Interesting Stuff

It’s worth noting that China has frozen Korean money transfers in protest over North Korea’s recent missile tests. I’m a bit surprised that China is willing to take such a strong action against what I thought was a close ally.

The more interesting news is that more chinks in the Bush administration’s monolithic confidence over Iraq are beginning to emerge. October, despite the observance of Ramadan, is already the most deadly month in Iraq for US troops since April. Most importantly, American diplomat Alberto Fernandez told al-Jazeera that the US acted with “arrogance and stupidity” in Iraq, and is now in a nigh unwinnable position. He was later forced to retract his position. The White House seems to be claiming that his statement was a mistranslation, despite the fact that Fernandez is fluent in Arabic (and presumably English, too).

Finally, I give you a history of Arial and Helvetica fonts, including a reason to like Helvetica and dislike Arial (Helvetica:Arial::Java:Javascript, one might say). I also include a guide to spotting the differences between the two. This was brought to my attention on the tex_latex community. I feel weird saying this, but it’s kinda fun being a typesetting snob and noticing the papers that lack ligatures and do paragraph/page spacing wrong.