Researchers Create 'Sans Forgetica,' a Memory-Boosting Font (cnn.com)

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: CNN reports on a new font that is purposely designed to more easily help students recall academic materials they read. From the report: "Australian researchers say their new font, called Sans Forgetica, could be the tool to help people retain information. The typeface, which slants to the side and has gaps in the middle, is not easy on the eyes. But according to the team at RMIT University in Australia who conceived Sans Forgetica, it has the perfect combination of 'obstruction' needed to recall information. The multidisciplinary team of typographic design specialists and psychologists said they designed Sans Forgetica using the learning principle called 'desirable difficulty.' The principle means that when obstruction is added to the learning process, people are required to make a little more effort and end up having better memory retention.

With normal fonts 'readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created,' RMIT senior lecturer Janneke Blijlevens said in a statement. Conversely, if a font is too difficult, memory is not retained. 'Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention,' she said. To get to that sweet spot, the researchers tested various fonts with roughly 400 Australian university students in a laboratory and an online experiment 'where fonts with a range of obstructions were tested to determine which led to the best memory retention,' RMIT said. 'Sans Forgetica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention,' RMIT said."

Comments

My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Bruce Perens]

OK, I understand the "slap in the face" strategy long used by memory enhancement experts, and inherent in "the peg", imagery, and other memory routines. The problem with this is that readers will become trained to it, until it is no more difficult to read than other fonts. Morse and his engineer intended people to read Morse Code off of paper tape, but it soon became clear that people could read it simply by the sound of the machine. Similarly, people's brains will work out an optimal strategy for reading deliberately-crippled fonts, and then there will no longer be a memory effect.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a loud and bizarre creepy font that takes up all the screen space to go with it?

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[rtb61]

Not quite, it will inherently diminish understanding because it simply requires more mental effort to read ie that greater mental effort required to read it, of course stimulates greater recall because you are putting much more mental effort in, especially when tired. Anyone outside of silly people using it, well no because it takes considerably more mental effort to read, greater pattern association processing is required, the problem there, it inherently will diminish thought being put into understanding what has been read, you really want to get that understanding in as early as possible to build a proper mental framework for more study. Japanese have a similar problem, with so much effort required to learn the Japanese language, it diminishes the amount that can be learned using the Japanese language.

Same with this font, test well in theory but it will diminish overall learning, beyond rote learning, so more effort consumed in the learning process, resulting in less learned. Of course if you write notes by hand, well, good luck. It is far better to sit through a lecture with pencil and pad, than with a computer, unless you want to spend that lecture time completing other assignments .

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Bruce Perens]

Isn't it kanji, the Han Chinese derived alphabet, that gives the Japanese such trouble? And I would imagine the Chinese? It is not language but literacy, I think.

The Koreans were smart, and got rid of that, focusing on Hangeul. The Japanese got the worst of all worlds, so they have katakana (phonetic writing), hirigana (phonetic writing which serves the purpose of italics, but has entirely different glyphs than katakana), and kanji.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Desler]

The Koreans were smart, and got rid of that,

No they didn't. Korean uses Chinese characters, too. They call it Hanja.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Desler]

And to add Hanja uses the traditional Chinese characters rather than simplified versions adopted by the Japanese and Chinese with fewer strokes than Hanja.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

No one actually listen to Bruce. His claims about Korean are bullshit.

Hanja is the Korean name for Han Chinese characters. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Toth]

It allows for another level in Japanese poetry and even given names.
There are multiple Chinese characters that have the same sound in Japanese. One can write a poem that meets all the rhythm and meter in Japanese with the choice of characters for the sound adds another level of complexity or meaning.

It appears to be the same for given names. We had an exchange student whose given name was Jiro.

Jir can be written using different kanji characters and can mean:

, "next, son"
, "next, melodious"
, "second, son"
, "second, melodious"
, "reign, son"

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[sg_oneill]

Not quite, it will inherently diminish understanding because it simply requires more mental effort to read ie that greater mental effort required to read it, of course stimulates greater recall because you are putting much more mental effort in, especially when tired. Anyone outside of silly people using it, well no because it takes considerably more mental effort to read, greater pattern association processing is required, the problem there, it inherently will diminish thought being put into understanding what has been read, you really want to get that understanding in as early as possible to build a proper mental framework for more study. Japanese have a similar problem, with so much effort required to learn the Japanese language, it diminishes the amount that can be learned using the Japanese language.

Same with this font, test well in theory but it will diminish overall learning, beyond rote learning, so more effort consumed in the learning process, resulting in less learned. Of course if you write notes by hand, well, good luck. It is far better to sit through a lecture with pencil and pad, than with a computer, unless you want to spend that lecture time completing other assignments .

Pure speculation. Memory and reason are not separate apparatus, and the idea that 'rote' learning doesn't lead to understanding is somewhat of a myth that isn't supported by the research. The thing is, we don't remember stuff we don't particualrly understand as well as things we do, and conversely we rarely understand things we can't remember. The two processes are intrinsically intertwined, and in fact as best as we can tell the neurons that do the reasoning ARE the neurons that store the memories.

Now obviously its not quite as simple as that. But the idea that the brain is a computer with separate RAM and CPU is straight up fictional.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[The Evil Atheist]

What a load of nonsense. That Japanese clearly have no trouble learning the same amount of things as people in the West, being one of the highly educated countries in the world, and being successful in making that education work for them. The problems you listed are precisely the problems of the inability to retain information, which is what happens now.

People dismiss rote learning, but recalling information quickly and accurately is vital to the learning process. Rote learning is only bad when memorization is the sole aim. Rote learning is an aid to memory, so that when learning advanced knowledge that builds on earlier knowledge is more effective.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Bruce Perens]

Darn snobbery. But at least the limit is only around 1800 glyphs for South Koreans.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. My first thought as well. They will have done experiments with groups reading in a normal font side by side with groups reading their broken font. Unlikely they will have done tests that get the people reading the broken font for days (or maybe only hours) till their brains adapt and it stops looking broken. Would have been a multi-disciplinary team, years of funding, at least one paper with about 20 authors which will be cited for the next decade as evidence of whatever.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[HarrySquatter]

Darn snobbery. But at least the limit is only around 1800 glyphs for South Koreans.

Most Japanese limit themselves to Joyo kanji which is only just over 2000 to be considered literate. A couple extra hundred isn't that much more to learn by the time you're 17-18. Very few ever go beyond that let alone to get level 1 in Kanji Kentei which requires knowing over 6000 kanji plus obscure readings, etc.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[TimMD909]

I have glaucoma. My vision in my right eye has suffered. It's harder to read for me now. These are facts. Now to my idea you inspired: my reading comprehension has seemed to improve as I have to spend more effort in focusing my eyes to read. I think it's a function of how much time I spend reading sentences. I was rushing when I should have spent time contemplating each sentence. Now I'm forced to, in a sense. Could it be simply as easy as re-reading every sentence to gain the same benefits this font claims it has? Basically, just slow the fuck down?

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who can seemingly skim read / read this font as fast as I normally could read any other normal font?

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Chris Mattern]

at least the limit is only around 1800 glyphs for South Koreans.

It's not much more in modern Japanese--about 2200. Post World War II, the Japanese did massive simplification of kanji, cutting it back to 2000. While it's not generally illegal to use the older characters, it is illegal to use them in official documents, and publishers can only be assured that their readers will know the official characters (you're supposed to know them all by the end of elementary school).

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Applehu Akbar]

Katakana, which is just a more angular form of the hiragana set of phonetic characters, is the set used like italics for foreign words. Hiragana are used as Japanese grammatical elements interspersed with the Chinese kanji, which carry the meaning.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Applehu Akbar]

That's why in intellectual Japanese conversations you see people tracing kanji on the palms of their hands.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[freeze128]

If that were true, then how do speed reading systems claim to increase your comprehension?

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[nospam007]

"Not quite, it will inherently diminish understanding because it simply requires more mental effort to read ie that greater mental effort required to read it, of course stimulates greater recall "

I thought Courrier and Elite were already perfect for that.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this is that readers will become trained to it, until it is no more difficult to read than other fonts.

That was my very first thought as well. My second was: restrict the use of this font to those passages that might normally be highlighted.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Cipheron]

Well then we need randomized fonts that select one of a range of letter styles for each word.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[angel'o'sphere]

There most likely never was a "memory" effect anyway.

Why should brain power wasted to deceiver a complicated script enhance memory, aka promote "understanding/comprehending and learning" about the topic the complicated script is talking about? This does not sound plausible at all.

Perhaps it urges people to read aloud? That actually _does_ improve learning.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[angel'o'sphere]

Japanese have a similar problem, with so much effort required to learn the Japanese language, it diminishes the amount that can be learned using the Japanese language.
That is nonsense.
Japanese, and for that matter Chinese, you can read close to 10 times as fast than German, and probably more than 5 times as fast than english.
There is no special "deciphering" gap in those languages, as it is with this proposed font.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[angel'o'sphere]

You are mixing up hiragana with katakana.

Most Japanese sentences are a mix of kanji (mostly used for nouns) and hiragana used for grammar structures and verbs (that is simplified).

Kanji you simply memorize. There is no "deciphering" like reading a complicated english word as "deciphering". Kanji spring while reading into your mind just like spoken language. Your brain/mind does not even use the same brain area for reading them as you would in reading letters or hiragana/katakana (Kana).

The Korean have absolutely no advantage. Their script is a syllable script just like Hiragana/Katakana, albeit they have more syllables. In other words: they have (nearly) the same deciphering work to do as a english speaker reading english, or god forbid: german :D

You can write Japanese fully in Hiragana, btw. If you only know the sound of the words, aka the words, but no the Kanji, you write it in Hiragana.

Many Haiku are Hiragana only, however strict rules involve to have at least one, or two Kanji in a Haiku.

Wow, I'm impressed, the english spelling correction on the Mac realizes: Kana, Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Haiku without complaints ...

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Darinbob]

I don't think they do increase comprehension. Most speed reading is essentially skimming.

Hate to add real info to slashdot, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually, it can't.

Your Jiro most certainly knew what his name was. And then only *one* of the Kanji you propose will fit.

However Japanese like to play with words/sounds. A completely correct written short sentence (like 5 or 6 Kanji) might actually mean something completely different than is written there. Consider it a "wise" or "well read" mens puzzle.

E.g. Daito Ryu Aiki Jujutus, is a martial arts. Founded around WWI. The Kanji basically mean "Aiki based weapon less fighting school of the greater east". The original meaning however is a different one, but for political reasons (Korea and Taiwan at that time "belonged" to Japan) the founder of the art used a glorious sounding Japanese Kanji expression.

One concept of using "wrong Kanji" to explain something is called Ateji. Instead of using the Kanji for "Trash Bin" they write "Protect Beauty". Same sound, but different Kanji and obviously a different meaning ... but everyone gets it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

E.g. Sanskrit texts are transliterated with a set of Kanji that are no longer in use in ordinary Japanese. They are amoung the most complex ones, discarded centuries ago. They are just "pictures" replacing Sanskrit consonant+vowel combinations.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[angel'o'sphere]

Yes,
slow the fuck down :D
But more effective is, reading loud. Repeating short paragraphs, loud, once or twice. Rephrasing it with your own words, perhaps a bit shorter only containing the key concepts. Making a mental model "how stuff works", e.g. distinguishing between what (words), how (sentences) and why (laws?).
Even more efficient, but probably expensive ;D is: having someone else read aloud to you. You try to follow and make your mental model. You ask him/her to go back a few sentences or paragraphs and repeat.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[angel'o'sphere]

Thy most likely mean that they increase the comprehension of the words, not necessary the topic.
Then again, you most likely speed read about topics you already have some good overview about.

In other words: speed reading the news is rather easy. Speed reading about the connection between demotic, coptic and Egyptian hieroglyphs and the ancient greek language might make you stumble every third word.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[jtgd]

I wonder if the way it works is to simply slow you down. If that's true then speed reading is bad.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[hankwang]

"The Korean have absolutely no advantage. Their script is a syllable script just like Hiragana/Katakana, albeit they have more syllables."

AFAIK Korean (Hangul) is an alphabetic system, just with the "letters" stacked to form a syllabic character that superficially resembles a Chinese character. You only need to memorize 24 "letters" to read and pronounce it.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Zontar The Mindless]

Japanese uses many of the traditional forms as well as simplifications that differ from those used by Simplified Chinese.

On topic: This is definitely NOT a font you'd want to use for writing code.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Zontar The Mindless]

I've used a similar trick to communicate in China when someone couldn't understand my pronunciation.

I must say it's quite entertaining to watch their expressions when they realise that's what the funny-sounding white guy is doing. :-)

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'm not convinced that using 1/5 the space automatically saves you 4/5 of the time required to read it (or write it, for that matter).

I suppose it's possible that Chinese sign-makers use a lot less paint per sign than do their Western counterparts, though.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[angel'o'sphere]

Then you are wrong informed.
It is easy to read it up on wikipedia.

And no, you are double wrong informed, Hangul has nothing to do at all with Chinese characters.

You only need to memorize 24 "letters" to read and pronounce it.
Make that about 200 ... I'm to lazy to look up how many there are exactly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The alphabet consists of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Its letters are grouped into syllabic blocks, vertically and horizontally.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

...and rômaji! (our alphabet), for a total of 4 that they mix and match at once :-)

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Jane Q. Public]

Agree.

The reason it enhances memory is because it makes you work to even read it. Which means you pay more attention, etc.

But that's like saying you'll better remember digging a ditch later if you have to do it with a shovel rather than a backhoe.

Probably true, but who cares?

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[stealth_finger]

Mine is called Fake Newsica. It's the new font for CNN and the failing New York Times.

Also good for white house press releases.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[cascadingstylesheet]

and the idea that 'rote' learning doesn't lead to understanding is somewhat of a myth that isn't supported by the research.

Yes, it's hard to escape the suspicion that the people who are always hatin' on "rote learning" are those who are just really, really bad at teaching.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[The Evil Atheist]

There's no evidence that Chinese characters give Chinese people any trouble. I learned Chinese in kindergarten and I remember finding english very hard - because it was foreign. Nowadays I do find Chinese hard because I've forgotten most of it. But ask any Chinese person from high school onwards. There's no trouble at all.

It's like people asking me why I still use chopsticks, considering that knife and fork is easier. Well, it isn't for me, because I've been using chopsticks most of my life, but for some reason people assume that familiarity plays no role whatsoever and if they find chopsticks and Chinese hard, it must be hard for everyone.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

I lived in Japan for two years. The Japanese have kanji, katakana (Japanese syllabary), hiragana (Japanese syllabary), and romaji (Romanisation of Japanese). All Japanese learn all of them. I had a girlfriend who worked at a book store and she was instrumental in exposing me to things most Westerners never see or learn. I learned about 200 characters whilst there in order to drive. I had to pass the Japanese driving test and be able to read all road signs. This test took me three months to learn and pass. The Japanese are a fantastic people and their social systems, whilst odd to us as Westerners, are quite nice. Great memories...

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[bluefoxlucid]

You win 100 Internets.

These people don't know about chicken sexers.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[bluefoxlucid]

I've noticed I read words by prediction: I know what words should come in the sentence, and will fill in what should be there. Word shape, length, position, and context determine what I see; sometimes I'm not even looking at the area of text I'm reading, instead inspecting the shape of the paragraph as a whole (including where white spaces occur) and "reading" the text entirely by prediction.

A not-insignificant part of this process is creating and integrating a theory-of-mind model of the writer: I'm simulating your thoughts, mannerisms, and speech patterns in my head. As consequence, I can have rather dramatic apparent personality shifts internally, although I assume most people don't notice because I tend to reflexively squelch that externally.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[bluefoxlucid]

Rote is an important learning mechanism. Memory is associative, and understanding is complex.

I never learned much by rote. When I learned math, I was learning processes, and I would see connections between those processes. I'd start reflecting everything as everything else, and could never remember...anything. I always re-derived all my formulas from other knowledge, proving again and again that the formula of a sphere was whatever it was.

When we moved onto integration in Calc 1, I immediately decided it was too much work and spent 40 minutes creating integration by parts--because I was too dumb to look forward 15 pages. My teacher said there was no such thing as a chain rule for integration, and I found the proposition preposterous.

I've forgotten most of that now.

Your reasoning center is prefrontal, but it relies on as much automatic process as it can. the more you use a process, the more you restructure the neural pathways around that process: when your prefrontal cortex says, "I need to perform process X, then put the result into process Y," your brain quickly spits out the result of process X, and then you manually stick that into process Y--which, again, just dumps the result back out into your head. Reasoning isn't as simple as just doing a lot of rote work up front.

The more stuff you know, the more you can associate. You can perform addition by simple, isometric process based around an addition table of five elements--forcefully memorize those five elements. Memorize your multiplication table, too. You'll have to practice the process of registered arithmetic, but it'll settle in eventually; it won't work unless you can produce the product of two single-digit multiplicands at prompting immediately without thinking.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[bluefoxlucid]

I read English pretty damned fast and I don't even speed read. When I use RSVP, 600WPM is comfortable. RSVP materials suggest 300WPM is viable for a beginner, yet I could pull 800WPM with comprehension, albeit that's running a little hot.

I have some odd mental habits, so I'm relatively well-prepared for things like that.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[bluefoxlucid]

Seems reasonable. I'm able to read without paying attention to the text, and instead rummage through the information in my head. I started reading fiction again after an episode of reading a book for two hours that I ... don't remember; I set the book down and only had three months of new memories that were a lot more interesting than anything that happens in the real world.

I can recognize reality--more specifically, I can't not recognize reality (which has consequences)--but I have more memories of things that are clearly not from reality, and those memories are more-vivid than anything else. I've spent my entire life abusing the machine with everything from synesthesia (I carried around an iPod full of songs that sounded like impossible colors and euphoria--LSD and cocaine in MP3 format, dude!) to dipping directly into my own analytical thought process and not trying to make sense of it (nothing in there makes sense).

People think I'm a genius (they're wrong: it's a parlor trick) because I recognize things they don't and can rapidly solve some problems, and at the same time are frequently confused at how quickly I go off on tangents because I recognize that two things are similar or related in ways nobody else considers. The two are the same mechanism.

So if I read something that's related to subject matter with which I have a great deal of familiarity, I'll immediately start connecting together existing information and analogical information: I'm not as aware of the text as I am of the massive amount of data spread throughout my brain. I start theorizing new ideas from this right away, it stores better. Whenever I hit something completely new, I stop dead: I have trouble learning things I can't immediately grasp, and usually find someone to do it for me and explain wtf is going on so I can get something seeded in there to work with.

I hate when the machine breaks like that.

Seems like most people would experience similar with reading in general: if X and Y, then Z; if you know X and Y and I point out that these together imply Z, you can rapidly validate that, connect it together, and understand it. If you have no clue wtf is going on and I have to break down what X and Y are, why they're important, how they function, and why it's sensible that they lead to Z, you're going to need to take things slow.

Of course, there are strategies for mass learning of new and complex information, such as SQW4R and multi-modal reading (subvocalization, multiple-intelligence, and structure-proposition-evaluation). Many of these slow down the process by taking extra reasoning steps, although I often subvocalize with temporal modification (I'll create a memory of a 5-second spoken sentence in 0.5 seconds, which can be hectic: for a brief few moments, I feel like multiple things have happened at once and time is not exactly linear).

Learning is fascinating.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[bluefoxlucid]

Even more efficient, but probably expensive ;D is: having someone else read aloud to you. You try to follow and make your mental model.

The Internet suggests that's how many people get laid in college, although I've started to think the Internet has some self-selection bias and a lack of general credibility.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Aristos Mazer]

No, youâ(TM)re not the only one. The point is that it is easily readable for most people but not as easily as Arial. The change is subtle but enough to engage your brainâ(TM)s âoethis is novel, better pay attentionâ mode.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[cyberchondriac]

I came here to say the same, but you said it better than I could have. Students today are already overwhelmed with all the courses, research, and piles of homework they do; this won't help, so this will just flop.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[ichimunki]

I think the White House should choose a different font from those so-called news organizations: Alternativ Factica.

Re: My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that speed reading may increase the comprehension just because you have to focus more on the reading.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[_merlin]

Yeah, but you only need to remember the 24 gwlja to be able to read all the jaso. For example, the jaso "nam" is composed of the gwlja "n", "a" and "m". The jaso "han" is composed of the gwlja "h", "a" and "n". The "a" and "n" are the same in "nam" and "han". The way to arrange the gwlja in a jaso is pretty obvious.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[DNS-and-BIND]

Oh, that's BS. Lots of Chinese people *suck* at Chinese. Why do you think they simplified the characters? Because it was hard for them, too. I'll never forget the first day I saw two Chinese people get into an argument about how a character should be drawn. Tremendously vindicating.

"From high school onwards" nice dodge there. You conveniently missed all the people who don't pass the test to go on to high school, or whose parents can't afford high school.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of Chinese people *suck* at Chinese. Why do you think they simplified the characters?

To give leftists a way to control the language, in turn gaining control over people who use that language, taking cues from 1984

No, that was not a snark answer. Read the wiki. The push for simplifying the language began in the days when revolutionaries were challenging the old imperialist regime, and along with it they challenged traditional Chinese culture, and the writing system was a part of it.

Improving literacy is the reason they give on the surface ("the public position", as Hillary may have put it)

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that's BS. Lots of Chinese people *suck* at Chinese. Why do you think they simplified the characters? Because it was hard for them, too.

All languages gets revised. Nobody writes "olde english" - it was too hard to maintain all sorts of oldfashioned rules & spellings. No surprise the Chinese do the same thing.

Writing used to be an art - something only experts did. So things was complicated. Then came the idea of general literacy. All should read & write. Writing was to be used for everyday messages, not merely poems & holy books & orders from the king. Had to be simplified, couldn't teach commoners all the peculiarities and finer points. The effect of this was the same everywhere - China, Europe, America.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Desler]

Katakana, which is just a more angular form of the hiragana set of phonetic characters

Katakana was not formed from hiragana. Katakana is derived from fragments of kanji.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[epine]

Oh, that's BS. Lots of Chinese people *suck* at Chinese. Why do you think they simplified the characters? Because it was hard for them, too.

If the Chinese had as many problems with their script as half the English population has with there/their/they're or your/you're, after simplification no character would have been left standing with more than five strokes.

(If you think this project is impossible, you haven't considered Randall Munroe. At a sustained rate of one character simplification per hour, he could have the first draft on the core 8000 characters completed in four standard work years, all down to five strokes, each and every one of them. Then you'd have to check that he hasn't turned all the characters that only show up only in the names of bird species into stick-figure girlfriends. Names of Chinese birds "According to this list in Wikipedia, the avifauna of China include a total of 1,314 species. Brelsford still has a ways to go before documenting most of them. But he seems like the kind of person who will persist to the end. He has what I call in Chinese "snail spirit" — go slowly but persistently; eventually you'll reach your goal.")

Simplification might have been a bit premature. Reading the traditional characters wasn't all that hard. But writing some of them took a lot of practice (and time, too, if you had to draw the three dragons without the use of ditto marks).

But soon we had computers (with decent input systems) to do all the actual writing, so that tedious skill rapidly became secondary.

I'm far from convinced that English would be easier to read, either, if we gave a thousand words the "thru" tummy tuck.

You really need to ask a deep neural network if the patterns are unreasonably complicated. "thru" might be simpler for a shallow network, whereas "through" might be far more consistent with the rest of the language once the network has trained for a while.

Human novices do prefer skills they can initially learn with shallow networks. So why don't we have an Esperanto version of everything? Because for anything we use heavily, we gravitate towards the minimal deep network. Our intuitions aren't very good yet about what this means. But now that we have all manner of sophisticated deep networks to interrogate, I'm expect we'll begin to progress on this eternal question any day now.

Just a little more snail spirit, we'll crack this one yet.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[The Evil Atheist]

And why does Taiwan still stick with traditional characters, and have absolutely no problem educating millions of people?

Why do YOU think they simplified the characters? Do you really buy the communist line that it needed to be simplified? It couldn't be because controlling the language allows them to also control the country's politics, allowing them to rewrite history knowing that it would be harder for people to go back to older, "dangerous" writings? Your sig talks about shutting down free speech, yet you clearly think the communist's controlling of speech through reinventing the language is okay.

Have you seen two english speaking people arguing about how to spell a word? Tremendously vindicating.

If the parents can't afford high school, why would you use that as evidence that Chinese is too difficult? That would be irrelevant, yet you would use that in a sample in order to "prove your point"? That's very scientifically ignorant of you.

I also use "high school" for the very fact that primary school children in english speaking countries also find english difficult. You really think people english speaking children have no problem with language? I migrated from Hong Kong to Australia just before primary school age, and I could spell better than any kids in my class.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[angel'o'sphere]

Yeah, you are right about that.
However if you want to write properly, you need to know the layout of each syllable.
Perhaps they are straight forward, I never dug into that :D

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[DNS-and-BIND]

Your sig talks about shutting down free speech, yet you clearly think the communist's controlling of speech through reinventing the language is okay.

Cathy Newman, is that you? Wow, you just told me what I think, put words in my mouth, and then criticized me for the made-up opinion you created.

Lots of Chinese people don't make it to high school. You used high school kids as a benchmark. That's a very biased sample. Who isn't using science here?

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

Segoe UI is the best font.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[stealth_finger]

I think the White House should choose a different font from those so-called news organizations: Alternativ Factica.

I would honestly be surprised if they weren't using comic sans at this point.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[hazardPPP]

Japanese have a similar problem, with so much effort required to learn the Japanese language, it diminishes the amount that can be learned using the Japanese language.

Uhm, sources on that? Quotes? Proof?

To me, it does not seem like the Japanese have a problem with learning.

They have a rich and complex culture and civilization, with highly complicated and very context-specific social rituals, rules, and customs.

Beyond social life, daily life requires following tons of large and small rules and regulations and norms of behaviour, of which everyone seems to be perfectly aware and know by heart to the minutest detail. Work life and generally business is also like this.

Japan has produced, as a society over the ages, great art and literature, which is often very nuanced and subtle. It also has a distuingished philosophical tradition.

Japanese schoolchildren are constistently topscorers on international tests such as TIMSS and PISA.

On top of all that, Japan is an industrial and technological superpower that has been a pioneer in many fields and a driver of technological, and more broadly, industrial inovation for the past 60 years at least.

None of this suggests that Japanese people have trouble with learning things compared to speakers of "simpler" languages, such as English or French or Spanish or Italian. I've even heard the opposite argument of yours several times: that is the complexity of the Japanese language - spoken and written - that forces people to develop their intellect.

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

definitely a wingding in the whitehouse

Re:My New Font Is Called Ophidian Lubrica

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the only glyph "blah"?

Right at the sweet spot

[Anonymous Coward]

And people will get used to it after awhile and start forgetting like they normally would.

TFS in wrong font

[sysrammer]

I was going to post a reply to TFS, but I forgot what it was about.

Re:TFS in wrong font

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the Help documentation for your browser should use the font. ;)

Oof

[Anonymous Coward]

that name makes me irrationally angry

Re:Oof

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you're a dick and nobody likes you.

Fuckin nonsense.

[denzacar]

Might as well suggest that one learns better and retains more memory about things seen through scratched up and filthy glasses.
Or by listening to a lecture while outside someone is tearing up the street with a jackhammer.

This is what happens when we allow behavioural economists and marketing people dabbling in psychology to be treated like serious scientists.

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[The Evil Atheist]

his is what happens when we allow behavioural economists and marketing people dabbling in psychology to be treated like serious scientists.

So the actual psychologists they have working on it are really behavioural economists and marketing people dabbling in psychology, as opposed to being actual psychologists that they actually are?

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of those things which is so obvious that if practical it was invented thousands of years in the past.

The difference today is that we have far greater means to accurately collect statistical data. Unfortunately the significance of the typeface is not significant enough to be worthy of consideration. It is significant enough to be measurable with modern technology (and a whole lot of jumping to conclusions) but without being significant enough to measure using ancient methods it isn't worth much.

Why would the standard latin typeface not be selected to be ideal across a variety of criteria? There are surely many trade-offs and by narrowing your criteria in this way it is unsurprising the result would be different.

The fact it is only ever so slightly different is only somewhat of a surprise if you assume there was no preexisting selection present.

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[Darinbob]

However it is true that one remembers lectures more when they write it down rather than just being handed a copy of the notes. The effort to write it down means you are expending effort to actually listening to what is being said.

Re: Fuckin nonsense.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much the expending of effort but activating more senses. With listening to a lecture you're just listing. By writing, you are listening, writing, and reading while you are writing simultaneously.

But there are a lot of weird quirks. I read of a fairly large (# of subjects) study that showed people remember about 14% better when taking notes in blue ink versus black ink (based on memory retention). There was no conclusion as to why, just a few theories.

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[Anonymous Coward]

And in what sense are "actual psychologists" not just "people dabbling in psychology"? Because I've met a load of them and they are mostly idiots.

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[Tom]

Didn't read any of their papers, but I do wonder if they tested it on long texts and not just notes.

I can imagine that it would help with short text fragments. I can't imagine it helps with a book.

Re: Fuckin nonsense.

[Aristos Mazer]

Why not help with book? Whatâ(TM)s your theory?

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[denzacar]

If a person with a degree in astrophysics published a paper "proving" that the Earth is flat, could that person still be accurately described as an actual astrophysicist?
Or would a description like "a fuckin flatearther loon" be more appropriate?

I.e. Should we blindly accept the authority of a piece of paper they have hanging on the wall in their office, OR should we take in account their actual words, actions and results when deciding on the validity of their work?

Similarly, if a person with a degree pushes marketing nonsense with little to no scientific proof behind it - should we consider that person a scientist and their thinly veiled marketing campaign a work of science?
Particularly when we're talking about fields with known "issues".

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[denzacar]

And one gets more exercise from sitting on a bicycle seat while pedaling to work than from sitting on a bus seat while being driven to work.

Writing is a completely different action from reading. From a neurological, physical... from any point.
Taking notes by yourself is another level entirely.
There's literally nothing to compare that action to reading different kinds of fonts other than that both are probably done in a classroom and that both probably use the same alphabet and language.

It's not even comparing cycling to sitting on a bus... it's comparing effects of cycling uphill to being shown a video of cycling on various kinds of screens and projectors.

Re: Fuckin nonsense.

[denzacar]

Brain becomes jaded and you read without noticing individual characters after a while.

But it's all bullshit anyway.
I'm from Bosnia. We have three official languages (actually not even properly different dialects) and two official alphabets.
Both are phonetic and identical in pronunciation.

I will often pick up a book and only hours into it realize that it is actually printed in Cyrillic.
Once you learn to read words without spelling out each character you lose the sense of the print.
The underlying language and meaning remain the same - which is what you are reading and writing.
Thoughts and ideas expressed through language - not characters of an alphabet.
You recognize the meaning encapsulated into a collection of symbols, you don't reinterpret each symbol from scratch.
E.g. You read both Sarajevo and Capajebo the same way.

Unless you are trying to make a political thing or a joke out of it. But that's a whole nother box of turds.

Re: Fuckin nonsense.

[Aristos Mazer]

Reasonable thought. Good point.

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[Anonymous Coward]

You still haven't proven the earth is round!

Re:Fuckin nonsense.

[Comrade Ogilvy]

It is perhaps true that a liiiittle bit of friction helps "memory retention", but I question whether memory retention is really so important.

The real point of education is become skilled at: processing information, building conceptual schemas, and re-building those schemas to become even better with more input, etc.

To get to my real point, if I am spending more effort while reading processing the font, is that improving my ability to memorize facts at a cost of interfering with schema building in the moment? Because better retention of facts may not come for free.

And psychologists are not the people who would know how to test that. I would look to education researchers instead (which uses psychology as one of its tools, but is not the same field).

Badd Spellingnings

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes peep read ma bad spellings, it be harder to the read because it not common

Anti-spell check > goobbydopper font?

Comic Sans seems to work just fine for that

[greenwow]

I seem to remember everything I read that uses that font since it makes me so angry.

Re:Comic Sans seems to work just fine for that

[mark_reh]

Dude! It's just a font. Get a life.

Re:Comic Sans seems to work just fine for that

[Anonymous Coward]

fyi comic sans isn't the most hated font by designers: it's merely the only font that had a consistent joke made about it. According to at least one survey, the most hated fonts are Helvetica and Times (grunge fonts are up there).

The short point is: if comic sans makes you upset but helvetica doesn't, you're absorbing nonsense opinions from others.

Re:Comic Sans seems to work just fine for that

[The Evil Atheist]

Designers just seem to be complete wankers.

Looks really crap and is hard to read

[gweihir]

Thanks, but no thanks. I will stick with what works for me and that means a font that is good to read and does not distract me from the subject matter.

Re:Looks really crap and is hard to read

[Anonymous Coward]

Being hard to read is the entire point.

Re: Looks really crap and is hard to read

[Aristos Mazer]

You missed the point entirely. Go read the article.

Re:Looks really crap and is hard to read

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's just distracting; their theory of better memory retention probably won't work past the first page or two, at which point the reader will be exhausted trying to parse that font. This is just another obstacle to learning IMO; find a better way to make text more memorable, like maybe, the authors should write better and in an more organized, less ambiguous manner than they so often do.

Show me the studies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Claims without a method for testing the claims can be summarily ignored.

This looks more like an April 1st joke, then the results of serious research.

Forgotten Linux?

[Teun]

Contrary to what is posted on the download page this font is also compatible with Linux.
Maybe they forgot to mention it, maybe they realised Linux users have better brains and don't need this crutch...

Per Forgetica

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a companion font that makes it easier to forget what's been read. Good for most every clickbait "news" item on today's Internet.

20 20

[bugs2squash]

I could probably get a pair of eye glasses and splatter them with paint or crack one of the lenses and get this effect with every font.

Re:20 20

[Anonymous Coward]

My PhD. My turn! My Turn! A very short thesis though:
"Boosting learning intensity by 2000%"
Method: smash glasses with jackhammer and transcribe all notes into a custom font called Gangsta Graffiti.

Please mail my degree to: ....

Literally HALF a stencil font???

[UnknownSoldier]

This font looks like shit and is even harder to read. I can't believe they literally used HALF a stencil font. WTF? Looks like I will be forgetting that crappy font.

I can even picture an xkcd for this:

Researcher 1: Hey, lets take a Stencil font and drop 50% of each of the individual glyphs.
Researcher 2: Won't that make it harder to read?
Researcher 1: Students will become so frustrated trying to read the words that it will actually increase remembering it!
Researcher 2: Brilliant!

Narrator: That brilliant idea when you are high isn't so brilliant when you aren't.

Re:Literally HALF a stencil font???

[Anonymous Coward]

shhhh,... it is developed by - wait for it - a ... UNIVERSITY.

Re: Literally HALF a stencil font???

[Aristos Mazer]

But when the idea is tested and the results back the hypothesis then your ranting turns into anti-science rhetoric. If you have counter evidence to present, please do so, but otherwise, youâ(TM)re just scoffing at a counterintuitive result you donâ(TM)t like.

Re:Literally HALF a stencil font???

[thoughtlover]

CNN's headline font was more interesting...

I write my notes.

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

How does this thing help me at all?

Re: I write my notes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try reading your notes and typing them into a computer while using this font. I bet it will improve recall substantially.

Re:I write my notes.

[freeze128]

You will save money on pencil lead!

It looks like a scam.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't read a scam in that font.

Won't eat their own dog food

[Chris Mattern]

I noticed that their site doesn't use the font except when it shows you examples. The site content text doesn't use it.

Re:Won't eat their own dog food

[DNS-and-BIND]

It's not study material. Duh.

Re:Won't eat their own dog food

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they want you to remember the meaning of the text, not the text itself. For example, you will forget what I just wrote, but you will forever remember that time you lost an argument on the Internet.

Re:Won't eat their own dog food

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you didn't install the font and the browser uses a close substitute instead

Re:Won't eat their own dog food

[Chris Mattern]

you will forever remember that time you lost an argument on the Internet.

I would've thought we'd all learned by now that nobody ever loses an argument on the Internet--just ask them.

A better name for the font

[Tablizer]

Sanzheimers

Re:A better name for the font

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually think "Sans Forgetica" is actually a smart name. You do know "Sans" means "without" right? the name of the font type literally means "without forget"

Re: A better name for the font

[Anonymous Coward]

The font should just be called forgetica because that's what's going to happen to this font.

Re:A better name for the font

[thoughtlover]

Hey, Forgeticaboutit...

Just wait until schools catch on...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is very likely that some half-witted school administrator decides to increase standardized test scores and forces all the students to read this font.

Humans Are Adaptable

[BBF_BBF]

Have the scientist done any long term studies with students that have read files using the font for hundreds or thousands of hours?

.

What happens when a human gets used to the "Sans Forgetica" font and no longer needs to try harder to decipher it? I guess the "harder to comprehend" edge goes away and we're back to square one.

Re:Humans Are Adaptable

[pr0fessor]

Most adults don't see individual letters instead they see groupings of letters as words and are no longer fully aware of the letters that make them up as they read. They also fill in words in sentences through context with out being fully aware of the missing words on occasion. This is one of the reasons why if you ask someone to count the occurrences of a specif letter in a paragraph they usually count wrong.

It shouldn't take long for someone to start identifying the lettering differences and associate them back into groupings.

A nightmare for dyslexics

[Anonymous Coward]

This will be a nightmare for dyslexics. It has even more ways than conventional type faces to twist letters around.

Sans Courage

[Anonymous Coward]

Courage!

Australia huh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Australians... the most dangerous creature ever found in New Zealand and several other countries ðY

Brief fad prediction

[Applehu Akbar]

Watch for a spate of movie and product titles using this "more memorable" font, until everybody is doing it and any advantage is killed off.

Remember right about the turn of the century, when every logo suddenly included a perspective-effect circle as an element? There was an effect in Photoshop at that time that everyone used.

I prefer Times New Gimmicka

[Anonymous Coward]

For that juicy 'memberful goodness there's nothing like a refreshing read of Times New Gimmicka.

EXACTLY!

[bussdriver]

This is just a first step. They will need to determine how long changes take for adaptation and then techniques to modify the font over time so you can't ever learn it.

I read a study a while ago on Dyslexic Fonts and they found that they do help over unknown fonts but the well known fonts like Helvetica did best because they are heavily trained which caused it to beat the special fonts. This study could impact future ones because additional factors could be involved that weren't previously considered.

Phlistines

[enrique556]

Went to the website - there's a link for a chrome browser extension but no firefox exntension.

"Researchers".

So I downloaded it ...

[Rip!ey]

... but I forgot where I saved it.

Re:So I downloaded it ...

[freeze128]

Probably to your fonts folder...

The same as using Comic Sans

[psnyder]

These people completely misunderstand "desirable difficulty". From the article:

The multidisciplinary team of typographic design specialists and psychologists said they designed Sans Forgetica using the learning principle called "desirable difficulty."

Using this font has nothing to do with desirable difficulty unless you're training yourself to read wonky fonts.

Disclaimer

[Anonymous Coward]

While the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology endeavours to provide accurate material on its web site, it gives no warranty concerning the accuracy of the material provided by this service.

Sweet

[NicknameUnavailable]

A font that's hard on the eyes and has the only purpose of making things easier to remember, so long as nobody remembers the font itself. This would literally be useless if anyone used it.

Similar to this I guess (?)

[FrozenFrog]

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Peer-reviewed validation study?

[gr8dude]

Has anyone found a scientific paper that documents the process of how they evaluated the font?

The claim is interesting, but where is the evidence to back it up?

Re:Peer-reviewed validation study?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.smh.com.au/educati... "Dr Blijlevens said the font could also be used by teachers, or by industries keen to reinforce important messages. “It can have quite far-reaching implications,” she said. The researchers are now preparing to publish their findings in a scientific journal."

We adapt

[TJHook3r]

The Qwerty layout was conceived to slow down typists in the days when hardware was more delicate. Now it's difficult to imagine that it was used to slow people down, because we all grew up on it and learnt it. Same with a new font. We'll get used to it and the benefits will wear off.

Re:We adapt

[Anonymous Coward]

The layout was NOT designed to slow typists down.

http://www.mythbusters.com/some-myths-about-the-qwerty-keyboard-part-i.html

Re:We adapt

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

There's also the story that the main problem with mechanical typewriters was jamming by hitting adjacent levers at almost the same instant. Seemingly scattering the letters across the board would SPEED UP typing because letters frequently occuring next to each other in words weren't next to each other on the keyboard.

The new font does work indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the linked article which was using the font. The title of the article was, wait, need to look up
Memory boosting fonts
Double checking
Researchers create 'memory-boosting' font
So, yup, almost optimal.

Cranking out the old template

[gringer]

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante ( ) form-based

approach to fighting memory loss. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mail and other legitimate text uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop memory loss for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of facebook will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from people with memory loss
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many text users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X) This meme is tired and worn out and I'm just as likely to get a -1 troll as a +5 funny.
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of writing
(X) Huge existing software investment in fonts
(X) Susceptibility of brain paths other than glyph recognition to memory loss
(X) Willingness of users to install new fonts
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do need to read things
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of established writing systems
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:Cranking out the old template

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhh the memories!
Thank you for that!

Where is the data....

[Anonymous Coward]

Spent a bit of time on rmit website.....where is the data showing this works??? I also want to know why the font was created in partnership with a creavite agency???

Re: You'l never forget a Clinton Genocide

[stealth_finger]

Not as much as Trump has laundered of Russian oligarch money to suppress the pee tape.

Probably not even as much as he's spent playing golf.

Mutating font

[HalAtWork]

Perhaps we need a font that can dynamically change as words are rendered, looking slightly different every time.

Seems kind of pointless, if you ask me

[mark-t]

For many of the glyphs, I noticed that the only way I would be able to recognize them is if I knew what the glyph was supposed to be already. There is some chance I could determine this from context, but in particular, if I were reading some unfamiliar text or especially if it contained some new term that I had not previously known and was learning about, I would very easily have absolutely no clue what I was reading.

What good does it do to increase memory retention but decrease comprehensibility to the point that the amount of information you will actually end up learning drops?

Metacognitive Difficulty

[atomicalgebra]

This is a great idea, and I have already implemented similar ideas into my education products. There is evidence it works. Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning(PDF)

COD becomes ( () ) ?

[holophrastic]

COD -> ( () )

no thanks.

Why would you forget? Fnord.

[The Snazster]

Fnord. You don't need to worry about fonts.

Ugly as f**k

[Anonymous Coward]

I've already forgotten it.