If you happen to be in that area, please take a look at the photos on the Find Marilyn website and keep your eyes open.
She was last seen on February 17th, 2008.
Technorati Tags: missing person
I find it interesting that the article is accompanied by two stills that appear to be from the panda sex video. One is a boring photo of the two pandas looking at each other from across a room. The other is of Qing Qing attacking Ha Lei, accompanied by the caption “Females commonly attack males after mating”.
These are strange choices for photos to accompany the article. The article is specifically about researchers showing this video to uninterested pandas in an effort to get them aroused. It should have been accompanied by photos of the researchers showing the video to pandas, a still of the pandas mating in the video, and (since the BBC obviously has the video of the pandas mating) they also should have posted the video to their website as a companion piece to the article. But that’s apparently not the way Western culture works. Violent photos are just fine, but photos of pandas actually engaged in mating (the horror) cannot be shown, and video –forget it.
Giant pandas mate rarely in captivity, and there are only a couple thousand of them left in the world. The entire video is newsworthy by any definition of the term. Who could be offended at a pair of pandas going at it?
Unlike the “Teaser Trailer”, this trailer concerns itself less with introducing the story and is more focused on imparting the feel of the film. There are tons of beautiful shots of scenery, action, Jackie Chan fighting Jet Li, Li Bing Bing being all hot and evil, Collin Chou looking devious, and Michael Angarano getting beaten up by just about everyone. In my opinion it’s more exciting than the teaser trailer, and given the amount of action in the film, a better representation of the film as well.
Yahoo’s “The Forbidden Kingdom” page also includes a countdown clock to the release date of the film. Right now it says 65 days, 21 hours, 15 minutes, and 55 seconds to go. Aiiiyaa!1 How freaky to actually see how little time is left until release. I’m going to see that countdown clock in my fitful sleep tonight2.
I’m happy to note that I can now use most of my Firefox extensions that haven’t yet been updated to pass the version check, because there’s an easy way to disable Firefox’s version-check code and run all extensions with abandon. Hooray.
I think the Windows font rendering method is designed specifically to make each character as clear and sharp as possible. I think the engineers who designed Windows XP’s typography engine did a great job accomplishing this task. The trouble with engineering is that it’s possible to come up with a great answer to the wrong problem. In my opinion, that is what happened here. The real problem with text on a computer is not clarity or sharpness, but readability.
The challenge of rendering fonts well on low-resolution screens is that fonts are full of curves and thin lines that just don’t line up exactly with the screen’s coarse grid of individual pixels. OS X and Windows both use sub-pixel rendering, so portions of characters that don’t land exactly on a screen pixel are rendered in shades of gray to represent how much of that pixel is covered by the font1. In order to make each character look as clear and sharp as possible, Windows alters the shape of characters to optimize the amount of each character that lands exactly on screen pixels and minimize the number of pixels that will be rendered as anything but black.
This definitely gives many characters a sharper look in Windows. Many instances of this can be noted in the images from my previous post, one obvious example is that Windows has taken the curved-top, bottom, left, and right edges of all lowercase ‘a’s and has straightened them so that they render as single and sharp lines of pixels at right-angles to one another. In comparison, the OS X rendering of the lowercase ‘a’s looks blurry and curvy.
But the trouble is, characters do not stand alone. Typographers for hundreds of years2 have taken great pains to design fonts so that the shape of characters, placed next to one another, produces well shaped words and sentences optimized for ease of reading. A well-designed font leads the eye through words, and the shape of the characters and the spacing between letters is crucial. The Windows font rendering engine changes fonts so thoroughly in order to maximize contrast that it warps them into shapes that barely resemble the original font (again, see those lowercase ‘a’s as a good example of this), and it also shifts portions of the fonts left and right such that the width of characters and the space between characters varies inconsistently, not just within within a line of text but even within individual words (note that in the Windows rendering of the word ‘event’ in the example image, there is a lot of space between the characters ‘e’ ‘v’ ‘e’, but ‘e’ ‘n’ ‘t’ are closer to each other).
The Microsoft engineers I know are very smart people, and I know Microsoft does a ton of usability studies, so how could they get this one so wrong? I suspect the wrong questions were asked. Perhaps test subjects were asked to look at blocks of text and rate their clarity and sharpness, or were asked to look at blocks of text rendered using different methods and were asked to judge the appearance of the text. Although I think the OS X method of font rendering is superior for the criteria that matter, I do think that when placed side by side with a block of text rendered by Windows and asked which block has the greatest clarity, many people would say the text in Windows looks clearer. And of course it does, there’s less gray, and those subjects might also be used to the look of non-antialiased fonts or bitmap fonts (especially at the time Windows XP was in development).
But the more important question to ask would be, “Which font rendering method produces more readable blocks of text”. And the way to test the question would be to take two groups of people with good reading skills who do not frequently read text on a computer, have each group read a 20-page story rendered on each computing platform, and time them. I contend that the OS X group, regardless whether they rated the text as clear or unclear, would finish reading first3. The reason being that OS X renders the fonts much more accurately, and since body fonts are carefully designed to be readable when typeset as words in paragraphs, the Windows tendency to mangle each character out of shape and out of harmony with its surrounding characters in order to maximize the clarity of individual characters turns out to be counterproductive. And butt-ugly IMO.
Ask the wrong questions, and you often wind up with answers like “42″ and font rendering engines like the one built into Windows XP.
Which do you prefer? Be honest now. OK, so maybe it’s not fair to compare the rendering of a font on a computer screen with a scan of actual printed type. And maybe it’s wrong to pick on Windows without offering up an example of how text is rendered in Mac OS X or Linux. Surely all computers have huge limitations when rendering the printed word. But actually I’m being more unfair than that. Please take another look at those examples, compare them, then click here to reveal the real captions for the above images to find out where they actually originated. (If you prefer the deceptive captions, you can reload ‘em).
To my eyes, OS X’s type rendering looks much like a scan of a newspaper or book. The weighting of characters is nice and even, and the text is pleasing to the eye and easy to read. Even if you didn’t buy the pretense of the original caption, it’s at least slightly possible to pass the OS X rendering off as something that was actually typeset and printed at high resolution.
Windows XP’s font rendering is an indefensible monstrosity.2 It pains me to think that over 90% of the personal computers in the world, in the year 2008, display text in this manner3. The characters in the Windows sample have very uneven weighting, with all corners and pointy details stabbing my eye with a couple pixels of absolute blackness while curves are rendered an anemic gray and straight lines are often reduced down to a single pixel in width (This problem jumps out at me in almost every letter, but can be seen more clearly in the sharp “J” next to the soft “o” in Jonathan, in the oddly sharp lower left corner of the lower-case “a”, and in the weird unevenness of the italics and the numerals). The best that can be said for the kerning is that it is bizarre; Letters are either smashed too close together or separated by chasms, within a single word. Italics are so awful in so many ways that I’m thinking of redesigning my pages to avoid using them altogether –Windows users have to suffer enough with regular text. Some characters look strangely condensed.
A few details to note: compare Windows’s rendering of the word “sweeping” to its rendering of the word “events” (why so much space between the instances of “e” and “v”?), then compare Windows’s renderings of the word “events”, “Rhys”, “1930’s”, “Children” to the OS X versions. And why are the OS X and Windows renderings of these lines so different in their relative lengths?
I’m sure there are compelling-sounding engineering reasons behind Microsoft’s assault on typography-loving eyes everywhere, but the proof is in the pudding. Both of these samples are of the same font, Georgia (designed specifically for Microsoft), and it is either Alanis-ironic or just plain sad that OS X kicks Windows’s ass so soundly at rendering Microsoft’s own. Another few hours of flipping between platforms and I’ll be compelled to file a shareholder resolution to push Microsoft to fix their font render engine, undergo a few sessions of maoist self-criticism, and make a public apology.
Windows, heal thyself, particularly thy crap-ass rendering of typography
An amusing alternate version can be found here.
Edit: Snowball the Cockatoo likes to dance to the Backstreet Boys and is awesome.“I’d like to refer to this whole thing from start to finish as a real Mickey Mouse operation, but that would be an insult to Mickey Mouse.”
Here’s a pretty fun little compilation of Bob Knight clips from ESPN, missing of course are some of his more offensive moments.
Technorati Tags: basketball, sports
