Phligm Phlagm

[philmophlegm]

Lynne Truss on Christmas round-robin letters

"The truth is that politicians are telling lies - government is simply unaffordable."

A right-wing view of Tolkien's work

I reckon it must have started raining about two days after this statement, and it doesn't seem to have stopped since.

"2013 will decide whether the Scottish wildcat lives or dies."

Fireworks look just as pretty backwards.

The history of the Falkland Islands

You too could own a PC shaped like the TARDIS! (But seriously, how much!?)

Is Obama secretly a Muslim? And did God sign a fish?

How free is your country (economically speaking)?

5 Myths About Health Care Around the World (American article aimed at Americans, but also should be read by the 'hands off our NHS' lobby...)

Why are there so many black and white televisions in Ulster?

"Global warming could mean the end of pasta". See - it's not all bad. Shame it turns out to be your typical environmental scare story bollocks.

Clever web application that shows you where each Premier League team's supporters live (or at least those who tweet about football).

Never, ever type two spaces after a full stop.

So what's this trillion dollar coin thing all about?

New terms and conditions for MPs. This seems remarkably sensible. If they agreed to these, I'd be happy for them to have that big pay rise.

A Timeline of Steampunk

Comments

[chainmailmaiden]

I like the TARDIS computer, but it is a tad on the expensive side!

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

I like the double-space sibboleth. None of the reasons stack up, apart from "ordinary people use two spaces and professionals use one; I use one" :-) The one about "it creates a break in the flow of words" is excellent: that's *exactly* why I use two spaces :-D

Incidentally, I notice that the article is left-justified, which looks much uglier than two spaces ever does. I know it's another typographical convention, but it does aimed at writing in columns where the lines are short but the words are long - which isn't the case in this article :-) Still, better to carefully apply a rule where it's inappropriate than run the risk of people thinking you weren't aware of it :-D

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Thinking about this when I put two spaces into a sentence just now, it occurs to me that the author han't really addressed the size of a space, especially using proportional fonts. Are we talking n-spaces or m-spaces?

Typing into an email in Arial, I find that a space seems to be smaller than an n, and is certainly much smaller than an m; in fact, two spaces seem to take up less line than an m does - and that's talking lower case rather than upper.

So in a proportional font, using two spaces is simply making sure that you get something approaching a single m-space where the space is most important. In effect,hitting the spacebar twice is simply the way to insert an m-space rather than an n-space. So if you wanted to reconcile the two views, there's a nice compromise: one space is correct ; it should be an m-space; hit spacebar twice to insert it :-)