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Comment Re:The flaw isn't the font. (Score 2) 391

Typesetters absolutely did use a wider inter-sentence space than inter-word space. (Outside of France, at least.) In fact, around 1900 the convention used to be for inter-sentence space to be an em-space (as wide as an M) and inter-word space to be 1/3 of that, the width of a lowercase L. The em-space got shortened to an en-space (half as much) through the 20th century, making inter-sentence space 1.5 times the inter-word space. (aside: The space after a colon used to be huge. Like 1.5-2 ems.)

Personally, I use 2 spaces and find 1 space harder to read in most fonts. I feel like my eye "trips over" the first word in a new sentence when there's not enough space--it feels a bit like reading it twice. We have wonderful typesetting programs like LaTeX, but most of the stuff I see in Word and in web browsers looks pretty awful. I'm not sure why we don't use our good typesetting algorithms in more contexts. I've used some programs that make double spacing WAY too wide, while single-spacing is still too short, which is frustrating. (My company used HipChat, which had this problem.)

I think that single vs. double spacing would be a good way to communicate to the typesetter which kind of space to use. I think I've heard of a typesetting system that does this. LaTeX tried to infer what space you want after a period based on capitalization and such. It usually does the right thing, but you have to resort to weird syntax when it doesn't.

Comment Re:It's already been done (Score 1) 234

Listened to your links. Frankly, I've heard church music with more dissonance. There was nary a minor 9th, major 7th, or minor 2nd to be found. Some major 2nds in the first link were about as dissonant as it got. I don't know what it is about metal that makes people think the harmonies are more complex than they are, but it's something I hear pretty often. Maybe the harsh timbres of the guitar effects and vocals make people think "this doesn't sound pretty; it must be dissonant."

Comment Re:Pretentious (Score 1) 234

I agree it's not really accurate to call it "The World's Ugliest Piece of Music." That would imply that the beauty of music is solely a function of how repetitive it is, which is obviously false because a single note repeated at regular intervals (or maybe a square wave held indefinitely on a single pitch) would certainly not qualify as "The World's Most Beautiful Piece of Music."

However, I don't mind this as a bit of marketing. There's really no denying that this piece is intended to be listened to after a brief explanation of the mathematics behind it, and "Mathematically Ugliest Music" is a more intriguing hook than the more descriptive "equally-tempered 88-tone row without repeated pitch or interval classes, played so that no two notes are rhythmically separated by the same rhythmic distance, on the premise that repetition is necessary for beauty in music."

While this piece does minimize a positive aspect of music, it does nothing to maximize negative aspects. Dissonance counterpoint comes to mind as a better example of actually trying to write unpleasing music. Basically, it takes the rules of counterpoint theorists have used to describe the music of Palestrina or Bach, then slavishly follows the opposite of those rules.

Comment Re:Random Number Generator (Score 1) 234

Well, different branches of mathematics have different notions of randomness. Your post makes sense assuming a statistician's concept of randomness. Your parent post almost makes sense assuming an information theorist's concept of random. (I say almost because actually proving a sequence to be Kolmogorov random is an incomputable problem.)

Comment Re:Vendors (Score 1) 313

"Apple's nVidia drivers are about 3 billion times more reliable than anything nVidia itself has ever produced."
FYI, NVIDIA produces Apple's NVIDIA drivers. Sounds like you may have hardware problems on your Win7 box.

Comment Re:Easy solution (Score 1) 572

I agree with you that it's polite to ask nicely for someone to do what they're paid for. I also agree with your parent post that it's not necessary. It's not like the waitress is justified in not bringing you your dinner because you didn't say please when you ordered.

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