Baskerville Is the Greatest Font, Statistically, Says Filmmaker Errol Morris

An anonymous reader writes "A survey of unsuspecting New York Times readers implicitly answered the question: Does a certain font make you agree or disagree more often than another font? It turns out Baskerville confers a 1.5% advantage towards agreement on a survey question, compared to an average of six fonts. They were asked to agree or disagree to a passage from physicist David Deutsch's book The Beginning of Infinity, and were found to have an optimistic, if Baskerville-favoring, outlook on life. David Dunning, a psychologist awarded a Nobel prize and, separately, an IgNobel prize (for the eponymous Dunning-Kruger Effect), called Baskerville 'the king of fonts.' Sadly, Comic Sans — notable for its appearance in the Higgs Boson announcement — seems to be the weakest font. And why did Lisa Randall, the Harvard physicist responsible for that Higgs announcement use Comic Sans? According to the article, 'Because I like it.'"

Comments

Links

[clinko]

Baskerville: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville

Open Baskerville: http://klepas.org/openbaskerville/

I read the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

and Lisa Randall was not the responsible for the announcement.

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist, kindly e-mailed Fabiola Gianotti on my behalf. Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs boson, provided a compelling rationale for why she had used Comic Sans. When asked, she said, “Because I like it.”

Lisa *asked* the responsible.

Oh editors, I miss the times where at least you read the submitted articles. Now the anonymous guy can write whatever he wants in the summary and you'll publish it.

Mistake in the summary

[fondacio]

The summary misstates the person responsible for using Comic Sans in the Higgs boson announcement. The full quote:

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist, kindly e-mailed Fabiola Gianotti on my behalf. Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs boson, provided a compelling rationale for why she had used Comic Sans. When asked, she said, “Because I like it.”

I was already wondering why a Harvard physicist would be making the announcement of a discovery by CERN.

Re:Mistake in the summary

[MightyYar]

CERN is in Europe, but almost any high-energy physicist worth a damn has rotated through there or one of the previous colliders. High energy physics is necessarily international, due to the costs and politics involved.

Re:1.5% from a survey?

[Trepidity]

They don't seem to represent the sampling uncertainty graphically as error bars, but if you scroll down to the paragraph that starts with "Are the results the product of chance?", they do a basic statistical analysis, and find that Baskerville performs better than average with p < 0.01 (and still p < 0.05, if you do a Bonferroni correction).

Dunning doesn't have a Nobel Prize

[JoshuaZ]

I'm really fond of the Dunning-Kruger effect to the point where I mention it almost daily and people get annoyed with me. So I was really surprised to hear the claim in summary that Dunning had a Nobel. What would it be in? The last time a psychologist got a Nobel it was for work related to economics. Sure, enough 10 seconds of fact checking, verified that he's not on any list of Nobel Laureates, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates or the official lists at Nobelprize.org. The claim about Dunning getting a Nobel isn't in TFA so I'm not sure where it came from.

Re:Computer modern

[Samantha Wright]

The reason for Computer Modern's ugliness isn't apparent until you know what it's imitating. This is a comparison of CM and Bodoni 12, a font from the early 19th century. So-called "Modern" typefaces were frequently used for setting professional and mathematical treatises (and Slashdot's had an article in the past about how being difficult to read slows down the reader and gives them time to absorb the material.)

Essentially, the problem with CM is that it has straight flat parts on the sides of curves (e.g. the bowls of d and b), which make the font feel synthetic, like Chicago. The rigidity of the figures makes the letters feel as though they were assembled out of parts (which they were), rather than organically drawn.