Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 12/16/05
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“MAN OF LETTERS”
by Alec Wilkinson
Our title and quotes below are from THE NEW YORKER of 12/05/05:
“Matthew Carter is often described as the most widely read man in the world. Carter designs typefaces. He is universally acknowledged as the most significant designer of type in America, and as having only one or two peers in Europe…
“A typeface customarily has two hundred and twenty-eight characters, including letters, accents, numerals, fractions, ligatures (the structure that in certain faces join letters together); commercial signs, such as those for the dollar and the euro; and punctuation marks, ampersands, and peculiars, such as asterisks and daggers for footnotes. A type designer typically produces four versions of a face: roman – that is, upright – letters, italic, bold roman, and bold italic. Such a grouping is called a family…
“The phone book is set in four categories of type: one for names and numbers; one for addresses; one in boldface, mainly for businesses; and one for entries called sub-captions, which is used for listings contained under a heading – the departments of a museum, for instance. Carter’s solution was to make the typeface for addresses narrower, and the one for names and addresses wider and heavier, which saved space and therefore a lot of money…
“If you substantially enlarge the “B” in Bell Centennial, the white space looks like two bells lying on their sides. Carter says this was unintended…
“Each letter has a boundary on either side called the side bearing. The letter “O” has the same bearing on each side, but most letters do not. The space within the letters is called the counter. The counter within the “n” must be at least in proportion to that within the “m” for the letters to look right in company. In addition, the counter of any letter must agree visually with the bearing. One means of helping settle the space between letters is a serif, the ledge of embellishment on the feet and shoulders, and sometimes halfway up the shaft, of letters in typefaces that are called serif faces. Serifs also make letters easier to read. Without serifs, “I” is difficult to distinguish from “1” or a lower case “l.” Carter says that the words such as “Illinois,” “Illicit,” or “Illogical” written in a face without serifs can look like a picket fence...
“Carter enjoys designing type for inhospitable environments. ‘Many of the projects that have interested me most,’ he says, ‘have involved somehow the instruction, Make a typeface that will work at tiny size when printed on newspaper at very high speed in ink composed of kerosene and lampblack – all the lowest standards of production. Before he designed Verdana for Microsoft, in 1993, the typefaces on computers were adapted from type used in magazines and books and newspapers. Because the resolution on computer screens is so imprecise, the letters looked scrawny and wan.
“Microsoft wanted its new typeface to be as legible as possible. Carter was aware as he worked that the point might soon be reached where more text was read on computer screens than was read on paper, and that the purpose in designing this face was not simply that it print handsomely but that it also look good on the screen…
“The alphabet was organized into capital and small letters around 800. The capital letters derived from inscriptions on Roman monuments, and the smaller letters from handwriting. Initially, all printing imitated handwriting. The first book that could easily be carried around was printed in Venice in 1501. It was called a pocket book. It was printed in italic, which was thinner than the other styles of type, and was said to be an imitation of Petrarch’s handwriting…”
The complete text of this outstanding 10-page article is available only in the 12/05/05 print edition.
“THOUGHT CONTROL BRINGS PAIN INTO LINE”
by Andreas von Bubnoff
Our title and quotes below are from news@nature.com of 12/12/05:
“Researchers have managed to teach people suffering chronic pain to reduce their own discomfort simply by controlling their thoughts.
“It’s unclear how long the effect lasts, but the researchers hope that this approach could one day be used to treat chronic pain, which affects tens of millions of people in the United States alone and is a major reason for sick leave.
“The team, led by Christopher deCharms, showed eight patients real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, of the activity in their rostral anterior cingulated cortex (rACC), a part of the brain known to be involved with pain control. They asked participants to try to increase or decrease activity in this area, by focusing on their pain or by distracting themselves from it.
“After only a few training sessions, most patients could reduce the activity in their rACC on command. These patients said that their pain lessened by about 50%…”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/pf/051212-1_pf.html
“GENETIC SECRETS OF MAN’S BEST FRIEND REVEALED”
Our title and quotes below are from 12/08/05 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:
“Scientists have decoded the dog genome. A boxer named Tasha, selected for her high degree of inbreeding, has had her genetic secrets puzzled out and then compared to partial genetic pictures of other breeds of dog and other mammals. It has been a long wait for humanity’s first companion, domesticated from gray wolves at least 15,000 years ago…
“The dog apparently shares 94 percent of its genetic sequence with humans and mice, despite having a substantially smaller genome thanks to fewer repeat sequences. And dog lovers will be happy to know that humans have more in common with dogs than with mice, despite sharing a more recent common ancestor with the latter.
“By comparing Tasha’s DNA to that of nine other dog breeds, coyotes and four types of wolves, the researchers also found that all modern breeds – from poodles to malamutes – derive from at least two population bottlenecks: one that occurred thousands of years ago when humans bred dogs from wolves and one happened in the last few hundred years as humans bred that ancestral population into the dogs of all shapes and sizes observable today…
To read the complete article, click on http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00082E69-67B3-1397-A7B383414B7F0000
“WHERE DOES WIND COME FROM?”
by Chris Weiss, asst. professor atmospheric science, at Texas Tech Univ.
Our title and quotes are from the 12/14/05 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:
“Simply put, wind is the motion of air molecules. Two concepts are central to understanding what causes wind: air and air pressure. Air comprises molecules of nitrogen (about 78 percent by volume), oxygen (about 21 percent by volume), water vapor (between 1 and 4 percent by volume near the surface of the earth) and other trace elements. Every time we breathe, the air we inhale is composed of about the same relative ratios of these molecules, and a cubic inch of air at ground level contains about 10 multiplied by itself 20 times molecules.
“All of these air molecules are moving about very quickly, colliding readily with each other and any objects at ground level. Air pressure is defined as the amount of force that these molecules impart on a given area. In general, the more air molecules present, the greater the air pressure. Wind, in turn, is driven by what is called the pressure gradient force. Changes in air pressure over a specified horizontal distance cause air molecules from the region of relatively high air pressure to rush toward the area of low pressure. Such horizontal pressure differences of all scales generate the wind we experience…”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=0004AF91-B25B-12D6-B25B83414B7F0000&catID=3&chanID=sa005 and then on questions about the environment.
OUR BLOG AND YOURS
Do you keep a blog? We hope so, for you read the things we write about and are therefore interested in the subjects that interest us. We are flattered, and we’d also very much like to read what you write about.
We don’t register on big globes of blogs for it may take us all day to examine all of them, and we might not understand much of it. Therefore, we hope you will send us the address of what you’ve written even remotely connected with the forest economy of the eastern United States. We’d also like to have permission to quote you, and we promise not to argue with you, in print or otherwise.
USED BOOK SALES
We offer for sale all books listed at http://www.vardaman.com/booksale.php.
OUR SYSTEM FOR BUYING OR SELLING LAND OR TIMBER
For the details, click on http://www.vardaman.com and then on the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” You can offer to buy or sell timber or land. You must post the general area of your interest; be sure to include the state. You must also post your E-MAIL ADDRESS and the URL of your Internet site. Our tracking report will not report the number of visitors UNLESS you enter your URL. If you are selling, you should post the name of the tract. When you have entered all details, click on “Submit,” and what you just entered will appear on our Internet site at the bottom of the page under the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” Be sure to check for and correct errors.
For each tract posted after 05/12/05 and whose owner posted his URL, we charge $0.25 for each visit his ad receives. On each Friday at 0900 Central Time, we will e-mail him a bill for $0.25 for each visit his ad received during the week just ended. You can pay us by e-mailing the money to “Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company” at PayPal or mailing it to P.O. Box 12293, Jackson, MS 39236. We will delete your ad when your payments cease. The new fee schedule does not apply to tracts marked with asterisks::
SELL LAND OR TIMBER
For 107-A. tract in GA, click on http://www.Buythisfsbo.com/pineplantation/
For 2071A. tract in TN, click on Doktortombstone@aol.com
BUY LAND
*For tracts in SC, send e-mail to loblolly@surfbvi.com
For tracts in SC, send e-mail to rich@CHRISTOPHERRADKO.COM
For tracts in MD, send e-mail to meyerstm@comcast.net
For tracts in MA, send e-mail to leonelmtz65@hotmail.com
For tracts in OR, send e-mail to 7200moore@charter.net
For tracts in OR, send e-mail to ptodd@orclinic.com
For tracts in FL, send e-mail to hot63vdub@hotmail.com
For tracts in TX, send e-mail to reedkimbley@hotmail.com
For tracts in TN, send e-mail to Doktortombstone@aol.com
BUY TIMBER
*For tracts in AR, send e-mail to dyork@digitalpassage.com
*For tracts in IL, send e-mail to psftimber@hotmail.com
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