Morning Fog

New Typography - Where Does It Stop?

It hasn't been so often lately that I have had the chance to read a book, but in the past couple of weeks I tried specifically to devote some time to reading beyond the newspaper. 

That's how I wound up tackling an 1100-pager last week.  But reading isn't as easy as it used to be.  I don't mean my vision, which still seems fine.   The difficulty is that publishers/printers/writers don't use a double space after a full stop anymore. 

I have found this mildly annoying before, something I've noticed but put up with, yet I now realize that it will become very enervating over the longer haul of 1100 pages:

For a while I thought the single-spaced sentence ending was just a conceit (or an ignorance) of Bill Gates, analogous to the way he seems to think you would want your address book organized alphabetically by first name (!).  But many sources remind us that double spacing was abandoned in books and magazines long before Microsoft, as early as the 1950s or 1960s.  Perhaps I attributed it to computerization because early word processers tended to "autocorrect" two spaces to just one.  At least they no longer do that!  In any case, the standard explanation for the change, provided by authorities as disparate as Slate and Wikipedia, is that due to scalable type, the double spacing is "no longer necessary." 

Well, maybe not to publishers.  But for readers (for me, anyway), my latest experience with this current book is that spacing is essential to comfortable reading and quick cognition.  A period is a small thing, not easily noticed.  In smaller fonts, it's likely to be indistinguishable from a comma, and the upper-case letter beginning the next sentence also may be less noticeable, or mistaken for a proper noun.  The double space is (or was) the best and most noticeable signal of a full stop.

With the new typographic convention, I find myself constantly being fooled into reading run-on sentences Wait I think as I get halfway into the next sentence, "that doesn't make sense," or "how does that track?"  It's annoying, unnecessary, and delaying.

Publishers, authors, editors!  Let's show some respect for the reader, and reinstate the double space to its proper place in the pantheon of correct typography.  Word-processing programmers, how about at least a means of changing defaults, so that the double space could be automatically inserted?  Or maybe we should go back to the practice used in those old-fashioned telegrams, where the period didn't exist and we used the word "stop" instead STOP

Of The "Minimum Wage," And Restaurant Tipping

Current efforts to raise the federal minimum wage in the U.S. have led to an uptick in interest in the topic.  

Today, Morning Fog would like to refer readers to our associated blog, The Tin Lizard, for "The Dirty Little Secret Behind Your Restaurant Tips" on a subissue, the question of restaurant tips and the so-called "tipped minimum wage."   

Wired

Out for a morning walk earlier this week, I noticed that a big, fat, full moon was still visible, clear and high in the morning sky, even at 7:30 AM.

As 21st-century man is wont to do, I whipped out my cell phone to capture this relatively mundane event for posterity.

But there was a problem.  Wires.  Electrical, telephone, cable.  Poles. Transformers.  Useful but ugly infrastructure strung across my view of the sky.  We may have trained our eyes to selectively and subconsciously omit some of this junk, but the camera captures all, as this photo indicates:

 

Further, though I tried many angles and distances, from a variety of spots along my route, it was impossible to find a place from which to snap any kind of photo without finding a good deal of man's despoliage of his horizons.  This, in a low-rise residential neighborhood!  It's much worse in commercial areas.  Of course, with a telephoto lens, or with severe cropping, it's possible to get a moon no wires, like this: 

 

But it sort of lacks context, don't you think?

Problems with over head wires aren't new; their shortcomings are not just visual and electrical interference, but susceptibility to weather, which brings us several power outages of various lengths throughout the year, with concomitant costs of repair and restoration.  Meanwhile, the companies that spread the blight continue to insist that underground cabling is "too expensive."

Still, on the grand scale of things, it's as if a huge spider were attempting to wrap the globe in its web - and doing a pretty good job of it, too -- closing us all in for eventual transmogrification from plump and juicy morsels to hollow shells sucked dry of fluid. 

How does this industrial version of the "world-wide web" affect mankind's spirit of discovery, adventure, freedom?   Will space exploration grind to a halt when we have so thoroughly swaddled the earth in conduit that there is no way for a rocket to poke through?  Would Wilbur and Orville have been inspired to their work on manned flight if their view of the sky had been hemmed in by a thick network of wires? 

[A fair corollary for consideration: would they have done so if they had known what a squalid experience air travel would become within just a few decades?] 

Is wireless technology the answer?  So far, it lacks reliability.  My fairly high-grade cell phone still does not produce as clear an audio experience as my old-fashioned "land line."  The giant spider proceeds, inexorably...

 

Following The Money On Smoking

In today's Doonesbury comic strip, Gary Trudeau has some fun with the fact that many of the states that received gobs of money from the big tobacco settlement -- the one that was supposed to provide funds for states to run anti-smoking campaigns, educate young people about smoking, and the like -- are not spending it for that purpose, but for other ordinary budget items.

I say "fact" above.  Of course just because it's in Doonesbury doesn't mean it's true, but I have little doubt that it is.

The same tendency to cadge any available funds, even those earmarked for other purposes, for immediate needs infects local, state, and national government.  (For example, a funny thing happened on the way to the bank with the Social Security "trust fund."  And it happened almost from the first deposit they were supposed to make.) 

The problem seems self-perpetuating.  Absent clear laws or rules of procedure to prevent it, can we count on our elected leaders to correct things?  Not if what they've accomplished on campaign reform is any indication. So no. Politicians, no matter what their party, seemingly can't resist these little experiments in fungibility.  Addicts can't cure themselves. 

Perhaps there is no fix.  Wouldn't it be an interesting spectacle, though, if the tobacco companies themselves, or perhaps a group of anti-smoking organizations, were to sue over this misspending?

 

  

The Promise Of Change

Election returns from the U.S. midterms are in, with a few races remaining in the balance (here in Virginia, for example, where the Democratic incumbent for Senate, Mark Warner, appears to have won, though the margin is slim enough that under Virginia law, his Republican opponent can request a recount).

But by and large, it was clearly a huge Republican victory. 

It's hard to disagree with the analytical line all the pundits are taking:   The voters want change. 

But change to what?  Does the outcome suggest a huge swing to Republican points of view?  Probably not, because U.S. demographic evolution is broadly toward what have traditionally been Democratic-party values; nobody really knows what Republican policies are, given serious splits within the party itself; and the current results may be due in part to the fact many Democrats and younger voters probably stayed home.

So it seems more probable that the impulse for change that motivated voters of all stripes was a broad discontent with gridlock.   One morning-after commentator (sorry, I can't recall which one) expressed it this way (I paraphrase):  the GOP needs to be careful not to accept Tuesday's results as an endorsement of its positions; it will have to be more than "the party of no," and show in the next two years that it can get things done in arenas - like the economy - that matter most to the people.

I think that's a fine, and correct, analysis.   But I don't have a lot of hope that it's going to turn out that way.  It will be far too tempting for Republicans, especially those who have had their noses pressed against the window for so long, to believe they have a "mandate" to return the country to the halcyon days of Eisenhower (or even Hoover, since this is the largest Republican majority in Congress, we're told, since that fine gent was in the White House).  Can cooler heads in the party prevail, and recalibrate the GOP's future?  

Again, I'm not optimistic, but it could happen.  I'll be looking first and foremost for a willingness for true bipartisan compromise (ardent desire may be too much to hope for but I'll take it if it comes).  We need to see this on both sides of the aisle, but the burden is now with the Republicans, who have the majority and the momentum.  In addition,  I'll be looking for signs that the Republican party can get control of its E.T. (Extreme Tea) wing; and for the evolution of competitive GOP Presidential candidates for 2016.

 

 

The Democratic Brand

Economic analyst/commentator Steven Pearlstein, who should know a thing or two about one of the most common buzzwords of our decade, "branding," argues that the Democratic Party faces losses in this week's election mainly because of the party's failure to manage its brand properly.

Surely, that is overstating the case.  There are certainly other factors.  But Pearlstein's argument that when Democratic politicians avoid campaigning with Obama, downplay their support for their party's fundamental principles, and fail to claim (let alone defend) the party's signal achievement of the past six years, they weaken their position, blur what the party stands for, and may discourage their base from even going to the polls.

This argument contains a good deal of wisdom. 

For four years, for example, I've thought that Obama and key Democrats failed miserably all along to bolster public support for the Affordable Care Act.  They took little effort to explain it (or worse, explained it in ways that added to the confusion; they neglected to set it in the context of a continuing history of social and economic justice, and they missed many opportunities to counter Republican misrepresentations.  (Muffing the online rollout of course didn't help either).  Maybe they thought it was self-evident?  It wasn't, and the GOP was allowed to define the debate. 

But one thing missing in Pearlstein's analysis is timing.  Greater attention to the Democratic "brand" a few years ago might have helped make the predicted fiasco of 2014 somewhat less bitter a pill. Now, I'm not sure it would really make any difference.  

Today's Economy - The Future We Were Told To Expect?

A Washington Post blogger, Matt O'Brien, is telling us that "the economy may never bounce back."  This is based on a chart he credits to Lawrence Summers, showing how the Congressional Budget Office has lowered its forecast for U.S. economic performance in each year since 2007.  And even now, actual GDP continues below the CBO's lowered estimate for the current year.

Well, if so, maybe this is the bright tomorrow that we were promised back in 1960 or so..  Decades ago, it was commonplace for economic pundits to talk in glowing terms about the economy of the future, in which we would all be freed from labor by advances in productive technology.  No need to work! Paradise.  

Even at that time, though, some commonsensical folks wondered how that would work out.  If hardly anyone worked, no one would have "jobs," but it turns out people for the most part need and want some kind of productive activity.  And besides, if no one had a job, where would they derive the income they would need to enjoy the good life?  The cloud of paradise has a black lining.

Personally I doubt we need to worry.  Where economies are concerned, it seems it's usually when no one can see an avenue to improvement that things turn around, often in ways that economists haven't been able to predict.  

Oh, and speaking of predictions, politicians are usually no better at them.  The next Congress, the next President, will implement new programs intended to address our economic ills at just about the time when the last batch of programs is kicking in with effect.  They'll be happy to take credit for any improvements, and we will very likely draw the wrong lesson about what works.