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Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Behind The Painstaking Process Of Creating Chinese Computer Fonts, by Tom Mullaney, MIT Technology Review

The core problem that designers faced was translating between two radically different ways of writing Chinese: the hand-drawn character, produced with pen or brush, and the bitmap glyph, produced with an array of pixels arranged on two axes. Designers had to decide how (and whether) they were going to try to re-create certain orthographic features of handwritten Chinese, such as entrance strokes, stroke tapering, and exit strokes.

How The World Ran Out Of Everything, by Niraj Chokshi, New York Times

But the tumultuous events of the past year have challenged the merits of paring inventories, while reinvigorating concerns that some industries have gone too far, leaving them vulnerable to disruption. As the pandemic has hampered factory operations and sown chaos in global shipping, many economies around the world have been bedeviled by shortages of a vast range of goods — from electronics to lumber to clothing.

In a time of extraordinary upheaval in the global economy, Just In Time is running late.

As Venice Floods, A Lush, Malice-Infused Mystery Unfolds, by Sarah Lyall, New York Times

A good-luck talisman that mysteriously vanishes; manuscript pages that may or may not have been deliberately flung into the canal; floods that threaten to swallow streets and people, in a city under siege; a touch of literary theft — all these figure in “Palace of the Drowned.” It takes some patience to remain inside the fevered mind of Frankie, with its daily questioning of its own sanity, but the wait is worth it. When you learn the truth at the end, you’ll want to go back and rethink everything you read before.

Breaking Out Of Prison With A Ouija Board And Some Clever Tricks, by Chris Jennings, New York Times

Going all the way back to the stratagems of Odysseus, certain war stories draw their fascination from the breathtaking cleverness occasionally sparked by the will to survive. “The Confidence Men,” Margalit Fox’s riveting account of two British officers who sprang themselves from an Ottoman prison camp during World War I using a Ouija board, sleight of hand, feigned madness and vast stores of creativity, is such a tale. Like the “Odyssey,” Fox’s book is less about war than the winding path home.