tingilinde

beyond comic sans

Despised by designers, the comic sans font has some fans in the dyslexic community.  And now fonts that are supposedly even better for dyslexics.

a tip of the hat to Roland

an artist's catalog of color

A 900 page obscure book dating o 1692.  The physical book would be wonderful,  This is a scan that's difficult to navigate (sort of the 1990 CD-Rom level of UI).

 

 

the authoritaritan personality

A CBC Ideas podcast episode on what personalities are attracted to authoritarians. A bit in the text, but more in the podcast.   

recommended

 

 

on public libraries

What they're for.

snip

...

Libraries fill a role central to any functioning democracy: upholding the rights of citizens to read, to seek information, to speak freely. As champions of access, librarians are committed to curating collections that allow everyone who enters the library to see themselves in the books and resources the library provides. It is especially crucial to serve people who belong to traditionally marginalized groups — such as the LGBTQ community — which have historically been underrepresented in the publishing industry.

...

 

 

true then .. sadly true now

 

“There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious.”

― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)

 

 

arguably the best book review I've read in years

On Jared Kushner's Breaking History

snip

...

“Breaking History” is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering (the “mechanic”) with issues he was interested in.

This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.

...

 

 

 

 

 

“A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb … But we are not helpless … We can sing the truth & name the liars.”

 Salman Rushdie

 

 

audiobooks or reading?

Turns out it doesn't matter...  at least in this experiment  (note - the work is about three years old)

the paper in The Journal of Neuroscience

 

The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading Is Invariant to Stimulus Modality

 

Fatma Deniz, Anwar O. Nunez-Elizalde, Alexander G. Huth and Jack L. Gallant

Abstract

An integral part of human language is the capacity to extract meaning from spoken and written words, but the precise relationship between brain representations of information perceived by listening versus reading is unclear. Prior neuroimaging studies have shown that semantic information in spoken language is represented in multiple regions in the human cerebral cortex, while amodal semantic information appears to be represented in a few broad brain regions. However, previous studies were too insensitive to determine whether semantic representations were shared at a fine level of detail rather than merely at a coarse scale. We used fMRI to record brain activity in two separate experiments while participants listened to or read several hours of the same narrative stories, and then created voxelwise encoding models to characterize semantic selectivity in each voxel and in each individual participant. We find that semantic tuning during listening and reading are highly correlated in most semantically selective regions of cortex, and models estimated using one modality accurately predict voxel responses in the other modality. These results suggest that the representation of language semantics is independent of the sensory modality through which the semantic information is received.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans can comprehend the meaning of words from both spoken and written language. It is therefore important to understand the relationship between the brain representations of spoken or written text. Here, we show that although the representation of semantic information in the human brain is quite complex, the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical. These results suggest that the representation of language semantics is independent of the sensory modality through which the semantic information is received.

 

new brick and mortar bookstores

Something I didn't expect - growth in small bookstores.  

 

the day for some jean shepherd

(the book is better, but this will do)