After 30 days of sunshine…

…IT RAINED!

(A quick note to all of you people who told me it would rain all summer in Seattle: Until the very recent past, the weather NOAA five day forecast looked like this

every day. Never debate weather forecasts with a quasi-meteorologist. That’s right.)

Back to the scheduled program:

FONTS

Fonts, you say? Isn’t this a blog about science, food, and lack of dates? Ah, if only one could remain so focused. Instead, I divert from my usual path to discuss other intensely interesting topics.

Inspired by the infinite wisdom of my mother, I have begun to buy the Sunday New York Times in print on, of course, Sundays to get my newsprint fix throughout the week. This way, I don’t feel distressed by the huge amount of newsprint coming my way every day, but also do not feel sad and alone without the friendly NYT awaiting me next to my steel cut oatmeal in the morning. And let’s be honest, it takes a whole week to read the whole Sunday NYT anyways.

But back to my point. When I picked up the NYT magazine, something didn’t seem quite right. Indeed, as the editor notes in his letter, the magazine is 9% smaller than usual to save on costs and (the more important implication in my book) to reduce paper usage. But yet, magically, the content is not reduced!

How, you demand? Well, the magic is at least in part due to the new font introduced – Lyon Text – that fits more words to a page. We do not often think about fonts (well, some do, but they are probably in a very small minority) but it is pretty cool when a change in font can affect environmental impact.

And this is not the first time fonts have entered the environmental scene: EcoFont was introduced at the start of the calendar year as a font that has holes in the letters (but not so many to reduce readability) in order to reduce the amount of ink used and thereby the number of printer cartridges disposed. While both of these changes are quite small, they show that it pays to think of alternative methods to reducing environmental impact.

FOOD

Sadly, I have nothing exciting to share since the last post. The only home cooked meal that has been produced was vegetables sauteed in peanut sauce over brown rice, which is more than self explanatory.

MATLAB

Today, my relationship with Matlab was threatened by a brief affair with a Matlab alternative, IDL. At first glance, IDL seemed more hip, more trendy, and perhaps more available. However, after my IDL fling, I return comfortably to my relationship with Matlab. And bring you: The Matlab command of the day!

Flipud! Fliplr!

Flip what? That’s right, Matlab has two handy-dandy commands for your use if you want to top of your matrix to become the bottom (flipud) or the left to become the right (fliplr). But, you say, I usually make my matrices the right way, not upside down and inside out – how would I ever use these?

So, one cool application: Imagine you live in a world where you want the low values of your colorbar to be red, not blue. But Matlab has a default colorbar that goes from blue to red! What to do?

Simply:

colorbar(flipud(colorbar))

Success.

DATING

It’s raining! Not men, though – not yet.

Happy Wednesday,

-Karen