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Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part 1)This is the first installment in a two- part series. THE QUIZ [1]The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes…— Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”NOTE: This is a follow- up to my quiz that ran in The Times, “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?” I would like you to read my essay and then take the quiz. It doesn’t matter whether you have taken it before. If you haven’t taken it before, please take it. If you have taken it before, please take it again.

Here is my confession. My quiz wasn’t really a test of the optimism or pessimism of the reader. There was a hidden agenda. It was a test of the effect of typefaces on truth. Or to be precise, the effect on credulity. Are there certain typefaces that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true? I picked a passage from David Deutsch’s second book, “The Beginning of Infinity” — a passage about “unprecedented safety” — and embedded it in my quiz for The Times, “Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?”.

Detroit makes for a disturbing and unnerving portrayal of real historical events, but has less success as a work of sociopolitical commentary.

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. With Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, Mark Strong. A chronicle of the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama.

If a one- kilometer asteroid had approached the Earth on a collision course at any time in human history before the early twenty- first century, it would have killed at least a substantial proportion of all humans. In that respect, as in many others, we live in an era of unprecedented safety: the twenty- first century is the first ever moment when we have known how to defend ourselves from such impacts, which occur once every 2. Do you think Deutsch’s claim is true? Is it true that “we live in an era of unprecedented safety”?( ) Yes: The claim is true( ) No: The claim is false. How confident are you in your conclusion?( ) Slightly confident( ) Moderately confident( ) Very confident. I do not mean to dismiss the possibility of global catastrophe from asteroids or global warming or a host of other possible calamities — bioengineered viruses spreading out of control, Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation choking off life on the planet, etc.

I wouldn’t want to dismiss even the most outrageous of millenarian fantasies, including Mayan predictions of the end of the world. But for the moment, I was interested in something somewhat less apocalyptic. We all know that we are influenced in many, many ways — many of which we remain blissfully unaware of. Could typefaces be one of them? Could the mere selection of a typeface influence us to believe one thing rather than another? Could typefaces work some unseen magic?

Or malefaction? Don’t get me wrong. The underlying truth of the sentence “Gold has an atomic number of 7. The sentence is true regardless of whether it is displayed in Helvetica, Georgia or even the much- maligned Comic Sans. But are we more inclined to believe that gold has an atomic number of 7.

Georgia, the typeface of The New York Times online, rather than in Helvetica? I asked a friend, the psychologist Marc Hauser, about experimental results on typefaces. He recommended a blog post, “The Secret Life of Fonts,” written by Phil Renaud, self- described as “a Canadian blog design and web design enthusiast, with a particular admiration for web standards and CSS innovation. Ruby on Rails, xhtml/css, ajax, and a whole lotta love.” [5]I’m nearing the end of my sixth semester of university, and things are going pretty well: I’m clearing a decent grade point average, enjoying my major, and just having wrapped up my semester’s “essay alley,” wherein all my courses require a term paper or two, and getting my results back telling me that I’m doing much better than usual. At first, I’m just relieved to be doing so well. Still, ever the skeptic, I start to wonder: what exactly am I doing differently now to be getting all these A- range paper grades all of the sudden? I haven’t drastically changed the amount of effort I’m putting into my writing.

I’m probably even spending less time with them now than I did earlier in my studies, and while I guess you could argue that I’m probably just being a great example of practice making perfect, I’ve got my doubts; I even used to take courses concentrating on writing better essays, and in the time surrounding that, my grades were pretty low. Then it hits me: the only thing I’ve really changed since I’ve been getting these grades is…my essay font. Renaud had written 5.

Eleven were set in Times New Roman, 1. Trebuchet MS, and the remaining 2. Georgia. The Times New Roman papers earned an average grade of A- , but the Trebuchet papers could only muster a B- . And the Georgia essays? A solid A. Well, would you believe it? My essays written in Georgia did the best overall. This got me thinking as to why that might be: maybe fonts speak a lot louder than we think they do.

Especially to a professor who has to wade through a collection of them; Times seems to be the norm, so it really doesn’t set off any subconscious triggers. Georgia is enough like Times to retain its academic feel, and is different enough to be something of a relief for the grader. Trebuchet seems to set off a negative trigger, maybe just based on the fact that it’s not as easy to read in print, maybe on the fact that it looks like something off a blog rather than an academic journal. Who knows…So, be mindful of your target audience when you’re marking up a document, whether it’s a university essay or a commercial website. You never know just how loudly a font speaks.

But Renaud’s results are anecdotal. I wondered: is there an experiment that could decide this once and for all? Or barring that, at least throw some empirical light on the situation? Could the effect of typography on the perception of truth be assessed objectively? Benjamin Berman (who designed the Multics emulation for my Times article “Did My Brother Invent Email with Tom Van Vleck?”) created a program that changes the typeface of the David Deutsch passage. Each Times participant read the passage in one of six randomly assigned typefaces — Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet. The questions, ostensibly about optimism or pessimism, provided data about the influence of typefaces on our beliefs.

The test consisted of comparing the responses and determining whether typeface choice influenced our perception of the truth of the passage. More than 1. 00,0. I gave the results to David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, who helped design the questions and the overall character of the quiz. Here are the results. Deutsch; 6. 1 percent were optimists and agreed with him.

You Need Hand Towels in Your Bathroom. People who don’t have hand towels in your bathrooms: What do you think your guests dry their hands on? Do you expect us to use your bath towels?

Do you think we know which part of the towel you use for your face, or your own hands? Or do you know that we might grab the part of the towel you rubbed all over your ass? Do you want us to flail our hands wildly in the air, sprinkling water all over your bathroom? Do you want us to commandeer your shower curtain or your toilet paper or our own pants? Do you think we just don’t wash our hands? Do you realize the chaos you’re causing? The shame, confusion, and sense of betrayal?

The mass panic taking place in your bathroom every time you host a party? A bath towel is used in the nude; it is applied to your intimate places.

A guest rubbing their hands on it is groping a ghost of your freshly showered morning self. If you don’t want hand towels for yourself, that’s your prerogative. You’re just swapping your cooties (and your dead skin flakes) back and forth on your own body. Some of you may wait until your towels smell funky to wash them.

As it turns out, it's better…Read more Read. But forcing your guests to use your bath towels, which were last washed god knows when, conveys a carelessness bordering on hostility that you definitely didn’t intend. Flashpoint Season 2 Episode 18 more. It should be a move reserved for movie villains establishing dominance, like forcing a cowardly character to shave them. It’s also unpleasantly intimate.

A bath towel is used in the nude; it is applied to your intimate places. A guest rubbing their hands on it is groping a ghost of your freshly showered morning self. If the towel is still damp, we are immediately reminded that this dampness came not from your own hands, which we gladly grasp in greeting or farewell, but from parts of you we’ve never seen, much less caressed.

You may as well ask us to use your toothbrush. Finally, sharing towels is a health hazard. The germs you pass to yourself are less harmful than the germs you pass to others, whose bodies haven’t always developed the same immunities. This is, of course, still a risk with hand towels, but less so, as those towels haven’t rubbed the exotic petri dish of your genital orifices before hanging limply to “dry” in the wettest room of your home. Your hand towels can be cheap. They can be ugly.

No one cares, so long as they can be clearly identified as hand towels—not a bath towel, not a floor towel. To that end, they must be smaller than these other towels. Other than that, go wild.

And please, wash your hand towels now and then. Ideally every week, but at least as often as your other laundry. Anything less, and your guests may as well wipe their hands dry on your mouth.