Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

End of the month and time to clean out the Fillip Folder on my machine — which means it’s a six-pack today, apropos for (what should be) the long weekend, perhaps.

1. FontStruct
I worked at a university for a great many years, and I eventually discovered that most of the faculty had no eyes. For them the visual world was purely a source of information, primarily in the form of text. All else was ornamentation, something that others might add on at the end — if there was time or an obscure need. The best illustration of this, for profs and, indeed, for many lawyers and librarians, who are also info-grabbers, is the complete lack of attention to type faces. Now, there’s a sense in which this is exactly what the type designer wants: the best fonts should slip below consciousness and simply offer up text as pretty as you please. But that marvelous disappearing act doesn’t mean we should be unaware of the wonders of design that go into the making of good type faces. FontStruct is the right tool to give you that appreciation. You sign up and then are invited to make your own type face online. The tools are well explained and there are lots of examples by others that you can learn from. And the beauty is that you’ll see that beauty in this information delivery system is… difficult.

2. Sustainable Energy, Without The Hot Air
Professor David J.C. MacKay, a natural philosopher in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, is writing a “popular book” on the problem of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, and he’s made a draft copy available online. What distinguishes this book from others on the topic is MacKay’s insistence on using numbers rather than adjectives to delineate the problem, leading to conclusions such as: “To provide one quarter of [the U.K.] current energy consumption by growing energy crops, for example, would require 75% of Britain to be covered with biomass plantations.” He’s posted an executive synopsis of the book in PDF for those who don’t want to expend the energy it would take to read the whole thing.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 27, 2008 (boomark / email).