Mes Souhaites

location: MPP DC

mood: busy

music: Scooter - One

I'm being mildly productive today which is a nice change of pace from my complete lack of productivity yesterday. In honor of Mexico defeating the French at Puebla in 1862, I've made a banana pudding and I'm off to eat it with some grilled meat this evening. The Mexico bit moreso enters with the dozen lemons and limes that will accompany a bunch of tequila into my belly with the pudding and meat.

I''ve been trying to find a reference to a study I remember seeing in the TEX documentation which covered reader comprehension as a function of line length. It tried to support with science the old newspapermen's addage that lines should not be more than 10-15 words. It is supposedly why newspapers and TEX documents are frequently columnated. It made the case that people process information by lines as they are reading and if the line is too long the brain gets confused trying to hold the whole thing. All they did was give people reading selections columnated to different lengths and compared their comprehension. I can't find the study, but I did find some interesting figures from Colin Wheildon's Type & Layout:

• Switching from full justified text to ragged right drops the percentage of readers with good comprehension of the contents from 67% to 38%
• Switching from serif to sans serif body type drops good comprehension from 67% to 12%
• Any text color but black drastically reduces comprehension — to 51% for a dark color, 29% for a medium color, and 10% for a bright color
• Black text on colored tints of 10% or less works fine. On darker tints, comprehension drops rapidly

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history — with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."