Saturday, February 13, 2010

I never finish anyth

Let me show a recurring pattern in my life.

When 12, I was into robotics. I read many books on building gadgets, and on artificial intelligence. I accumulated spare motors, microchips, microcontrollers - anything I thought would be useful. And I assembled them. I know the feel of epoxy on my hands and how capacitor smoke spells. I assembled a walk cycle controller after the design that had worked for others, but they were dead bricks. I assembled crawlers that were mostly the same as working ones other people built. Their designs were not good enough, they needed improved. But my designs didn't crawl anywhere. Other projects came to the foreground. A working autonomous robot was never completed.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Serifs and Typography

Any mind-machine interface has 3 attributes: Learnability, Efficiency, and Memorability. An optimal system can be learned easily, used quickly, and is easy to remember or re-learn. Writing is a mind-machine interface. This paper focuses on efficiency. There are two warring factions of fonts, Serif and Sans serif. To determine the most readable of the two requires understanding of the reading process.