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!)
- Herculanum
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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.
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.
Me: (tries to visit a local restaurant’s website via iPhone)
Restaurant website: I require Flash. Fuck off.
Me: I just want to know how late you’re open.
Website: Nope.
Me: But I’m on my phone. Don’t you have a little “HTML Version” link up in the corner or something?
Website: I’m ignoring you.
Me: What if I’m on my phone because I’m out, looking for a place to eat? Didn’t that ever occur to you?
Website: Fuck entirely off.
Me: (gives up, switches to computer)
Website: Oh! Hi! What can I help you with today?
Me: What are your —
Website: Hang on, I’m loading the music.
Me: Really.
Website: You’ll love it. It’s “Girl from Ipanema” arranged for steel drum and keytar.
Me: No, you don’t have to —
Website: Loading…
Me: All I want is —
Website: I SAID DOT DOT DOT.
Me: (drums fingers on desk)
Website: There we go. Isn’t that nice? It’s… what’s the word. Ethnicky.
Me: What are your hours?
Website: Take a look at our menu! It’s a PDF of a screenshot of a scan of a Word document printed on a dishtowel. With fonts!
Me: I don’t care. What are your hours?
Website: Don’t worry, the menu loads in a new window so the music won’t stop. Can I show you some broken images?
Me: What. Are. Your. Hou. Rs.
Website: I… I don’t know.
Me: (goes to Denny’s)
