Informal poll (reblogged for morning viewers)

Do you think you’re going to get an iPad?

(Reply/answer via Tumblr Dashboard or click through and leave a comment.)

Informal poll

Do you think you’re going to get an iPad?

(Reply/answer via Tumblr Dashboard or click through and leave a comment.)

Math!

whileyouweresleeping:

Steven Strogatz, in Opinionator:

… suppose we add all the consecutive odd numbers, starting from 1:

1 + 3 = 4
1 + 3 + 5 = 9
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16
1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 = 25

The sums above, remarkably, always turn out to be perfect squares. (We saw 4 and 9 in the square patterns discussed earlier, and 16 = 4 × 4, and 25 = 5 × 5.) A quick check shows that this rule keeps working for larger and larger odd numbers; it apparently holds all the way out to infinity.

Did that just blow your mind, too?

— From London.

Neat, huh? But there’s a pretty intuitive explanation: suppose you have a bunch of pennies arranged in a square, and you want to increase the dimensions of the square by one. To do so, you have to add an L-shaped collection of pennies, and the L-shape always has an odd number of pennies in it.

The Wikipedia page on square numbers illustrates this perfectly:

Count the pink diamonds in each figure: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9…

QUIZ: Typeface or Body Part?

Do YOU know the difference between a ligament and a ligature? If someone said you had grotesque descenders, would you thank them or slap them?

In today’s fast-paced design world, you’re always just a tiny misunderstanding away from either a harassment suit or the best Rotary Club newsletter ever printed. Take our simple quiz and see if you’re ready for the challenges of modern typography.

FONT or ANATOMICAL TERM? (Answers next month!)

1. Herculanum
2. Duodenum
3. ITC Vas Deferens Premier Pro
4. Helveticles Neue
5. Zapf Dingbladder
6. Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Bold Oblique Clubfoot Regular
7. VAG Rounded

-.— -.— —..

lonelysandwich:

An actual tritone is a musical interval that spans three whole tones, and because it normally sounds horrible and dissonant and creates tension to be resolved into a perfect 5th, it’s historically known as Diabolus in Musica, or “the Devil’s interval” and was even suppressed by the Church in the Middle Ages.

Oh, how I love me a good tritone. It’s exactly half an octave, and thus the only interval that is its own inversion. It’s equivalent to either an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth.

You can use tritones to construct an auditory illusion in which the same sequence of tones is heard as ascending by some people and descending by others, and which way you’ll hear it is culturally determined. The consistency with which people resolve the paradox one way or the other for different pitches is evidence that absolute pitch is a not a rare gift but a common latent ability that can be learned.

In one particular Rush instrumental, a two-note theme consisting of the Morse code for Toronto Pearson International Airport appears in the introduction, the lower note representing the dits and the upper note standing in for the dahs. The interval between those two notes? A tritone.

How can the iPhone SDK be NDA’d?

rentzsch:

I was talking to a friend, who made an interesting point.

For $99, anyone can sign up to be an iPhone Developer. Then, Apple provides you with supposedly confidential information.

I’m no lawyer, but it doesn’t seem right to claim information is confidential while advertising it for sale to the public at large.

Protected by copyright, sure. But confidential?

Well, it’s not that anyone can just sign up. You have to apply, be accepted, sign the NDA and other agreements, and pay your $99. People have been rejected (though not so much these days) and have had their memberships terminated for violating the agreement. And if you lose your membership, you can’t download SDK updates, provision devices for development and testing, or sell your apps through the App Store. So it’s not strictly a sale of information; it’s a contract with very specific language that must be purposely agreed to, and a well-defined penalty for violation. That Apple charges for membership and isn’t particularly selective about whom it lets into the program doesn’t stop them from enforcing its terms, among which is that frustrating NDA.

It’s worth noting, however, that the confidentiality now covers only prerelease and beta materials, as has been the case for the parallel Mac Developer Program for as long as I can remember.