Asym spacing

I've never heard of this typography concept: asym spacing.

But one tech company believes something as simple as increasing the size  of spacing between certain words could improve people’s reading comprehension. Research going back decades has found that “chunking,” a technique that separates text into meaningful units, provides visual cues that help readers better process information.
 
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The image below shows  the before and after of Asym’s spacing on a paragraph  of text. Quartz  is also experimenting by manually adding Asym’s spaces  to this article. The effect  is subtle, but likely will irk keen-eyed copy editors (sorry!), especially those from the print world who are accustomed  to deleting extraneous spaces.

No idea if the science behind this is solid, but I have heard of chunking. When I took a speed-reading class in grade school, they taught us two key principles. One was not to read aloud “inside your head,” and the other was not to read linearly, one word at a time, but to look at chunks of words (which also makes it hard to read linearly).

Maybe because I already chunk groups of words in regularly spaced text, or maybe because the asym spacing bunched odd groups of words together, I found the regularly spaced text (on the left) easier to read.

Uber for disembodied companionship

Kashmir Hill worked as an invisible boyfriend/girlfriend for a month. We are already living with one foot in the near future.

With each job, I would see the person’s first name, last initial and hometown; “how we met;” and my own assigned name, age, and which of six personality types they’d given their Invisible. Now I’m adventurous and fun. Now I’m cheerful and outgoing.
 
There were 3 major rules:
1. I was always supposed to be upbeat in my messages.
2. I’m not supposed to break character.
3. No sexting. (Photos are blocked on the service.)
 
I’d get the story of how we met and the last 10 messages we’d exchanged. This setup is designed to create the illusion of continuity; ideally, an Invisible Boyfriend would seem like a steady, stable presence in a user’s life, instead of what it really is: a rotating cast of men and women. And it is both: a woman who works for the service previously told me she prefers playing the role of boyfriend because she knows what a woman wants to hear.
 

Hill probably got paid more for this article than she did for her work as invisible companion.

It’s hard to put a price on love. But Crowdsource did. It’s worth a whopping five cents. That’s how much I got paid to write each of these texts.
 
If I spent an hour answering texts, and took the full five minutes to write each one, I’d be making 60 cents an hour, far below the minimum wage. This is legal because all the workers on the platform are classified as independent contractors rather than employees. “Contributors have a tremendous amount of control over their decisions—for example, when to perform a task, when to complete it, and even if they want to complete it at all,” said Jeffrey H. Newhouse, an employment lawyer at Hirschler Fleischer, by email. “That means the contributor isn’t an employee and, as a result, employee protections like the minimum wage don’t apply.”
 

Not surprising considering the required skill set is the ability to write with decent grammar, that's reasonably commodified.

As with Uber, the laborers already fear displacement by technology like self-driving cars.

I assumed that, when artificial intelligence is good enough, Invisible would just cut the crowdsourced humans out of the equation and use chat bots, which you don’t have to pay per message, instead.
 
No, he said. “Having humans in the flow is the key to the service,” said Tabor. “There are things that only humans can respond to and understand, like inside jokes.”
 

Loneliness continues to be one of the great problems being tackled by technologists. See also: Her, The Diamond Age.

IoT

Daniel Miessler thinks we're underestimating the Internet of Things.

IoT isn’t about smart gadgets or connecting more things to the Internet. It’s about continuous two-way interaction between everything in the world. It’s about changing how humans and other objects interact with the world around them.
 
It will turn people and objects from static to dynamic, and make them machine-readable and fully interactive entities. Algorithms will continuously optimize the interactions between everyone and everything in the world, and make it so that the environment around humans constantly adjusts based on presence, preference, and desire.
 
The Internet of Things is not an Internet use case. Quite the opposite, the IoT represents the ultimate platform for human interaction with the physical world, and it will turn the Internet into a mere medium.
 

Great succinct read on the key technical components that will make up his vision for IoT.

The Internet of Things is a terrible name, which doesn't help matters. Miessler suggests four alternatives though they don't catch me on first read. Something less tech jargony, not terrifying (the phonetics of daemon aren't great though it's a cool word), shorter (a la the singularity). it sounds silly but a name is all that gives a futuristic scenario like this a personality right now.

Kubrick posters by Tomer Hanuka

I'm a huge fan of Tomer Hanuka's art, and several of his prints hang in my apartment. The ones that don't are the ones that sold out before I could get my hands on one of them, much to my grief.

He's working on a series of posters for Kubrick's movies, four of which are done already.

The Divine, a graphic novel by Boaz Lavie with art by Tomer and his brother Asaf, ships next week. Looks great.

Hanuka also created one of my favorite New Yorker covers, the Valentine's Day cover in 2014, titled Perfect Storm.

Disrupting reality

Most television viewers don't realize just how much of what they watch contains a lot of visual FX, or “virtual reality” if you will. Check out this reel from Stargate Studios.

Sometimes, the only thing that's “real” is the main actor. Increased computing power and advances in visual effects software and techniques mean we're only going to see more and more productions turn to the trusty green screen. More and more, the cost of shooting against a green screen and drawing in a background is lower than shooting on location. That's a sea change that has happened more quickly than most viewers realize.

It's not a short step, but perhaps not more than a few vigorous hops and a few cranks of Moore's Law to imagine the same convenience tradeoff happening in our own lives, the swap of physical reality for virtual reality. As long as the quality is good enough, the lower cost/higher convenience solution wins out. For virtual reality, that bar is not to match reality exactly. It is simply belief.

We're finally at the point in history when we have an alternative to the shadow costs of the real world.

Reality is bloated.
 
It started off as a lean, mean MVP with a minimal feature set — hunting and gathering, procreating, a little story-telling around the fire, fighting for dear life — but now every last use case has been crammed in. There are so many layers of cruft on this thing, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all.
 
This is one of the ultimate drivers of consumer VR — not (just) to provide experiences we couldn’t have otherwise, but to replace many of the crappy physical experiences we slog through every day. Business travel. Middle school. Conferences. You know: pain relievers, not vitamins.
 
There’s been no choice until now, since we’ve been living in a platform monoculture where the monopoly provider hasn’t had any competition to keep it honest. Thankfully, that’s about to change.
 

That's Beau Cronin on unbundling reality. It's perhaps one of the greatest disruptions we'll live through this century.