Slatest

Jan. 14th, 2011 08:06 pm
calimac: (Blue)
[personal profile] calimac
1. Oh, great. Now we can blame Philip K. Dick for the Tucson shootings. Or Nietzsche. (Paging Otto West, Mr. "Don't call me stupid" from A Fish Called Wanda)

2. The Grand Unified Theory of Palinisms. She knows so little, she doesn't know that she doesn't know it, and she doesn't know that there are other people who do know it.

3. The Military-Industrial Complex. Contains something of a history of the idea that wars are caused by arms merchants seducing and bamboozling politicians into them. Doesn't go into the literary manifestations, though. I first came across this notion in Shaw's Major Barbara, in which Undershaft the arms merchant says that he and his peers decide when there'll be a war, for the sake of profit. I once read a reprint of early issues of Superman from the late 30s. In them, Superman spent most of his time beating up arms merchants who were trying to lead the US into war. That he didn't even bother thinking about, say, Hitler or the Japanese militarists is unnerving.

4. Here's a truly insane screed against putting two spaces after a period, and he'll have to take my cold dead thumb from the keyboard to stop me.

Date: 2011-01-15 05:31 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kalimac.livejournal.com
No, he's insane.

Since, as you quite accurately point out, HTML removes extraneous spaces (if you want extra spaces to appear in the browser display, you have to encode them explicitly), then WTF does it matter how many spaces you type? Why should he care?

In the case of proportional fonts in word processors, double-spacing is still desirable. It really does affect the amount of space that appears in the document, and it's useful to distinguish the end of a sentence from the space after the period in an abbreviation like "St. Louis". If they're the same, I find it disconcerting.

That's if the document is not to be further edited. On occasion I've written documents which are to be professionally typeset by someone who's going to go over all the kerning with care, and they request me to leave only one space after sentences to assist them in their work. Fine; in that case it's quick-and-easy to make a global change after I write the document, without having to change my typing habits.

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