Via HWTW, a hilarious advice piece to new profs by Phil Ford at Inside Higher Ed, adapted from a Notorious B.I.G rap, “The Ten Crack Commandments”. The article is great, but the comments are even funnier.
Hazardous Jobs #523: Dean of Undergraduate Studies
From Bob Sloan’s rumination on the joys of being an NSF program manager:
When I left for NSF, I was Director of Undergraduate Studies for a department that had well over 600 majors at the height of the dot com boom. The previous two holders of that position had only ended their time in it by leaving the country in one case and dying in the other—both far more extreme than going to NSF for a couple of years
It’s the Sans Serif smackdown
In the right corner: HELVETICA !!
Helvetica, which had its world premiere at the conference, presents the life story of something all of us encounter on a daily (or even hourly) basis. Created in 1957 by the Swiss modernist designer Max Miedinger as a response to the cluttered typography and design of the postwar era, Helvetica’s clean neutrality and balanced use of the empty space surrounding letters quickly made it a go-to font for public signage, advertising, corporate logos and works of modernist design around the world[...]
Filmmaker Gary Hustwitt revels in his fascination with something so commonplace that it blends almost entirely into a context-less background, becoming a detective of sorts to unveil the myriad everyday places Helvetica is hiding (“It’s a disease,” Hustwitt said of his obsessive font-spotting).
In the left corner: COMIC SANS MS:
Earz: I found a weird website on typography, it was written in Italian I think, and had images of a gravestone lettered in comic sans. What does that say to you?That would only be appropriate if the deceased were a clown or comedian, but other than that, I’d come back to haunt whoever did that if I were the dead guy.
Personally, I prefer Trebuchet MS.
p.s In the top corner, ARIAL:
It’s been a very long time since I was actually a fan of Helvetica, but the fact is Helvetica became popular on its own merits. Arial owes its very existence to that success but is little more than a parasite—and it looks like it’s the kind that eventually destroys the host. I can almost hear young designers now saying, “Helvetica? That’s that font that looks kinda like Arial, right?”
The Cauchy-BUNYAKOVSKY-Schwarz inequality
Episode #2583 of “By the law of large numbers (of Russian mathematicians), your theorem has been proved by some Russian before you even thought of it”:
Viktor Bunyakovsky worked on Number Theory as well as geometry, mechanics and hydrostatics. He discovered the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality 25 years before Cauchy or Schwarz.
