Shorter one today because we spent the weekend out in the sun at Camp Pendalouan celebrating my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s wedding. We had our wedding there 6 years ago and it was lovely to be back without needing to also do all the extremely fun and draining things one needs to do on their wedding weekend.
If you want to see a lot of pictures from this past weekend you can check out instagram feed. Lots of my cute kid AND a video of a tiny turtle in there if you need enticing.
Other Newsletters
- Ed’s Vaccuum Newsletter – Ed reminds everyone that the Cobblestone Farm Market starts back up this month. I’m a nice evening stroll away from that and looking forward to it!
- Patti’s Newsletter: Newsletter for May 6, 2018 – Hanging Out with Teacher Patti – I liked this tidbit “Best burn of 1898 comes from the Ann Arbor Argus who says that the fifth graders in Grass Lake have several ways to spell the word “icicle”, including “icesickles”, “icycycles” and “icecickles.” Concludes the paper–“that’s pretty good spelling for Grass Lake.” [ed. note: Grass Lake needed some ice after that sick burn!]”
- CivCity’s Newsletter: Time to Vote Local! – if you’re at all civically minded and in Ann Arbor you should subscribe to this! It’s a great overview of what’s happening in the city including the upcoming May 8th vote!
DTE Riverfront Development
DTE unveils plan for $75M riverfront redevelopment in Ann Arbor | MLive.com
This is great! I wish it was 500 affordable condos instead, but am happy to see SOMETHING done with that land. Lowertown has had two huge pockets of undeveloped and fenced off land since we moved here 9 years ago. Between the riverfront development and the project going in at Plymouth and Maiden Lane (1140 Broadway project) it’ll be a nice change to that area.
Vote Tomorrow, May 8th!
Please vote! Like, come on, this is the least you can do.
I’m guessing turnout will be low at this one because for most of the city it’s “just” about a tax thing. AnnArborVotes.org has more info on it:
Spaces After Periods
There was a study floating around this past week about how using two periods after spaces was actually correct because they did a Science about it. Unfortunately, the study was about some specific circumstances where it might be true and then the “reporting” morphed that into “Always use two now!”
Turns out…
“Most notably, the test subjects read paragraphs in Courier New, a fixed-width font similar to the old typewriters, and rarely used on modern computers.”
Practicaltypography.com has a great overview of all the other issues with drawing some vast conclusion on who is RIGHT forever and ever from this study:
Are two spaces better than one? | Butterick’s Practical Typography
“True, the researchers found that putting two spaces after a period delivered a “small” but “statistically … detectable” improvement in reading speed—about 3%—but curiously, only for those readers who already type with two spaces. For habitual one-spacers, there was no benefit at all.”
I agree with them that studies like this are important to do. They often don’t surface new information that typographers don’t already know, but sometimes they do!
More broadly: typography should always be about legibility first. Once that it satisfied we can have a number of fun discussions and arguments about the design of it. It’s gotta be readable though. I personally think that modern variable width fonts are very good at handling spacing issues automatically for you though.
Susu the cat
After CATACA died one of our main concerns was how her sister, Susu, would handle the transition. She’s mellowed out considerably, which was a surprise. It seems that in an attempt to assert who was alpha cat they were attacking each other more than we thought. They, sadly, never got a chance to really figure it out.
We were gone this weekend at a wedding and when we got back Susu greeted us more affectionately than I’ve ever seen her. We collapsed and watched TV the rest of the night and she was on top of one of us the entire time.
The Curse of Getting a Good Gmail Address
I have the gmail address for my first initial and last name. This is really easy to remember, easy to tell people about, and for some reason every other C Salzman in the world uses it when they sign up for stuff. The latest was getting Clay’s travel itinerary:
I’ve gotten a lot of receipts for various things over the years. At one point I was getting emails in Spanish being sent to Carlos, who is apparently a businessperson of some sort. One time I got biopsy results for someone that I hastily replied back that they weren’t for me and deleted without looking at.
If you have a similar situation I’d love to hear about it. Emails you have received but really shouldn’t are my favorite genre of weird emails stories.
Rewarding Rage
This thread about how algorithms reward anger and outrage is worth reading:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how if you get angry, the internet rewards you. And how algorithms have undoubtedly been tuned to heighten this in ways we’ll never fully know. And even if we did know…
@histoftech on the rewards of public anger
Next time you fire up twitter take a look at how many tweets being shown to you are based around anger, outrage, and/or fear. Yes, the world is bad, but goodness, what the Algorithm shows us is something to behold.