Geek of All Trades

Keypads - which way is up?

I am reading Henry Petroski's Invention by Design, an interesting little book about how engineering and invention have been applied to solve such every day engineering problems as clipping papers together, storing carbonated beverages in retail-friendly containers, and crossing bodies of water.

In a sidebar, Petroski notes that telephone keypads and calculator keypads have evolved opposite standards when it comes to key ordering:

Telephone      Calculator

  1 2 3          7 8 9
  4 5 6          4 5 6
  7 8 9          1 2 3
  * 0 #          0 + =

(I hope my attempt at monospace formatting works here.)  In telephones, "1" is at the top left and the numerals proceed across and down to "9" on the bottom right, whereas in calculators, "1" is at the bottom left  and "9" the top right.  I have been a regular user of both telephones and calculators for something like 30 years (though concededly, of telephones having keypads for perhaps only 20 years), and I have never once noticed this disparity of standard. 

Petroski asks, "Do users who alternate frequently between telephones and calculators find the difference to be a serious problem?"  From my own experience, I have to say no, patently not.  How is that possible?  I have no idea what the answer is but I suspect there is a psychological explanation.  There must be a separation in the brain's task space between the act of punching in a telephone number on the one hand, and that of entering numbers for calculation on the other, a separation sufficient that when turning one's attention to one of the two tasks one isn't even momentarily confused by expectations associated with the other.  Or something. 
I am amazed that I never noticed this myself and I'll have to give some thought to why that is. 

Exoticized lettering: Arabic- and Urdu-styled Roman

Here are a couple more for the exoticized lettering series (and here's the archive category collecting all such posts).

First, a very pretty example from the website of Ahiida, a company that sells the "burqini," a modest bathing costume.  Ahiida's logo is the Roman characters "ahiida" styled to resemble Arabic calligraphy.  It's a really lovely sample, amazingly evocative - those ascenders are reminiscent of minarets.

Then, John of bradshaw of the future keeps finding the best examples - he sends this gorgeous poster that says "Marudanaayagam" in Roman letters styled to look like Naskh-style Urdu.  John found this in Street Graphics India, published by Thames & Hudson; click on the picture for a bigger version.

And thanks to Manish of the excellent and thought-provoking Ultrabrown for the link. 

Bathroom, tiled

Our renovation project was dormant for a couple of weeks, while contractors were on vacation and other delays happened for reasons that are not entirely clear to us.  In the past week, though, stuff started happening again.  Two very friendly guys have been hard at work tiling our bathroom - they poured a new concrete underfloor last week, and then got to the tiling on Monday.

Something I learned about tile: grout is not mortar.  The tiles are glued in place, and grout is applied afterward to fill in the spaces between them.  We did not select grout (there are a wide range of colors to choose from) until after the tiling had already begun. 

Today, all the bathroom tiles are in place, but the grout has not yet been applied.

(Click on the pictures for a bigger view.)  We chose a pale green ceramic tile for the floor.  The wall is white subway tile with a border of green glass.   The wall tile goes up to 42" with a chair rail edge at the top.  Above that, we'll probably paint the walls to match one of the greens in the glass border.  I have fallen madly in love with subway tile and I'm tempted to cover my whole house with it.  That's probably a little excessive, so instead of that I'll just use it in the bathroom and in the kitchen for the splashback behind the counters. 

The floor of the shower is the same tile as the bathroom floor, except in a smaller version - 2" tiles instead of 6" tiles.  This is because the shower floor is pitched inward toward the drain, and a smaller tile is needed to follow that contour.  Inside the shower we've used the same subway tile and border as outside, all the way up to 7'.

Here's one more look at the floor and the wall together.  This is where the toilet will be. 

In the kitchen, there is also starting to be some progress.  The kitchen hasn't changed much in the last three weeks.  But today a stone fabricator is here making a template for the countertops, and either today or tomorrow we are heading to the stoneyard to pick out our actual piece of stone. 

Philosophy of mind-reading, and stress

Here's a very nice post by Language Log's Heidi Harley that illustrates what happens when good noun modifiers go bad.  In the example she gives, there are three consecutive noun phrases and it's not immediately obvious how to identify heads and modifiers among them.  The phrase is "philosophy of mind reading group" - the ambiguity is between (philosophy of mind reading) (group), on the one hand, and (philosophy of mind) (reading group) on the other. 

Prof. Harley's post is made more interesting by sentence diagrams and sound files illustrating how, in spoken English, stress breaks the ambiguity.  She refers to the "compound stress rule" and links to another Language Log post on the subject - the link is broken, so I found a different one to link.

English forms compounds so readily that I wonder if there is really an analogue to the compound stress rule in other languages that are less compound-friendly.  Is there a change in stress when compounds form in German, one of the few languages that is more compound-happy than English?

Hindi is a very even-stress language; unlike English, in which there are complex rules of word stress, all syllables in Hindi should be given the same stress.  What might be heard to English-speakers as difference in stress (for example, in the minimal pair कमल kamal, lotus, and कमाल kamaal, wonder) is actually a difference in vowel length.  So although Hindi does form compounds, I don't think there would be any stress-shift analogous to English.

We are all of us Simpsons

David and I saw the Simpsons movie and liked enjoyed it.  I'm not going to review it.  There are plenty of reviews out there that get it right - it's funny, it sustains, it's about as good as a good episode of the TV show.  We've been singing the "Spider pig" song all weekend -

Spider pig, spider pig
Does whatever a spider pig does
Can he swing from a web?
No he can't, he's a pig

And I've found myself quoting lines, like President Schwarzennegar's "I was elected to lead - not to read!"  So all in all it was a successful film, I think. 

The official website is the best part though - you can make yourself a Simpsons-style avatar.  Here are David and me.

Tamil-styled Roman and more Urdu-styled Devanagari

Here are two more installments in the exoticized lettering series, both discovered by John of bradshaw of the future. 

Firsts, John presents the the cover of an album called Autoditacker by Mouse on Mars, in which the band's
name is written in Roman characters styled to resemble Tamil script (here's a sample of Tamil for comparison):

Then, in email, John sent me another wonderful example of Urdu-ized Devanagari that he found in a book on Hindi sign-making (a book I'd love to see some time):

This says "lailaa majnuu" - लैला मजनू - which is the title of a legendary Persian love story that is often cited in romantic Hindi film songs.  This beautiful sample, like the Umrao Jaan example of Udru-ized Devanagari that started this whole collection, is characterized by the absence of a rekha (the overhead line connecting contiguous letters in ordinary Devanagari), by long, stylized curved descenders on the letterforms and vowel matras, and the addition of meaningless dots that add to the Urdu feel of the lettering. 

Stay tuned!  More to come. 

Cyrillic-styled Roman and Tibetan-styled Chinese

The collection of exoticized lettering began when I emailed my sample of Urdu-styled Devanagari to Prof. Bill Poser in response to his Language Log post with this example of Cyrillic-styled Roman lettering from the Vancouver Sun:

After Prof. Poser put the Urdu-ized Devanagari on Language Log, I discovered this excellent post by Joel Martinsen of Danwei, with glorious examples of Tibetan-styled Chinese lettering like this one from a movie poster:

Stay tuned for more examples.

Appliances

Things are taking shape in the kitchen.  The appliances went in today, and all the wood trim on the doorways and cabinets is done.  All that's left is the countertops and tile backsplash, plus a few minor things like the hardware for the cabinet doors and drawers.

 

Here's an overview of the room; you can see the new sink, dishwasher, stove, and ventilation hood.

Here's another look at that stove.  This was our big splurge in this project - the six-burner professional range of the sort that I have coveted my entire adult life.

Here is a look at the cabinets in what used to be the pantry - this is where the washer-dryer was, in what used to be the butler's pantry.

Looking back from the former butler's pantry into the kitchen, we see David posing with the new doorframe and window frame that got built yesterday and today.  And there is that stove again!

Here is the banquette - one of the fun parts of the design.  There is storage space - drawers - under the seat.  We will have a cushion made for it and place a table in front of it, and that will be our new kitchen seating.  Just for comparison, I've added below a picture of what this corner of the kitchen looked like before the project began.

Here's David admiring the project.  He says, "This is going to be sweet."

Geek of type and lettering

After my first post on exoticized lettering got mentioned on Language Log, many more examples of the form  - lettering in one script stylized to resemble a different script - have started to pour in via comments on this weblog and links on other people's weblogs.  There seems to be a great diversity of such stylized scripts, both Roman scripts styled to resemble non-Roman scripts and, perhaps even more interesting, one non-Roman script styled to look like another non-Roman script.

I think all of these fascinating samples need to be gathered in one place on line, and after talking it over with bradshaw of the future I've decided to set up a new category here to collect them.  Over the next couple of days I'll post all of the examples (with links to sources of course) that I've seen so far, and I encourage you all to please send along any others you find. 

I've called the new category "Geek of Type and Lettering," and I'll use it both for the exoticized letterings that inspired it as well as for other observations I've made about typefaces and lettering styles.  But the truth is that I am not really a Geek of Type and Lettering - I'm interested in the subject but I don't yet know much about it.  I hope this new category provides an opportunity to learn more.