Larry Hosken: New: Tag: letters

Book Report: Shift Happens, Vol. №1

It's the first volume in a set of books about the history of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with text on various then-newfangled devices. I learned a lot, which might kind of surprise you; I'd already learned plenty about the history of this technology and that technology. But focusing on text brings you to some weird corners.

E.g., in the very-early days of typewriters, a typist couldn't see what they'd typed; the marks were under the paper, hidden by the typewriter mechanism. You might say "Well, any serious typist learns to touch-type at some point; but I dunno if I could work up the resolve to learn touch typing if I couldn't see my work when I was starting out.

I learned about Linotype spacebands. A linotype lets a typesetter make a line-of-type by typing text, laying out an array of letterform molds. But this tool, for book and newspaper publishers, supports full-justified text. It did that by changing the spacing between words; not so hard if they're just blips of light on a computer screen, but tricky when they're pieces of metal sitting in a track. It turns out that while the letter-pieces were flat, spaces were spacebands, tall subtly-slanted wedges.

|..____⚺____⚺___⚺__⚺___.|

When you'd entered a line of text, the machine would push down on the wedges, forcing apart the words until those words hit the edges of the track.

|_____ _____ ____ ___ ___|
      V     V    V   V

They fit snugly enough such that when hot lead was poured over the track, it probably didn't leak past those wedges.

I learned something about the history of the telegraph, surprising since I studied that pretty hard while coming up with ideas for that Telegraph Hill puzzle hunt. I learned about some of the also-ran devices that were devised, false starts towards usability. Many people saw that electricity could be used for communication. Someone at point A closes an electrical circuit; this causes something to happen at point B, far away but also on that electric circuit. But what should happen? It shouldn't require too much power; you'd have to drive that much power through the circuit. (Modern folks might think "why not run a little trickle of power through the circuit and use it to trigger a transistor to something more powerful at the receiving end?" but of course this is all before transistors.) I read about the efforts Francisco Salva Campillo, who had the idea of using twitching severed frogs' legs at the receiving end to indicate when the circuit was closed. I'm really glad I didn't try to write a puzzle around that.

So far, so good. Onward to Volume №2.

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Book Report: S v Z This book accompanies Tauba Auerbach's exhibit now showing at SFMoMA. It's an interesting piece of art in its own right. That's a good thing, I guess? I find myself comparing it to an earlier book d...

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Further Bewordled I read Allison Parrish's article "Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish," in which she discusses the design of the card game Rewordable. Like Scrabble and Bananagrams, in Rewordable a player builds u...

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I made a little program to generate "ransom note" text using fancy international symbols like "İ 𝗺Ąⅅ𝔼 𝔸 𝔩𝒊ŦƬ𝕃🝗 ᑭ𝗥Ⲟ𝙶ꞅ𝙰𝗺 t𝕆 𝔾ƐŊЄᏒa𝞣𝐸 'Ꮢ𝛢𝛮💲⎔⩋ Ŋ⎔Ƭ𝛦' Ƭ𝐸𝑿t 𝑼ຣi𝓝𝙶 🝡𝘈𝚗𝘾γ 𝒊𝚗𝚃𝙴Rn⩜𝚃İ⬯Ⲛaℒ ട𝘺ოβ⎔ℓS." ...

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As a wordplay enthusiast, I was excited to hear about an old book called Ars Magna by Ramon Llull that tried to find new occult truths by re-arranging letters. The letters of "Ars Magna", after all, ...

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Free Donald Knuth lecture coming up… about Metafont. Clever guy, but not my topic. I probably won't go, but maybe you're interested. ...

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Fear and Loathing in Alternate Reality Warning: this blog rant contains a mild spoiler for act two of the Games of Nonchalance a.k.a. "The Elsewhere Public Works Agency". It won't spoil any "puzzle": what makes the situation so dreadful...

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Book Report: Alphabet Juice This book is a sort of lexicon, except that instead of definitions there are riffs. These are some of the author's favorite words, or at least words that he wanted to write about. He likes to pron...

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Site: Tauba Auerbach / The Alphabet Variations You may recall that I went to a gallery a couple of weeks ago. It was some art by Tauba Auerbach, including two that featured an alphabetload of overlapping letterforms. I'd wondered what they woul...

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Book Report: How to Spell the Alphabet A while back, I pointed out some not-exactly-puzzle-ish-but-not-exactly-not-either images by Tauba Auerbach. I finally broke down and sent away for a book of her work, How to Spell the Alphabet. To...

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Park Challenge Today Team Unwavering Resolve (a.k.a. Steven Pitsenbarger, Paul du Bois, and I) played in Park Challenge, a puzzle hunt game organized by the Desert Taxi folks. It was a fun stroll in Golden Gate Pa...

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