.) It’s interesting research, that unfortunately everyone seems to misinterpret (including the Science reviewers of the 2004 paper in which Fitch & Hauser reported related results for tamarin monkeys, who —this is just unattributed gossip, mind you— apparently made them cut descriptions of various control conditions which are essential for ruling out some trivial objections). I sense a post coming on…
• More bird-brained antics: Language Log has been infected with bird (syntax) flu. (Warning: Psychologists the condition linguists doctors examined suffered first described agree: it’s highly contagious, and the symptoms are bloody awful.)
• Great potential: a plagiarism contest (phrases or larger, no single-word citations). [via Maud Newton]

Mobile phones are great technology. Text messaging is great technology. Text messaging on a mobile phone is terrible technology. I could rant for pages about how bad mobile phones are for basically everything except making phone-calls; email, cameraphones, WAP, and so on. But all of these are overshadowed by the toilets on the platform at Amersfoort Station.

Dutch public toilets usually cost something in the vicinity of 50 euro cents to use. Sometimes there is a WC attendant with a little collection tray, sometimes the process is automated with a coin-operated turnstile. (In Amsterdam Centraal, they have a turnstile and an attendant who will give you correct change if you need it.) Moving as we are towards a cashless society, the Dutch also have a variant of the PIN-operated card –EFT-POS for Kiwis– called ChipKnip, designed expressly for small transactions. You load money onto the card itself, rather than accessing your bank account for each transaction, and it doesn’t require a PIN entry to pay by Chipper. On the well-known principle that “Anyone can invent a better wheel,” the designer of the Amersfoort Station WC bypassed all these obvious options.

Instead, there’s a sign beside the door showing an 0900 number, and a series of instructions. You call this number, then enter a code identifying this particular WC. You pay 50 cents plus the cost of the call, and when you’ve entered the code the door opens. You’re warned that a sanitation cycle will begin 15 minutes later.

It terrifies me that this design actually got implemented. On one level, it’s scary for what it says about the attitudes involved (“Don’t have a mobile? You’re almost certainly homeless, and probably a junky. We don’t want you in our toilets.”). On another, there’s the sad lesson of stupidity inertia (as if the QWERTY keyboard wasn’t enough). This country already has a system for making micropayments, and it’s a system that works. And yet, people only take up ChipKnip when they’re forced to — and everyone has a mobile phone.

Except, this is becoming more and more a misnomer. I don’t really have a mobile phone, I have an extremely poorly designed text messaging device. Many people I know have even more poorly designed combination text messagers and cameras. And now, if Amersfoort is anything to go by, it’s a text-messager-cum-camera-cum-bankcard. A bankcard too thick to fit in your wallet, which requires you to negotiate the dialup connection for the transfer by hand. Still, we can’t deny the march of technology, right? Wouldn’t it be terrible if we still had to carry coins around in our pockets?