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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.'"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkoX0pEwSCw
Baskerville: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville
Open Baskerville: http://klepas.org/openbaskerville/
And why did Lisa Randall, the Harvard physicist responsible for that Higgs announcement use Comic Sans? According to the article, 'Because I like it.'"
Given the mostly fixed number of neurons available to any single individual, the talent for physics must have come from somewhere... obviously, the aesthetics circuits got the short end of the deal.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
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).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Time to update my resume.
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.
You should send 10M€ to my bank account.
Dyslexia
While not the best, it's decent and by far the most widely available (of the fonts dyslexics find easier to read).
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Damnit! I knew Obama shouldn't have written the Affordable Care Act in Comic Sans!
"Yo, Baskerville, I'm really happy for you, and Imma let you finish, but I just got to say Helvetica is one of the best fonts of all time."
In the Typography course I took, we were taught that the greatest font of all time is Garamond.
It wasn't even tested in this article.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
No, not that one. Or this one.
When I started at a NASA center, working with a bunch of physicists for the most part, I found I was being sent to an AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting. I don't remember exactly what my boss said that was disparaging about astronomers, but I do remember he said something to the effect, 'but at least they're not mathmeticians, as they generally bathe at least once a week'.
So, just remember -- they might've been cleaning themselves out of the sink -- but at least they were cleaning themselves.
(and well, during undergrad, I think I had a period of about 10-14 days when I don't think I went above ground ... at least not when the sun was out (and it was summer) ... the problem is, you can't tell just how ripe you've managed to get ... so engineers aren't always the best group, either).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Comic Sans is utterly despised by anybody who cares about fonts, but for everybody else it's just another option that they can choose if they feel like it. Lisa Randall is in the latter group, she's too busy discovering the secrets of the universe to care what font would win her the most esteem among people who give a shit about fonts.
I read the internet for the articles.