Nursery rhyme conundrum

xkcd picks up a technical issue in one of our canon of nursery rhymes – although it seems it was likely not to have been intended so literally when it was first sung. I have probably sung this hundreds of times both as a child and a parent but never thought beyond the words to the improbability of the scenario.

London Underground – re-signed

 
This set of images from Prosign has, apparently, been around for some time but I've only just seen it.

via Alex Pang on Facebook

The sun always shines on...

... the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Class of 2014).

Gangnam opportunity cost

The Economist has mapped the aggregated time spent watching 'Gangnam Style' on YouTube to other projects which have demanded much human time and effort.

Via Tim Harford

Physician heal...

Just looking at a version of the Mini-mental State Examination (MMSE),* a simple test used in clinical settings to assess possible cognitive impairment. The following does not bode well for patients' scores.

* Folstein, M.F, Foltein, S.E., McHugh, P.R. (1975) Mini-mental state: a practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. J Psychiatric Research, 12, 189–98.

Believing myself to be an efficient-ish sort of person, I imagine I screen out irrelevant detail when searching for information on the web. But, as advertisers know so well, extraneous information impinges on the consciousness of even the most focused researcher. Which is why, I suppose, I was so distracted by the banner image (above) on the web site of the Oxford Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. The dome of the German Reichstag (below) seems a surprising choice... or have I missed some linking significance?

Rockets (and other things) made simple

Robert Krulwich describes xckd's rocket diagram (all explained in words within the most frequent 1,000 used in English) as 'Deep Simple' and wishes there were more accessible explanation around. I was surprised to see 'space' in the top 1,000 words (it's well in, according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English at 522), whereas moon is down at 2471 (and, yes, given that we're diurnal, sun comes in at 1239).

Scepticism and phone launches

[via John Naughton, and even more poignant in the light of today's brouhaha over Nokia's bicycle video]

Ma'amite

This...

... has punctured my Jubilee-resistant shell. Very clever DDB UK.

Employee manual from heaven...

...according to Mark Barratt. Valve's manual does, indeed, achieve an imaginative (as you might expect) balance of information, inspiration, reassurance, humour and self-deprecation (passing over the section on T-shaped people). A new benchmarking standard.

[Image from BoingBoing]

The impact of touch screen interaction

A little while ago Bill Wessel, of Foviance, blogged on how the iPhone and its successors had changed mobile interaction in a way that couldn't have been envisioned, as recently as 2006. The shift in expectation was brought home to me over the holiday as I tried using a basic Kindle, and found myself constantly wanting to interact directly with the display, and frustrated by the tedious process of navigating a keyboard using a cursor key and select option.

This video shows clever work by Jack Zylkin that turns the whole sequence of progress on its head, with an iPod driven by a typewriter.



[Foviance blog via Usability News; video via John Naughton]

Pareidolia

MindHacks can't see Elvis in this potato crisp (picture from a study by Voss et al.) but he's certainly there. A great example of pareidolia.

Siri says

This and many more at STSS.

[via John Naughton]

Kerning - hours of fun

Honestly. Test your kerning against (other) typographers.

[via Jason Kottke]

Our children will never know...

...the link between the two.

Seems to be a bit of a meme, appearing in many forms (this one here). I can't find the origin.

[Thanks to Laura Laamanen]

Generic health charity press release

CELEBRITY! We are very happy to announce that [celebrity] is now our spokesperson/ambassador/patron! S/he is willing to be interviewed on the subject of [disease] which s/he had a “scare” about/has had/had a friend who had it/has always been worried about. As you know, s/he is in the news lately because of Big Brother/football spousal injunction/autobiography/launch of own vajazzaling range. S/he thinks that the current lack of awareness of [disease] is scandalous and is campaigning for more to be done!

Keen observation by GP and commentator on healthcare issues, Margaret McCartney.

[via Dorothy Bishop's Twitter stream]

What makes a good app

Doing a bit of prep for a forthcoming postgraduate workshop on the design of weather forecasts, I found this typically incisive reflection on the design of apps by xkcd. So, yes, the functionality and interface are smooth but...

Viral whiteboards on the Tube

Going Underground has been documenting the recent spate of philosophical thoughts appearing on the Tube's service information whiteboards (including the homage to information design, above, captured by Tom Philips).

My favourite, though, expresses a somewhat more down-to-earth sentiment (picture by Blake Conolly):

Legibility not great but it says: Tomorrow may be Friday but there will be NO mention of that Rebecca Black song here.

In 1993, I worked on a Customer Information Strategy for London Underground, aimed at improving the organisation's communication, across all media, with its customers. When we recommended, then, improving the use of whiteboards, this wasn't quite what we had in mind. But that was back in those austere days before Pyne and Gilmour. (Nice to see, though, Oval making such good use of the ruled whiteboards, which we endorsed because they improved the legibility of hand-written messages. Not so sure about the gothic script.)

For even more whiteboard 'experience', see here. 

[via David Woodward on Facebook]

Alex Ferguson on reading

"I don't know why anybody can be bothered with that kind of stuff. How do you find the time to do that? There are a million things you can do in your life without that...Get yourself down to the library and read a book. Seriously."

Not the person you might expect to extol the virtues of focused reading but, according to The Guardian, Alex Ferguson isn't sympathetic to his tweeting players.

How to read a magazine

Lovely parody of instructional screens, by Khol Vinh, following his post on over-complex instruction overlays (most of which will never be read) for iPad and other apps. My issue is that these instructions often aren't easily found after first use i.e. at the time people start realising they're probably not using a tool efficiently and want to find out quickly what they're missing.

[via Eye magazine]