Hard News: Higgs Live!
319 Responses
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I find the comic sans hate pretty hilarious. Most typefaces are horrible. Times New Roman? Ugh. Etc etc.
The real problems here are around visual noise and clutter, which have very little to do with type choices. Also much harder to fix. Structural as opposed to surface etc.
One of the second year projects at Ilam in design is to layout spreads from a science textbook.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
The real problems here are around visual noise and clutter, which have very little to do with type choices.
Agreed.
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Scott Chris, in reply to
And there are folks in science who are very good at presenting their data.
Easier to present data on the supposed benefits of drinking red wine than, say, the feeding habits of Powelliphanta Augusta.
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Keir Leslie, in reply to
Which is pretty ironic, given what half the difficulty in high energy particle physics is!
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
tasty, yet solid, energy...
...data on the supposed benefits of drinking red wine than, say, the feeding habits of Powelliphanta Augusta
I hear they are very nice pan fried in butter with a little red wine...
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Scott Chris, in reply to
Ha! Very clever. Reminds me of Monty Burns singing See My Vest
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Which is pretty ironic, given what half the difficulty in high energy particle physics is!
Not really given their solution to finding data within an obscuring mess is to smash 500 trillion nuclei
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David Hood, in reply to
But if I only get to travel overseas to one conference in 5 years I’m damn well not going to a photoshop course!
Twitch Please don't try to make A0 posters in Photoshop Twitch
I teach our university's two hour (2 measly hours) Conference Poster Making course, but I have to acknowledge most people would rather do their own thing using Powerpoint, assuming that it is as good at producing giant sheets of paper as it is slides, rather than come to a course to learn to use a layout program (though that same program can be equally use at making diagrams & maps).
I name Powerpoint specifically as that is the main culprit for people turning up at helpdesk going I wanted to make a poster, but it won't print and I'm out of time. -
Meanwhile, actual tweets. Take that, atheists!
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Please don’t try to make A0 posters in Photoshop
That was why I learned to use Pagemaker and then InDesign (I say learned in the loosest sense of the word).
And a two hour course sounds good to me.
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chris, in reply to
For the briefest nanosecond I felt the slightest pang that the Communist Party have banned the shit out of Twitter.)
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
That was why I learned to use
Pagemaker and then InDesignI still swear by, and use, FreeHand as a default page -making program - unfortunately it seems to be becoming an unsupported cottage industry and maroons me below OS 10.6...
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That Free Me From Those Money Grubbing Printers and let me at "Desk Top Publishing". Now THAT has a lot to answer for......
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Lilith __, in reply to
By ‘napkin’ I obviously mean ‘serviette’. I dunno WTF is happening to my class roots.
My Grandma always insisted on "paper table-napkin".
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Lilith __, in reply to
FreeHand as a default page -making program
You mean that's NOT the standard anymore?? I feel old.
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Regarding cold fusion, that someone mentioned earlier: it would be revolutionary enough if humans got ordinary fusion to produce more energy than it consumes. That would change the world. People are working on it!
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Islander, in reply to
My Grandma always insisted on “paper table-napkin”.
We still call 'em paper napkins...confuses the hell out of some people...
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Kracklite, in reply to
While JET/ITER have some promise – though Tokamaks could fall short of other potentially cheaper and ultimately easier means than Polywell or Z-pinch – who knows – alas, the opposition the fundamentalist green opposition to anything with the letters “f” or “n” reaches the level of the absurd. I can’t find the actual source, but I remember a German Green politician saying or admitting in a radio interview that her party’s opposition to fusion was essentially because it was “nuclear”. Turei’s idiotic tweet seems on a par. People like that would ban stars if they knew how they shone. It’s a pity, but sometimes I’m reminded all too well by a quote from Larry Niven that there is no cause so noble (and I do believe that overall the green movement is a noble cause) that you won’t find damned fools following it.
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Lilith __, in reply to
her party’s opposition to fusion was essentially because it was “nuclear”.
The devils (or angels) are usually in the detail.
I’m staunchly Green, but such stupidity makes me writhe with embarrassment.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
Bart mentions talks he has been to. That is not the problem with the “Comics of Cern”. It is the non science folk (and reporters) who are watching and trying to understand – and probably having a little difficulty given the questions asked at the news conference along the lines of “What should I write about this event in my paper?” – thus they concentrate on the how rather than the what.
And that’s great, but it’s also spectacularly (and dangerously) naive. If scientists aren’t going to deign to speak clearly and intelligibly to those “non-science” folks out there want to know who will? Politicians on the campaign trail who will never have an easier applause line than denouncing “out of tough” pointy headed academic elitists who’ve never had a real job in their lives. Folks who think religious dogma has a place in science curricula for “balance”.
Oh, and writers who will ask questions like Can debt-swamped Europe afford expensive science, like pursuing the God particle? They’re not going to stop, so it may behoove some scientists to have a fucking answer that can be understood without a ladle of alphabet soup after your name.
Rant over.
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Islander, in reply to
'STRUTH!
Surely that stream will collapse under rampant collective idiocy?
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Nah, rant actually not over.
Is boiling down complex ideas for non-specialist audiences a hard thing to do at all well? Yes - which is why I admire good general-interest writing/journalism about science so much. But it's a skill not a mystical vocation. I'm just suggesting it's not only a healthy contribution to the culture for more scientists to develop that ability, but entirely in their enlightened self-interest. Science isn't just about the seminar room and the research lab.
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Chris Waugh, in reply to
Surely that stream will collapse under rampant collective idiocy?
I'm going to assume that Russell's link is in a similar vein to the tweets in the picture he posted earlier. But no, if anything collapses that stream it won't be rampant collective idiocy. Rampant collective idiocy, unfortunately, is one of our species greatest talents. I reckon those CERN people should be figuring out how to convert human stupidity into a useable form of energy, cos then all our energy worries would be solved for all time.
Now, what would be fun is to see the churches start excommunicating people who've gotten all confused by the Higgs boson's nickname and somehow seem to think it's God on grounds of idolatry.
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Islander, in reply to
Rampant collective idiocy, unfortunately, is one of our species greatest talents. I reckon those CERN people should be figuring out how to convert human stupidity into a useable form of energy, cos then all our energy worries would be solved for all time.
O dear. You are so right. And I'll just go bash my innate reason & commonsense faculties against that berloody large rock.
Gah! Gah! Gah!
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