I didn't read the OP but one pet peeve of mine is the uppercase I vs. lowercase L in sans-serif. Especially in contexts like randomly-generated passwords which you have to manually copy for whatever reason. Does the article address this in any way? Or is the context limited to "real" language where that's not as much of an issue?
That's only a problem with some sans-serif fonts. This very site is using a sans-serif and the capital 'I' has bars in either end so it's not confused with 'l'.
Some sans-serif fonts do add little flourishes to some letters, like 'l', to further distinguish them.
According to the CSS, this site requests the fonts Verdana or Geneva in order, and what you say about the capital 'I' is true for the former but not the latter.
> That's only a problem with some sans-serif fonts. This very site is using a sans-serif and the capital 'I' has bars in either end so it's not confused with 'l'.
I'm not sure if my browser is broken or what but they literally look identical to me in your comment.
One place where the big i and small L look almost identical, and a pretty funny/annoying place for them to do so, is when you're typing a WiFi password in OSX (if you toggle "Show password"), at least as of MacOS Monterey 12.1. I also see them as almost identical in my browser's URL bar (Firefox 148.0.2 on aforesaid version of OSX) which isn't just an annoyance but might even be a security concern!
And that's the argument for serif. If you set sans serif the OS may pick one or another font, and that choice may change over time.
By publishing with serif you are guaranteed there will be a clearer distinction.
But txet is contxtual you can evn miss letres entrly yet be lgibl.
The over a hundred page long research paper makes conclusion off a practical study, not encumbered by intuitive clues that typically make us think serif lead to more legibility.
Not for me. The font we are all seeing depends on our browser and whether we have the requested fonts. No bars on the sans serif my Firefox on Android is displaying.
This might be a question of philosophy! I suspect that they were originally serifs - see inscriptions to Julius Caesar, say (such inscriptions being the inspiration for Trajan font) - but for some writers they were extended to become part of the letter body, akin to the bar on the top of capital-T.
My take then is, originally they were serifs, now they are sometimes part of the letter form.
It's surprisingly rare for fonts to be careful to distinguish not just Il1| but also 0O 2Z "'' 5S B8. I typically set my system font to something that does, like Atkinson hyperlegible.
Smallcaps hyperlinks is even worse than it might initially sound: many ESL speakers have difficulty with text written in all-caps, and it totally makes sense why, if you think about it.
All-uppercase distorts the shapes, making them unfamiliar to ESL readers who have less practice. You must know that famous meme about how you can read English perfectly fine if the letters (besides first and last) of each word are scrambled: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy..."
Granted, I'm not an expert in this area. I'm actually just relaying what an ESL ex of mine told me. She hated whenever she had to read things like "Calvin and Hobbes" which use all-caps, for this exact reason. Come to think of it, she was Japanese, I wonder if it has to do with growing up with a logographic writing system.
Uppercase doesn't distort shapes, they're just the uppercase shapes. Reading in all-uppercase is a basic skill that you quickly learn, since it's extremely common in signs, titles, etc.
I can understand that learning separate letters for lowercase and uppercase is something that students coming from other writing systems have to learn, the same way I had to learn both uppercase and lowercase in Greek.
But it's just a year-one skill you have to learn. You learn it, fairly quickly, and then you're fine. It's not a reason to avoid using small caps. Generally speaking, by the time your English skills are good enough to read an average paragraph, text in all-uppercase has not been a problem for you for a long time. Vocabulary is the thing that takes a long time to learn, not recognizing words in uppercase.
So while I don't doubt that your ex was telling the truth about Calvin and Hobbes, I think that was just a personal annoyance of hers. It's not a widespread problem. But everybody winds up having their own idiosyncratic annoyances with foreign languages.
Yes, all-caps and lowercase have different word shapes. This is something that slightly slows down native or highly experienced speakers (readers), because they have so much exposure to reading the language that they use the word shape to help.
This is not something ESL students are doing to any appreciable degree. They have not put in the 1000's of hours of reading in the target language to read even faster by identifying word shapes. That is a level of optimization they are nowhere near.
I'm working on arranging talks and poster presentations at various conferences/seminars to spread knowledge of my latest academic paper, "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points". In the paper, among other things, I argue that (we should define species in such a way that) for any organism in any species, either the species is made up almost entirely of descendants of that organism, or else the species is made up almost entirely of non-descendants of that organism. This is a funny property because most people who hear about it fall into one of two camps, those who say it is obviously true, and those who say it is obviously false!
This is a common misconception. People without academic affiliation (based on their email address) require someone to vouch for them before they can submit to arxiv. And papers submitted to arxiv (with or without affiliation) are reviewed, and many are rejected.
arXiv does not review everything pushed to the site.
It's very easy to get in. It's becoming a common target for grifters who will "publish" papers on arXiv because it looks formal to those who don't know any better.
>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality.
I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more securely because of all the slop.
Congratulations. How did you do it? And how do you get access to resources such as reference products, journals, etc. that typically require institutions with budgets?
Sorry for not seeing your message until now. Journals, at least in mathematics, generally don't require you to have a university affiliation, so as long as the paper is good on its merits, you can get it in, though I don't know to what extent it might be more of an uphill battle due to implicit peer reviewer bias etc. Re: reference products: one generally scraps what one can together through a combination of arxiv.org, Anna's archive, or emailing the authors.
Thanks for responding! Have you ever tried to get access to for-pay reference sources such as JSTOR? I haven't found a way other than going in-person to libraries, which is not practical.
On rare occasions where the other methods don't yield anything, I have friends in academia who have access and who are happy to help out. But yeah, it's totally medieval that this knowledge isn't freely available to the world.
J.S. Mill's autobiography is a fascinating read. He spends quite a lot of it discussing his early childhood, explaining that in his opinion he was not particularly special, rather, it was his father who pushed him to all those accomplishments. His father sheltered him from other kids so he was not aware that his accomplishments were unusual!
"The main axiom we introduce [...] states that for any organism in any species, either the species contains at most finitely many descendants of that organism, or else the species contains at most finitely many non-descendants of that organism."
This subject always seems to get bogged down in discussions about ordered vs. unordered keys, which to me seems totally irrelevant. No-one seems to mention the glaring shortcoming which is that, since dictionary keys are required to be hashable, Python has the bizarre situation where dicts cannot be dict keys, as in...
{{'foo': 'bar'}: 1, {3:4, 5:6}: 7}
...and there is no reasonable builtin way to get around this!
You may ask: "Why on earth would you ever want a dictionary with dictionaries for its keys?"
More generally, sometimes you have an array, and for whatever reason, it is convenient to use its members as keys. Sometimes, the array in question happens to be an array of dicts. Bang, suddenly it's impossible to use said array's elements as keys! I'm not sure what infuriates me more: said impossibility, or the python community's collective attitude that "that never happens or is needed, therefore no frozendict for you"
> the glaring shortcoming which is that, since dictionary keys are required to be hashable, Python has the bizarre situation where dicts cannot be dict keys
There is nothing at all bizarre or unexpected about this. Mutable objects should not be expected to be valid keys for a hash-based mapping — because the entire point of that data structure is to look things up by a hash value that doesn't change, but mutating an object in general changes what its hash should be.
Besides which, looking things up in such a dictionary is awkward.
> More generally, sometimes you have an array, and for whatever reason, it is convenient to use its members as keys.
We call them lists, unless you're talking about e.g. Numpy arrays with a `dtype` of `object` or something. I can't think of ever being in the situation you describe, but if the point is that your keys are drawn from the list contents, you could just use the list index as a key. Or just store key-value tuples. It would help if you could point at an actual project where you encountered the problem.
Turning a dictionary into a tuple of tuples `((k1, v1), (k2, v2), ...)`; isn't that a reasonable way?
If you want to have hash map keys, you need to think about how to hash them and how to compare for equality, it's just that. There will be complications to that such as floats, which have a tricky notion of equality, or in Python mutable collections which don't want to be hashable.
>I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.
Here's a trick, it sounds stupid but it works like magic.
Just talk about mundane things that are physically present. Mention the color of the wallpaper. Mention the painting on the wall. Talk about how noisy the room is, or about the food on the plate in front of you. Literally act like you're an image classifier tasked with outputting a text summary of the scene you find yourself in...
If you're the cerebral type like I am, you'll feel afraid these topics will bore the other person. But surprisingly, they don't, if the other person is neurotypical.
