The Helvetic Hegemony: How An Unassuming Font Took Over the World

You have to go to http://www.slate.com/id/2166887/ and see this slideshow about the Helvetica font. Veeerrrryyyy interesting... I'm switching to Helvetica for everything now.

Distorted Word Puzzles Commonly Used To Register on Web Sites

Have you ever wondered what they call those distorted word puzzles you have to type in when you go to a Web site? Well, they are called CAPTCHAs, short for "completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart." Computers can't decipher the twisted letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated programs are using the Web sites. Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a way to enlist people across the globe to help digitize books every time they solve these simple distorted word puzzles. These researcher say that instead of wasting time typing in random letters and numbers, we should be using the 150,000 hours every day to type in snippets of books to speed up the process of getting searchable texts online. To read the complete article go to http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/05/29/blather.to.books.ap/index.html.

Pet Peeve: E-mail without a Subject Line

I can't count how many e-mails I receive in a day without a subject line! When you receive 30+ e-mails every day, you need a method for determining which ones need to be responded to right away and which ones you can let sit for a while. Without a descriptive subject line, prioritizing e-mail can be a problem. So I have a rule: no subject line, no response.

"And another thing, buster...." I don't know why people think that they can throw all of the grammar, punctuation, and spelling rules out the window when they write an e-mail. Don't they know that e-mail can be used in a court of Law, so they had better take as much care with their e-mail as they do with any other litigious type of correspondence. Just ask Jeff Skilling and the rest of the Enron executives.

As protectors of the English language, let's unite against e-mail abuse and at least force our coworkers to include a subject line. Create a rule in Outlook to let the senders know that you require a subject line. We can deal with the content of the message later.