I came across two fascinating articles on my science blog reading today.
The first is from The Longevity Meme, a refreshingly libertarian science blog (why are so many sci-bloggers authoritarian progressives? A question for another post), whose name points to the obviously extropian focus. Caloric restriction has been a major focus in the life-extension community for decades. Unfortunately, it's always been questionable if the extremely promising results achieved in animals would ever carry over to humans. The deaths at fairly normal ages of such early CR standard-bearers as Roy Walford (a mere 79) certainly didn't help.
Anyway, the new study indicates that it might be protein restriction rather than caloric restriction which does it for us humans. Not impossible, given how long ago our biochemistry diverged and our already relatively long lives compared to most other species. If so, I'm glad I never want in for that Atkins crap.
Next, we have a summary from that dry firehose, EurekAlert (dryly written, but a staggering stream of info). It's one of those psychology things that seems kind of obvious in retrospect, but it's good to have it quantified anyway. The study shows that to make words more visible from far away, you get more bang for your back by separating the letters from each other than by increasing the letter size. Could be very handy for those of us making signs for trade shows and the like...
In programs like Word you don't have much control other than picking a font with a little more space in between the letters. For important graphics you might want to use programs like CorelDRAW (or the more common Adobe Illustrator for you conformists ;), which let you control "kerning" (fancy word for letter spacing, I think) on the individual character level.
March on, Mad Science!
(Yeah, I've been catching up on Girl Genius too :)
No comments:
Post a Comment