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05 Jan 06:29

Protesters decry 'maniacal fantasy' to close People's Park in Berkeley

by Kent German

A rally opposed the closure of People's Park.

29 Nov 03:26

Nima Momeni's sister arrested on suspicion of DUI, hit-and-run, police say

by Amy Graff

The sister of Nima Momeni, the man accused of killing Bob Lee, was arrested in SF.

09 Feb 21:53

Tips and tools for Safer Internet Day

20 Mar 00:57

SF Fire Dept. rescues man clinging to cliff at hidden Marshall's Beach

by Amy Graff

The San Francisco Fire Department rescued a man clinging from a forested cliff at Marshall's Beach Tuesday morning.

03 Jun 15:43

'Why I'm Switching From Chrome To Firefox and You Should Too'

by EditorDavid
An anonymous reader quotes an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design: While the amount of data about me may not have caused harm in my life yet -- as far as I know -- I don't want to be the victim of monopolistic internet oligarchs as they continue to cash in on surveillance-based business models. What's a concerned citizen of the internet to do? Here's one no-brainer: Stop using Chrome and switch to Firefox... [W]hy should I continue to use the company's browser, which acts as literally the window through which I experience much of the internet, when its incentives -- to learn a lot about me so it can sell advertisements -- don't align with mine....? Unlike Chrome, Firefox is run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization that advocates for a "healthy" internet. Its mission is to help build an internet in an open-source manner that's accessible to everyone -- and where privacy and security are built in. Contrast that to Chrome's privacy policy, which states that it stores your browsing data locally unless you are signed in to your Google account, which enables the browser to send that information back to Google. The policy also states that Chrome allows third-party websites to access your IP address and any information that site has tracked using cookies. If you care about privacy at all, you should ditch the browser that supports a company using data to sell advertisements and enabling other companies to track your online movements for one that does not use your data at all.... Firefox protects you from being tracked by advertising networks across websites, which has the lovely side effect of making sites load faster... Ultimately, Firefox's designers have the leeway to make these privacy-first decisions because Mozilla's motivations are fundamentally different from Google's. Mozilla is a nonprofit with a mission, and Google is a for-profit corporation with an advertising-based business model.. While Firefox and Chrome ultimately perform the same service, the browsers' developers approached their design in a radically different way because one organization has to serve a bottom line, and the other doesn't. The article points out that ironically, Mozilla supports its developers partly with revenue from Google, which (along with other search engines) pays to be listed as one of the search engines available in Firefox's search bar. "But because it relies on these agreements rather than gathering user data so it can sell advertisements, the Mozilla Corporation has a fundamentally different business model than Google."

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12 May 01:45

How to Break Free From Social Media

image

This post presumes you already have a firm understanding of why you should cut ties with social media. If you aren’t there yet, you probably don’t need to read on. But perhaps you’d be interested in the following articles on happiness, avoiding depression, etc.

If you already know that social media is making you miserable and you’re just trying to find a way to escape then read on and follow this 5 step plan.

1. Tell your real friends your intentions. It’s crazy, but people might think you are unfriending them if you shut down your accounts. Do it in a non-judgmental fashion. “I just gotta lay low for a while.”  “I’m spending too much time staring at my phone.” Keep it simple, you don’t need to tell them that social media has become a leading cause of depression. They might not want to hear it, and that’s fine.

***Whatever you do, don’t pull one of those bullshit things where you post on social media that you are leaving social media.  People will just think you’re fishing for attention. Because you probably are just fishing for attention.***

2. Turn that shit off.

3. Make a list of what you’ll be missing.

You probably use social media for a number of reasons. Your original reason like connecting with old classmates that you haven’t seen in years was probably replaced by things like:

  • Spying on ex GF’s, BF’s, your kids, spouses, lovers.
  • Reading news (i.e. watching John Oliver clips)
  • Reading fake news
  • Collecting likes. And spending meaningful events in your life (like vacations, weddings, births) thinking about how to frame that moment on Instagram or Facebook and what you’ll say.
  • Looking at things you could buy.
  • Getting invited to events that you don’t want to go to, but… FOMO.
  • Looking at pictures from events that you missed that make them look way more fun than they actually were.
  • Taking 5 minute breaks from work.

4. Figure out healthy ways to replace what you’re missing.

  • Email an old friend that you haven’t connected with in a while.
  • Spend meaningful life events being present and undistracted by technology. Maybe just bring a camera or nothing to the beach or Disney World for one day to see how it goes.
  • Actually watch the concert or game you have attended. Especially if your friends or children are participating.
  • Stay informed on things you care about by subscribing to RSS feeds on a tool like The Old Reader! There’s almost infinite amazing content on every topic you can imagine. But you’re probably missing most of it while obsessing over random crap on Facebook.
  • Go for a 5 minute walk outside. Even if the weather stinks. Walks in the rain can be pretty awesome.
  • Meditate for 5 minutes. Just focus on breathing and clearing your head. No iPhone app or expertise required.

5. You’re free! Just because social media is a growth area and a new technology doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. I mean, seriously, your parents are watching you again! You’d finally broken free and moved to a different state. And now they know about everything you do.

07 Nov 04:30

TSA Screeners Can't Detect Weapons (and They Never Could)

by Soulskill
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: TSA screeners' ability to detect weapons in luggage is "pitiful," according to classified reports on the security administration's ongoing story of failure and fear. "In looking at the number of times people got through with guns or bombs in these covert testing exercises it really was pathetic. When I say that I mean pitiful," said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), speaking Tuesday during a House Oversight hearing concerning classified reports (PDF) from federal watchdogs (PDF). "Just thinking about the breaches there, it's horrific," he added. A leaked classified report this summer found that as much as 95 percent of contraband, like weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings. Lynch's comments were in response to the classified report's findings.

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05 Dec 02:52

Which City Has The Most Unpredictable Weather?

by Nate Silver

Most every American has some basis to complain about unpredictable weather. As a mid-latitude country with shining seas and majestic mountain ranges and fruited, wind-swept plains, we’re subject to pretty much every type of weather meteorologists have thought to identify. So perhaps you’ve heard the line: “If you don’t like the weather in Chicago, wait five minutes.” Or you’ve heard it applied to a city nearer to you: Denver or San Francisco or Atlanta or Boston.

But where in the country is the weather truly the most unpredictable?

We’re going to answer this question in a specific way, by comparing daily weather patterns against long-term averages.62 We’ll define the weather as being more unpredictable when it deviates more from these long-term trends.

Meteorologists call these long-term averages climatology. Weather forecasting has moved beyond climatology to embrace more sophisticated techniques, but in some cities climatology does extremely well on its own. Take the case of Phoenix, for example. The chart below compares high temperatures in Phoenix on each day from 2011 through 201363 against the 20-year average for the week64 in question. On a typical day in Phoenix, the high temperature deviated from the long-term average by only 5 to 6 degrees. You could plan a wedding or golf tournament in Phoenix years in advance and be reasonably confident of what the temperature would be.

silver-feature-unpredictable-2

This wouldn’t be true for Denver. Over the past three years, climatology has missed the high temperature there by 9 to 10 degrees on average. And misses of 20 degrees or more, which almost never happen in Phoenix, have occurred, on average, once every other week in Denver.

silver-feature-unpredictable-1

Get the drift? We’ll do this for 120 American cities, one representative from each of the 120 National Weather Service forecast offices across the 50 states.65 (Generally, we used data from the largest airport-based weather station in the area.)66 And we’ll be doing it for 10 weather statistics rather than just high temperatures. We can then combine the statistics into an overall measure of weather unpredictability for each city.

As a reminder, our goal is to evaluate how unpredictable the weather is — rather than whether the weather is good or bad. In San Diego, to a first approximation, it’s always 72 degrees and sunny.67 In Seattle, to a first approximation, it’s always 59 degrees and drizzly. Most people like San Diego’s weather better, but both cities have fairly predictable weather patterns.

Nor are we concerned about how much the weather varies throughout the year — provided it does so predictably. As a matter of practice, cities with high seasonal volatility usually also have high day-to-day unpredictability, but there are exceptions. Phoenix, for instance, has pronounced seasonal variation in its temperatures (the average high temperature there is 67 degrees in January and 106 degrees in August) but the daily values don’t deviate much around those seasonal averages. So its temperatures rate as predictable. Similarly, a city that routinely has thunderstorms in the spring but rarely throughout the rest of the year will rate as having more predictable weather than one where storms can occur at any time.

The statistics we’ll be evaluating fall into three major categories.

First, temperature:

  • High temperatures;
  • Low temperatures;
  • Daily mean temperatures.

Second, precipitation:

  • Rainfall, in inches;
  • Snowfall, in inches of snow (rather than the liquid equivalent68);
  • A binary variable indicating the presence or absence of precipitation (without regard to the type or amount of it). If there’s any precipitation at all over the 24-hour day, we score this variable as one. Otherwise, it’s zero.

Finally, severe weather and the conditions that contribute to it:

  • Wind speed;
  • Humidity69;
  • Cloud cover70;
  • A binary variable indicating whether there was a severe weather event (a thunderstorm, tornado or hail) in the city that day.

We scrubbed the data to identify extreme outliers and obvious data-entry errors and removed them before calculating the weekly averages.71 Then we calculated the root-mean-square deviation for each variable. Because all the statistics are on different scales — degrees Fahrenheit for temperature, mph for wind speed — we standardized them onto a common scale before averaging them together.

That was a bit of work, but it allowed us to generate this fun map:

silver-feature-weatherpredict-1

Among the cities we tested, the one with the most unpredictable weather is … Rapid City, South Dakota. Congratulations, Rapid City!

The ICAO code for Rapid City Regional Airport is KRAP. That’s also a good description of Rapid City’s weather. Its temperature might be 30 degrees in January — or just as easily -12. It’s snowy and windy and prone to big, unexpected winter storms. And it has a thunderstorm on almost 25 percent of days from July through September, more than the national average.

But Rapid City isn’t alone; other cities in the Great Plains and Upper Midwest dominate the most-unpredictable list. After Rapid City, those with the most unpredictable weather are Great Falls, Montana; Houghton, Michigan; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Fargo, North Dakota; Duluth, Minnesota; Bismarck, North Dakota; Aberdeen, South Dakota; Grand Island, Nebraska; and Glasgow, Montana.

For the most part, these cities are landlocked. The presence of lakes or oceans can contribute to weather problems — for instance, the huge amounts of lake-effect snow in Houghton, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (about twice as much as in notoriously snowy Buffalo, New York). But water usually does more to regulate temperatures and severe weather.

The other common thread between these cities is that not very many people live in them. Indeed, among the top 23 cities on our list, none are within the 50 most populous metro areas in the United States. Among cities that do fall within the most populous metro areas, those with the most unpredictable weather are as follows:

  1. Kansas City, Missouri;
  2. Oklahoma City;
  3. Minneapolis;
  4. Cincinnati;
  5. Indianapolis;
  6. St. Louis;
  7. Birmingham, Alabama;
  8. Boston;
  9. Milwaukee;
  10. Dallas.

This list, too, is dominated by landlocked cities in the Midwest (depending on how you define the region). There are a smattering of northeastern cities and a few landlocked cities in the South.

To get more insight into the source of these differences, we can break the ratings down into their three major subcomponents: temperature, precipitation and severe weather. Here’s the map for temperature unpredictability:

silver-feature-weatherpredict-4

You can easily make out the path of the Rocky Mountains in this map. Cities just to the east of them — like Denver and Great Falls, Montana — have much more unpredictable temperatures than almost any place to the west of them.

Cities just to the east of the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico have the most predictable temperatures. San Diego’s temperatures are the most predictable of anywhere in the continental United States (Honolulu’s are the most predictable overall). Seattle and San Francisco have highly predictable temperatures, as does the Florida peninsula.

The map of unpredictable precipitation patterns is dominated by cities in the eastern half of the country:

silver-feature-weatherpredict-3

Nothing tops Houghton, which gets about twice as much snow as any other city we evaluated and can also be reasonably rainy in the summer.

But why don’t notoriously wet cities like Seattle and Portland, Oregon, rank higher? Both have precipitation fairly often; Seattle ranks eighth in the country (out of the 120 cities we tracked) by the number of days with precipitation, and Portland ranks ninth. But they usually have light precipitation. Between 1994 and 2013, Portland got at least an inch of rain only 1.2 percent of the time, for example, as compared with 2.1 percent of the time for the average U.S. city. Their precipitation patterns are also quite seasonal, making them more predictable. Seattle has historically received precipitation on 71 percent of days in January but just 19 percent of days in July.

If you want to have an easy life as a weather forecaster, you should get a job in Las Vegas, Phoenix or Los Angeles. Predict that it won’t rain in one of those cities, and you’ll be right about 90 percent of the time.

The frequency of severe weather conditions is more idiosyncratic than the presence of precipitation in general. But the map of areas most prone to unpredictable, severe weather generally follows Tornado Alley, with cities in the line of states from South Dakota through Oklahoma and northern Texas ranking toward the top of the list.

silver-feature-weatherpredict-2

Oceans and lakes tend to reduce severe weather frequency and make its occurrence more predictable. There are some exceptions, however — especially the Atlantic Seaboard from North Carolina through Maine. Cities like Boston and New York don’t have many thunderstorms, but they have fairly unpredictable wind patterns and humidity levels. Those can scale up the severity of a storm in a hurry, especially in the winter months.

Want a more precise estimate of where your city ranks? As we mentioned before, we translated the 10 weather conditions onto a common scale; specifically, it’s a common scale where 66 represents average. Why 66? Because it should be an intuitive value when we’re looking at weather data. The high temperature for the 120 weather stations we tracked was about 66 degrees, on average, throughout the year.72

Higher values indicate more unpredictability:

  • Scores in the 80s or above indicate very high unpredictability.
  • Scores in the 70s indicate above-average unpredictability.
  • Scores in the 60s indicate average unpredictability.
  • Scores in the 50s indicate comparatively predictable weather patterns.
  • Scores in the 40s or below indicate highly predictable weather.

There are some limitations to our method. It reflects day-to-day rather than hour-to-hour unpredictability, for instance. And perhaps the weather is more unpredictable within particular microclimates than at the airport-based weather stations we’ve tracked. Still, a few cities with a reputation for unpredictable weather rank lower than you might expect:

  • San Francisco’s weather patterns are unusual as compared to the rest of the country (September has historically been San Francisco’s warmest month, for instance). But they’re predictably unusual, at least on a day-to-day (if not necessarily hour-to-hour) basis. And San Francisco, like the rest of the West Coast, rarely gets severe weather.
  • Chicago’s weather is slightly more unpredictable than average but not more than that. It has distinct seasons, and considerable temperature fluctuations, especially in the spring. But it doesn’t have especially unpredictable severe weather or precipitation patterns. It isn’t all that windy, despite its nickname, and it very rarely gets lake-effect snow since the wind usually blows west to east across Lake Michigan rather than into Chicago.
  • Buffalo does get plenty of lake-effect snow and has unpredictable wind patterns. But its humidity levels and cloud cover patterns are fairly predictable, which cuts down on severe weather outside the winter and early spring.
  • Denver, although it has among the most unpredictable high temperatures in the country and can have bouts of severe weather, has fairly predictable rainfall patterns (there usually isn’t much) and cloud cover (it’s usually sunny). And its problems tend to be concentrated in spring; summer days in Denver are often predictably mild.

These cities still have plenty of unpredictable weather. But if you don’t like the weather in Chicago or Denver, be thankful you don’t have to deal with the KRAP they have in Rapid City.

silver-feature-weatherpredict-table

21 Dec 03:07

Sigil Cycle

The cycle seems to be 'we need these symbols to clarify what types of things we're referring to!' followed by 'wait, it turns out words already do that.'
01 Jun 21:47

collegehumor: notforbreakfast: The Font Conference....



















collegehumor:

notforbreakfast:

The Font Conference. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3k5oY9AHHM

This video wasn’t long enough,

so we made it double-spaced.

16 Apr 02:05

Facebook's Android App Can Now Retrieve Data About What Apps You Use

by samzenpus
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook on Friday released its Android launcher called Home. The company also updated its Facebook app, adding in new permissions to allow it to collect data about the apps you are running. Facebook has set up Home to interface with the main Facebook app on Android to do all the work. In fact, the main Facebook app features all the required permissions letting the Home app meekly state: 'THIS APPLICATION REQUIRES NO SPECIAL PERMISSIONS TO RUN.' As such, it’s the Facebook app that’s doing all the information collecting. It’s unclear, however, if it will do so even if Facebook Home is not installed. Facebook may simply be declaring all the permissions the Home launcher requires, meaning the app only starts collecting data if Home asks it to."

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16 Apr 02:03

Silence

All music is just performances of 4'33" in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time.
24 Mar 17:31

10 Fascinating Typographical Origins

by JFrater

A typographical character is simply a printed symbol—this includes letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. The ? is called a question mark; ( and ) are called parentheses; and ; is known as the semicolon. But you know that already, and I suspect you’re beginning to wonder how one could possibly wring drops of “fascinating” from the dry towel of typography. And that’s fair. But did you know the division sign has a name? What about the mysterious origins of the paragraph sign? Where did the % sign come from? ¿Why on Earth do Spanish-speakers put those upside-down question marks at the beginning of their sentences? Read on!

10 The Pilcrow—¶

Gazette Pilcrow

The pilcrow, also less elegantly called the “paragraph mark,” serves a number of purposes, most of which involve denoting the presence or location of a paragraph in one way or another. Most commonly, it’s used in word processing programs to indicate a “carriage return” “control character;” that is to say, a non-permanent mark showing where a paragraph ends. There is disagreement over the origin of the name; The Oxford English Dictionary, for one, likes to think it comes from a string of corruptions of the word “paragraph.” I prefer to side with the Oxford Universal Dictionary, which suggests that the sign itself looks a lot like a featherless crow—a “pulled crow.” The symbol itself derives from the letter C—you can still see it in there—which stood for the Latin “capitulum,” or “chapter.” The two lines that ended up vertically crossing the C were a sort of editorial note from the writer.

The pilcrow was used in the Middle Ages, in an earlier form, as a way of marking a new train of thought before the paragraph became the standard way of accomplishing this. Now, among its myriad uses are in academic writing (when citing from an HTML page), legal texts (when citing a specific paragraph), and in proofreading (an indication that a paragraph should be split in two).

9 The Ampersand—&

Ampersand-1

The ampersand is a logogram used to mean “and.” The symbol itself is based on a shorthand version of the Latin word for “and”—et—and in certain fonts, you can still clearly see an ‘e’ and a ‘t’ linked together (Adobe Caslon, for instance). The word ampersand has a somewhat unusual origin—it’s a corruption of the hard-to-parse, multilingual (English and Latin) phrase “& per se and,” which means “& by itself is ‘and.’” Confused? Don’t worry—that’s only natural. All it means is: “The symbol &, all by its little self, simply means and.” And where did this phrase come from? Well, in the early 1800s, & was considered the 27th letter of the English alphabet, and since saying “X, Y, Z, and” would be confusing, “and per se and” was said instead. It doesn’t take a major stretch of the imagination to fathom how this could quickly turn into ampersand, which it did by around 1837.

Because people like to make up urban legends based on everything, including stodgy ol’ typographical marks, there’s a vicious rumor floating around that French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère used the mark so much that it eventually got called “Ampere’s and.” Don’t believe it for a second. In the end we’re left with a pretty little symbol that has more than a few variants.

8 Interrobang—!?, ?!, or ‽

Type-Talks-1

What?! You’ve never heard of the interrobang!? Really? Well, now you have, so all is forgiven. An interrobang is described as a “nonstandard punctuation mark” (it’s part of the punctuation counterculture), used to end sentences where you really want both the exclamation point and the question mark. While the use of both marks side by side had been prevalent for some time, it wasn’t until 1962 when an advertising executive named Martin K. Speckter decided that enough was enough—no longer would he withstand the tyranny of two separate punctuation marks when one would suffice. He asked readers to suggest names—rejecting such fine ideas as rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest—and ultimately settled upon interrobang, a combination of the Latin root “interro” (think “interrogate”), and “bang,” which is printer’s slang for the exclamation mark. The word is used to describe both the two side by side (!? or ?!), or the combined symbol ?.

7 At Sign—@

at_symbol800-640x360.jpg

What we know as @ has a lot of different monikers—including “at sign,” “at symbol,” “ampersat,” and “apetail”—but is unusual in that it doesn’t have a widely-accepted name in English. In Spanish, it is known as an arroba, and in French the arobase. @ has two primary usages—its original one, used in commerce to mean “at the rate of,” and more recently, “directed at” (primarily in email and in social media like Twitter). It has been claimed (by Italian professor Giorgio Stabile) that the symbol is actually over 500 years old, to represent an “amphora”—a unit of capacity used in commerce. It first made its way onto a typewriter as early as 1885, and has since found its way into our hearts.

A couple of fun facts:

- The Spanish arroba was a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds.
- The names for @ in other languages often derive from the idea that it looks like an animal. To wit: apenstaartje (Dutch for “monkey’s tail); papacy (Greek for “little duck); dalphaengi (Korean for “snail”); sobachka (Russian for “little dog”).

6 Guillemets—« »

Gui

Guillemets are what the French use instead of quotation marks. In addition to the physical differences, the usage differs as well—generally, guillemets open and close entire conversations or exchanges, rather than individual utterances. Amusingly, the guillemet is named after a French printer named Guillaume Le Bé from the 16th century; “Guillemet” is a diminutive of “Guillaume.” One can only assume that French people call our quotation marks “Willies,” “li’l Bills,” or “Mini Williams.”


5 Obelus—÷

Obelus

The Obelus, more commonly known as “the division sign” for reasons I can’t fathom, comes from an Ancient Greek word for a sharpened stick or other similar pointy object. It shares its roots with the word “obelisk.” The obelus was once used to denote sections of writing that were considered incorrect or suspicious; in other words, it would have been perfect for Wikipedia editors. It was first used to mean “division” in 1659 by Swiss mathematician Johann Rahn. While still used frequently in the US and in Britain, it is not commonly used to mean division in most of the rest of the world.

4 Inverted ? and !—¿ and ¡

Question Mark

In Spanish, when a sentence ends with a question mark or an exclamation point, it also starts with an inverted one. ¿Porque? Well, I’ll tell you porque. In 1754, the Spanish Royal Academy decided that the Spanish language had a dire problem: when you start reading a sentence, you often have no way of telling if it’s a question or not until you get to the very end.

Consider the sentence vas a ir a la tienda? (Are you going to go to the store?). Up until you get to the question mark, you are totally in the dark—is it a question, or simply a declarative sentence stating “you are going to go to the store”? In English, we have ways of indicating that a question is coming, so that proper inflection can be used, as well as to help with comprehension. In Spanish, you used to need contextual clues to help you out before the Royal Academy had its way. They also decided that the exclamation point would be lonely, so they advocated for its inverted use as well.

Though the language was slow to adopt this new convention, it is now a fully integrated part of the language. A few interesting usage notes:

- Short, unambiguous questions are often written without the inverted mark—Quien eres?
- In digital communication, the inverted mark is frequently left off (emails, instant messaging, texts).
- Some authors refuse to use inverted marks.
- Writers can get playful with the marks, including starting a sentence with a ¡ and ending it with a ?.
- ¿ can be used in the middle of a sentence if the whole sentence is not a question, but rather the final clause.
- Note that ¿ and ¡ are positioned differently than ? and !; they hang below the line.

3 Ditto mark

Quotes

File this under “things we use all the time but don’t know their name.” Ditto marks are those quotation-looking-guys you use to save your tired wrist from a few more seconds of writing, indicating that what’s directly above should be repeated. Though one might suspect (“one” being “me” before I researched it) that the word ditto may have been related to the Latin root “di” (meaning “two”, as in when you say “ditto” you mean “me too!”), it in fact derives from an early (c. 1620) form of the Italian word for “to say.” Originally, it was used to avoid needless repetition when writing a series of dates in the same month.

A “ditto mark” is a type of “iteration mark.” Other languages have their own, notably Chinese, Japanese, and Ancient Egyptian. It’s tough to fathom why Ancient Egyptian scribes might have needed a way to cut down on chiseling elaborate drawings into rock.

2 Percent Sign—%

M 506A91Feb7C37

Take a look at the percent sign. Look at each of the three individual marks—a circle, a line, a circle. Remind you of anything? Does it, perhaps, remind you of a certain number, with the digits rearranged and realigned? A very important number? Maybe . . . the number 100?

The % sign, of course, means that the preceding number should be understood as being divided by one hundred—”per cent.” The slash mark used to be straight across, with zeroes above and beneath, but it gradually became slanted—leading to what D.E. Smith, in 1925, called the “solidus form” of the percent sign. The solidus, aka slash, virgule, fraction bar, and other names, is this sign: /.

Because there is disagreement about everything, there is disagreement over whether there should be a space between the number and the % sign, over whether it should be per cent or percent, and when you should use the % symbol and when you should instead write out the word.

1 Upper Case and Lower Case letters

9 29 Upper & Lower Case

Once I learned the origins of the terms “upper case” and “lower case,” it seemed so obvious. I mused: does everyone know this but me? What else are my friends and family keeping from me? Instead, though, I decided to convince myself that legions of Listversers were in the dark like me, too embarrassed to say anything. Take comfort, fellow readers, for you may remain anonymous in your ignorance.

Now then: in the early days of printing, when each letter was set individually, the letters were kept in cases. The capital letters were kept in—you guessed it—the “upper case,” less convenient to the printer because of how relatively few capital letters are used, while the lower case letters were kept in the more accessible—wait for it—”lower case.” It’s as simple as that, really. This usage of the terms dates back to 1588.

Fun facts about cases:
- The use of two cases in a written language is called “bicameral script.” Languages with only one case are called “unicase.”
- So what were lower-case letters called before they used cases at all? Well, we have other words to describe them—Upper-case letters are called majuscules (and, of course, capitals), and lower-case letters are called minuscule. Note the spelling difference with the word miniscule.

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