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Australia Science

Researchers Create 'Sans Forgetica,' a Memory-Boosting Font (cnn.com) 151

OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: CNN reports on a new font that is purposely designed to more easily help students recall academic materials they read. From the report: "Australian researchers say their new font, called Sans Forgetica, could be the tool to help people retain information. The typeface, which slants to the side and has gaps in the middle, is not easy on the eyes. But according to the team at RMIT University in Australia who conceived Sans Forgetica, it has the perfect combination of 'obstruction' needed to recall information. The multidisciplinary team of typographic design specialists and psychologists said they designed Sans Forgetica using the learning principle called 'desirable difficulty.' The principle means that when obstruction is added to the learning process, people are required to make a little more effort and end up having better memory retention.

With normal fonts 'readers often glance over them and no memory trace is created,' RMIT senior lecturer Janneke Blijlevens said in a statement. Conversely, if a font is too difficult, memory is not retained. 'Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstruction has been added to create that memory retention,' she said. To get to that sweet spot, the researchers tested various fonts with roughly 400 Australian university students in a laboratory and an online experiment 'where fonts with a range of obstructions were tested to determine which led to the best memory retention,' RMIT said. 'Sans Forgetica broke just enough design principles without becoming too illegible and aided memory retention,' RMIT said."

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Researchers Create 'Sans Forgetica,' a Memory-Boosting Font

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  • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday October 04, 2018 @07:09PM (#57428078) Homepage Journal

    OK, I understand the "slap in the face" strategy long used by memory enhancement experts, and inherent in "the peg", imagery, and other memory routines. The problem with this is that readers will become trained to it, until it is no more difficult to read than other fonts. Morse and his engineer intended people to read Morse Code off of paper tape, but it soon became clear that people could read it simply by the sound of the machine. Similarly, people's brains will work out an optimal strategy for reading deliberately-crippled fonts, and then there will no longer be a memory effect.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @07:28PM (#57428146) Homepage

      Not quite, it will inherently diminish understanding because it simply requires more mental effort to read ie that greater mental effort required to read it, of course stimulates greater recall because you are putting much more mental effort in, especially when tired. Anyone outside of silly people using it, well no because it takes considerably more mental effort to read, greater pattern association processing is required, the problem there, it inherently will diminish thought being put into understanding what has been read, you really want to get that understanding in as early as possible to build a proper mental framework for more study. Japanese have a similar problem, with so much effort required to learn the Japanese language, it diminishes the amount that can be learned using the Japanese language.

      Same with this font, test well in theory but it will diminish overall learning, beyond rote learning, so more effort consumed in the learning process, resulting in less learned. Of course if you write notes by hand, well, good luck. It is far better to sit through a lecture with pencil and pad, than with a computer, unless you want to spend that lecture time completing other assignments .

      • Isn't it kanji, the Han Chinese derived alphabet, that gives the Japanese such trouble? And I would imagine the Chinese? It is not language but literacy, I think.

        The Koreans were smart, and got rid of that, focusing on Hangeul. The Japanese got the worst of all worlds, so they have katakana (phonetic writing), hirigana (phonetic writing which serves the purpose of italics, but has entirely different glyphs than katakana), and kanji.

        • by Desler ( 1608317 )

          The Koreans were smart, and got rid of that,

          No they didn't. Korean uses Chinese characters, too. They call it Hanja.

          • by Desler ( 1608317 )

            And to add Hanja uses the traditional Chinese characters rather than simplified versions adopted by the Japanese and Chinese with fewer strokes than Hanja.

            • Darn snobbery. But at least the limit is only around 1800 glyphs for South Koreans.
              • by HarrySquatter ( 1698416 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @08:10PM (#57428336)

                Darn snobbery. But at least the limit is only around 1800 glyphs for South Koreans.

                Most Japanese limit themselves to Joyo kanji which is only just over 2000 to be considered literate. A couple extra hundred isn't that much more to learn by the time you're 17-18. Very few ever go beyond that let alone to get level 1 in Kanji Kentei which requires knowing over 6000 kanji plus obscure readings, etc.

              • by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @09:43PM (#57428660)

                at least the limit is only around 1800 glyphs for South Koreans.

                It's not much more in modern Japanese--about 2200. Post World War II, the Japanese did massive simplification of kanji, cutting it back to 2000. While it's not generally illegal to use the older characters, it is illegal to use them in official documents, and publishers can only be assured that their readers will know the official characters (you're supposed to know them all by the end of elementary school).

            • Japanese uses many of the traditional forms as well as simplifications that differ from those used by Simplified Chinese.

              On topic: This is definitely NOT a font you'd want to use for writing code.

        • by Toth ( 36602 )

          It allows for another level in Japanese poetry and even given names.
          There are multiple Chinese characters that have the same sound in Japanese. One can write a poem that meets all the rhythm and meter in Japanese with the choice of characters for the sound adds another level of complexity or meaning.

          It appears to be the same for given names. We had an exchange student whose given name was Jiro.

          Jir can be written using different kanji characters and can mean:

          , "next, son"
          , "next, melodious"
          , "second, son"
          ,

          • That's why in intellectual Japanese conversations you see people tracing kanji on the palms of their hands.

            • I've used a similar trick to communicate in China when someone couldn't understand my pronunciation.

              I must say it's quite entertaining to watch their expressions when they realise that's what the funny-sounding white guy is doing. :-)

          • Actually, it can't.

            Your Jiro most certainly knew what his name was. And then only *one* of the Kanji you propose will fit.

            However Japanese like to play with words/sounds. A completely correct written short sentence (like 5 or 6 Kanji) might actually mean something completely different than is written there. Consider it a "wise" or "well read" mens puzzle.

            E.g. Daito Ryu Aiki Jujutus, is a martial arts. Founded around WWI. The Kanji basically mean "Aiki based weapon less fighting school of the greater east".

        • Katakana, which is just a more angular form of the hiragana set of phonetic characters, is the set used like italics for foreign words. Hiragana are used as Japanese grammatical elements interspersed with the Chinese kanji, which carry the meaning.

        • You are mixing up hiragana with katakana.

          Most Japanese sentences are a mix of kanji (mostly used for nouns) and hiragana used for grammar structures and verbs (that is simplified).

          Kanji you simply memorize. There is no "deciphering" like reading a complicated english word as "deciphering". Kanji spring while reading into your mind just like spoken language. Your brain/mind does not even use the same brain area for reading them as you would in reading letters or hiragana/katakana (Kana).

          The Korean have absol

          • "The Korean have absolutely no advantage. Their script is a syllable script just like Hiragana/Katakana, albeit they have more syllables."

            AFAIK Korean (Hangul) is an alphabetic system, just with the "letters" stacked to form a syllabic character that superficially resembles a Chinese character. You only need to memorize 24 "letters" to read and pronounce it.

            • Then you are wrong informed.
              It is easy to read it up on wikipedia.

              And no, you are double wrong informed, Hangul has nothing to do at all with Chinese characters.

              You only need to memorize 24 "letters" to read and pronounce it.
              Make that about 200 ... I'm to lazy to look up how many there are exactly.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

              The alphabet consists of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Its letters are grouped into syllabic blocks, vertically and horizontally.

              • by _merlin ( 160982 )

                Yeah, but you only need to remember the 24 gwlja to be able to read all the jaso. For example, the jaso "nam" is composed of the gwlja "n", "a" and "m". The jaso "han" is composed of the gwlja "h", "a" and "n". The "a" and "n" are the same in "nam" and "han". The way to arrange the gwlja in a jaso is pretty obvious.

                • Yeah, you are right about that.
                  However if you want to write properly, you need to know the layout of each syllable.
                  Perhaps they are straight forward, I never dug into that :D

          • I've noticed I read words by prediction: I know what words should come in the sentence, and will fill in what should be there. Word shape, length, position, and context determine what I see; sometimes I'm not even looking at the area of text I'm reading, instead inspecting the shape of the paragraph as a whole (including where white spaces occur) and "reading" the text entirely by prediction.

            A not-insignificant part of this process is creating and integrating a theory-of-mind model of the writer: I'm

        • by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Friday October 05, 2018 @07:18AM (#57430414)
          There's no evidence that Chinese characters give Chinese people any trouble. I learned Chinese in kindergarten and I remember finding english very hard - because it was foreign. Nowadays I do find Chinese hard because I've forgotten most of it. But ask any Chinese person from high school onwards. There's no trouble at all.

          It's like people asking me why I still use chopsticks, considering that knife and fork is easier. Well, it isn't for me, because I've been using chopsticks most of my life, but for some reason people assume that familiarity plays no role whatsoever and if they find chopsticks and Chinese hard, it must be hard for everyone.
          • Oh, that's BS. Lots of Chinese people *suck* at Chinese. Why do you think they simplified the characters? Because it was hard for them, too. I'll never forget the first day I saw two Chinese people get into an argument about how a character should be drawn. Tremendously vindicating.

            "From high school onwards" nice dodge there. You conveniently missed all the people who don't pass the test to go on to high school, or whose parents can't afford high school.

            • by epine ( 68316 )

              Oh, that's BS. Lots of Chinese people *suck* at Chinese. Why do you think they simplified the characters? Because it was hard for them, too.

              If the Chinese had as many problems with their script as half the English population has with there/their/they're or your/you're, after simplification no character would have been left standing with more than five strokes.

              (If you think this project is impossible, you haven't considered Randall Munroe. At a sustained rate of one character simplification per hour, he coul

            • And why does Taiwan still stick with traditional characters, and have absolutely no problem educating millions of people?

              Why do YOU think they simplified the characters? Do you really buy the communist line that it needed to be simplified? It couldn't be because controlling the language allows them to also control the country's politics, allowing them to rewrite history knowing that it would be harder for people to go back to older, "dangerous" writings? Your sig talks about shutting down free speech, yet
      • Not quite, it will inherently diminish understanding because it simply requires more mental effort to read ie that greater mental effort required to read it, of course stimulates greater recall because you are putting much more mental effort in, especially when tired. Anyone outside of silly people using it, well no because it takes considerably more mental effort to read, greater pattern association processing is required, the problem there, it inherently will diminish thought being put into understanding

        • and the idea that 'rote' learning doesn't lead to understanding is somewhat of a myth that isn't supported by the research.

          Yes, it's hard to escape the suspicion that the people who are always hatin' on "rote learning" are those who are just really, really bad at teaching.

        • Rote is an important learning mechanism. Memory is associative, and understanding is complex.

          I never learned much by rote. When I learned math, I was learning processes, and I would see connections between those processes. I'd start reflecting everything as everything else, and could never remember...anything. I always re-derived all my formulas from other knowledge, proving again and again that the formula of a sphere was whatever it was.

          When we moved onto integration in Calc 1, I immediately deci

      • What a load of nonsense. That Japanese clearly have no trouble learning the same amount of things as people in the West, being one of the highly educated countries in the world, and being successful in making that education work for them. The problems you listed are precisely the problems of the inability to retain information, which is what happens now.

        People dismiss rote learning, but recalling information quickly and accurately is vital to the learning process. Rote learning is only bad when memorizat
      • "Not quite, it will inherently diminish understanding because it simply requires more mental effort to read ie that greater mental effort required to read it, of course stimulates greater recall "

        I thought Courrier and Elite were already perfect for that.

      • Japanese have a similar problem, with so much effort required to learn the Japanese language, it diminishes the amount that can be learned using the Japanese language.
        That is nonsense.
        Japanese, and for that matter Chinese, you can read close to 10 times as fast than German, and probably more than 5 times as fast than english.
        There is no special "deciphering" gap in those languages, as it is with this proposed font.

        • I'm not convinced that using 1/5 the space automatically saves you 4/5 of the time required to read it (or write it, for that matter).

          I suppose it's possible that Chinese sign-makers use a lot less paint per sign than do their Western counterparts, though.

        • I read English pretty damned fast and I don't even speed read. When I use RSVP, 600WPM is comfortable. RSVP materials suggest 300WPM is viable for a beginner, yet I could pull 800WPM with comprehension, albeit that's running a little hot.

          I have some odd mental habits, so I'm relatively well-prepared for things like that.

      • by jtgd ( 807477 )
        I wonder if the way it works is to simply slow you down. If that's true then speed reading is bad.
      • Agree.

        The reason it enhances memory is because it makes you work to even read it. Which means you pay more attention, etc.

        But that's like saying you'll better remember digging a ditch later if you have to do it with a shovel rather than a backhoe.

        Probably true, but who cares?
      • I came here to say the same, but you said it better than I could have. Students today are already overwhelmed with all the courses, research, and piles of homework they do; this won't help, so this will just flop.

      • Japanese have a similar problem, with so much effort required to learn the Japanese language, it diminishes the amount that can be learned using the Japanese language.

        Uhm, sources on that? Quotes? Proof?

        To me, it does not seem like the Japanese have a problem with learning.

        They have a rich and complex culture and civilization, with highly complicated and very context-specific social rituals, rules, and customs.

        Beyond social life, daily life requires following tons of large and small rules and regulations and norms of behaviour, of which everyone seems to be perfectly aware and know by heart to the minutest detail. Work life and generally business is also like this.

        Japan

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @08:10PM (#57428340)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • If that were true, then how do speed reading systems claim to increase your comprehension?
        • I don't think they do increase comprehension. Most speed reading is essentially skimming.

          Hate to add real info to slashdot, but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • Thy most likely mean that they increase the comprehension of the words, not necessary the topic.
          Then again, you most likely speed read about topics you already have some good overview about.

          In other words: speed reading the news is rather easy. Speed reading about the connection between demotic, coptic and Egyptian hieroglyphs and the ancient greek language might make you stumble every third word.

          • Seems reasonable. I'm able to read without paying attention to the text, and instead rummage through the information in my head. I started reading fiction again after an episode of reading a book for two hours that I ... don't remember; I set the book down and only had three months of new memories that were a lot more interesting than anything that happens in the real world.

            I can recognize reality--more specifically, I can't not recognize reality (which has consequences)--but I have more memories of th

      • Yes,
        slow the fuck down :D
        But more effective is, reading loud. Repeating short paragraphs, loud, once or twice. Rephrasing it with your own words, perhaps a bit shorter only containing the key concepts. Making a mental model "how stuff works", e.g. distinguishing between what (words), how (sentences) and why (laws?).
        Even more efficient, but probably expensive ;D is: having someone else read aloud to you. You try to follow and make your mental model. You ask him/her to go back a few sentences or paragraphs an

        • Even more efficient, but probably expensive ;D is: having someone else read aloud to you. You try to follow and make your mental model.

          The Internet suggests that's how many people get laid in college, although I've started to think the Internet has some self-selection bias and a lack of general credibility.

    • Well then we need randomized fonts that select one of a range of letter styles for each word.

    • There most likely never was a "memory" effect anyway.

      Why should brain power wasted to deceiver a complicated script enhance memory, aka promote "understanding/comprehending and learning" about the topic the complicated script is talking about? This does not sound plausible at all.

      Perhaps it urges people to read aloud? That actually _does_ improve learning.

    • Perhaps we need a font that can dynamically change as words are rendered, looking slightly different every time.

    • You win 100 Internets.

      These people don't know about chicken sexers.

  • I was going to post a reply to TFS, but I forgot what it was about.

  • Fuckin nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by denzacar ( 181829 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @07:37PM (#57428178) Journal

    Might as well suggest that one learns better and retains more memory about things seen through scratched up and filthy glasses.
    Or by listening to a lecture while outside someone is tearing up the street with a jackhammer.

    This is what happens when we allow behavioural economists and marketing people dabbling in psychology to be treated like serious scientists.

    • his is what happens when we allow behavioural economists and marketing people dabbling in psychology to be treated like serious scientists.

      So the actual psychologists they have working on it are really behavioural economists and marketing people dabbling in psychology, as opposed to being actual psychologists that they actually are?

      • If a person with a degree in astrophysics published a paper "proving" that the Earth is flat, could that person still be accurately described as an actual astrophysicist?
        Or would a description like "a fuckin flatearther loon" be more appropriate?

        I.e. Should we blindly accept the authority of a piece of paper they have hanging on the wall in their office, OR should we take in account their actual words, actions and results when deciding on the validity of their work?

        Similarly, if a person with a degree pushe

    • However it is true that one remembers lectures more when they write it down rather than just being handed a copy of the notes. The effort to write it down means you are expending effort to actually listening to what is being said.

      • And one gets more exercise from sitting on a bicycle seat while pedaling to work than from sitting on a bus seat while being driven to work.

        Writing is a completely different action from reading. From a neurological, physical... from any point.
        Taking notes by yourself is another level entirely.
        There's literally nothing to compare that action to reading different kinds of fonts other than that both are probably done in a classroom and that both probably use the same alphabet and language.

        It's not even compari

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      Didn't read any of their papers, but I do wonder if they tested it on long texts and not just notes.

      I can imagine that it would help with short text fragments. I can't imagine it helps with a book.

      • Why not help with book? Whatâ(TM)s your theory?
        • Brain becomes jaded and you read without noticing individual characters after a while.

          But it's all bullshit anyway.
          I'm from Bosnia. We have three official languages (actually not even properly different dialects) and two official alphabets.
          Both are phonetic and identical in pronunciation.

          I will often pick up a book and only hours into it realize that it is actually printed in Cyrillic.
          Once you learn to read words without spelling out each character you lose the sense of the print.
          The underlying language and

    • It is perhaps true that a liiiittle bit of friction helps "memory retention", but I question whether memory retention is really so important.

      The real point of education is become skilled at: processing information, building conceptual schemas, and re-building those schemas to become even better with more input, etc.

      To get to my real point, if I am spending more effort while reading processing the font, is that improving my ability to memorize facts at a cost of interfering with schema building in the moment

  • by greenwow ( 3635575 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @08:00PM (#57428280)

    I seem to remember everything I read that uses that font since it makes me so angry.

    • Dude! It's just a font. Get a life.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      fyi comic sans isn't the most hated font by designers: it's merely the only font that had a consistent joke made about it. According to at least one survey, the most hated fonts are Helvetica and Times (grunge fonts are up there).

      The short point is: if comic sans makes you upset but helvetica doesn't, you're absorbing nonsense opinions from others.

  • Thanks, but no thanks. I will stick with what works for me and that means a font that is good to read and does not distract me from the subject matter.

  • Contrary to what is posted on the download page this font is also compatible with Linux.
    Maybe they forgot to mention it, maybe they realised Linux users have better brains and don't need this crutch...
  • by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @08:26PM (#57428378)
    I could probably get a pair of eye glasses and splatter them with paint or crack one of the lenses and get this effect with every font.
  • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @08:32PM (#57428404)

    This font looks like shit and is even harder to read. I can't believe they literally used HALF a stencil font. WTF? Looks like I will be forgetting that crappy font.

    I can even picture an xkcd for this:

    Researcher 1: Hey, lets take a Stencil font and drop 50% of each of the individual glyphs.
    Researcher 2: Won't that make it harder to read?
    Researcher 1: Students will become so frustrated trying to read the words that it will actually increase remembering it!
    Researcher 2: Brilliant!

    Narrator: That brilliant idea when you are high isn't so brilliant when you aren't.

  • How does this thing help me at all?

  • by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @09:36PM (#57428622)

    I noticed that their site doesn't use the font except when it shows you examples. The site content text doesn't use it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      It's not study material. Duh.
  • Have the scientist done any long term studies with students that have read files using the font for hundreds or thousands of hours?

    .

    What happens when a human gets used to the "Sans Forgetica" font and no longer needs to try harder to decipher it? I guess the "harder to comprehend" edge goes away and we're back to square one.

    • This is just a first step. They will need to determine how long changes take for adaptation and then techniques to modify the font over time so you can't ever learn it.

      I read a study a while ago on Dyslexic Fonts and they found that they do help over unknown fonts but the well known fonts like Helvetica did best because they are heavily trained which caused it to beat the special fonts. This study could impact future ones because additional factors could be involved that weren't previously considered.

    • Most adults don't see individual letters instead they see groupings of letters as words and are no longer fully aware of the letters that make them up as they read. They also fill in words in sentences through context with out being fully aware of the missing words on occasion. This is one of the reasons why if you ask someone to count the occurrences of a specif letter in a paragraph they usually count wrong.

      It shouldn't take long for someone to start identifying the lettering differences and associate the

  • by Anonymous Coward

    This will be a nightmare for dyslexics. It has even more ways than conventional type faces to twist letters around.

  • Watch for a spate of movie and product titles using this "more memorable" font, until everybody is doing it and any advantage is killed off.

    Remember right about the turn of the century, when every logo suddenly included a perspective-effect circle as an element? There was an effect in Photoshop at that time that everyone used.

  • Went to the website - there's a link for a chrome browser extension but no firefox exntension.

    "Researchers".

  • ... but I forgot where I saved it.
  • by psnyder ( 1326089 ) on Thursday October 04, 2018 @11:26PM (#57429078)
    These people completely misunderstand "desirable difficulty". From the article:

    The multidisciplinary team of typographic design specialists and psychologists said they designed Sans Forgetica using the learning principle called "desirable difficulty."

    Using this font has nothing to do with desirable difficulty [wikipedia.org] unless you're training yourself to read wonky fonts.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    While the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology endeavours to provide accurate material on its web site, it gives no warranty concerning the accuracy of the material provided by this service.

  • A font that's hard on the eyes and has the only purpose of making things easier to remember, so long as nobody remembers the font itself. This would literally be useless if anyone used it.
  • Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
  • Has anyone found a scientific paper that documents the process of how they evaluated the font?

    The claim is interesting, but where is the evidence to back it up?

  • The Qwerty layout was conceived to slow down typists in the days when hardware was more delicate. Now it's difficult to imagine that it was used to slow people down, because we all grew up on it and learnt it. Same with a new font. We'll get used to it and the benefits will wear off.
  • by gringer ( 252588 ) on Friday October 05, 2018 @05:37AM (#57430054)

    Your post advocates a

    (X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante ( ) form-based

    approach to fighting memory loss. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

    ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
    (X) Mail and other legitimate text uses would be affected
    ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
    ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
    (X) It will stop memory loss for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
    (X) Users of facebook will not put up with it
    (X) Microsoft will not put up with it
    (X) The police will not put up with it
    (X) Requires too much cooperation from people with memory loss
    ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
    (X) Many text users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
    (X) This meme is tired and worn out and I'm just as likely to get a -1 troll as a +5 funny.
    ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
    ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

    Specifically, your plan fails to account for

    ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
    ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
    ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
    ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
    ( ) Asshats
    ( ) Jurisdictional problems
    ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
    (X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of writing
    (X) Huge existing software investment in fonts
    (X) Susceptibility of brain paths other than glyph recognition to memory loss
    (X) Willingness of users to install new fonts
    ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
    ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
    ( ) Extreme profitability of spam
    ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
    (X) Technically illiterate politicians
    (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do need to read things
    ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
    ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
    (X) Outlook

    and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

    ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
    ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
    ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
    ( ) Blacklists suck
    ( ) Whitelists suck
    ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
    (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of established writing systems
    ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
    ( ) Sending email should be free
    ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
    ( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
    (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
    ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
    ( ) I don't want the government reading my email
    ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

    Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

    (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
    ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
    ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

  • For many of the glyphs, I noticed that the only way I would be able to recognize them is if I knew what the glyph was supposed to be already. There is some chance I could determine this from context, but in particular, if I were reading some unfamiliar text or especially if it contained some new term that I had not previously known and was learning about, I would very easily have absolutely no clue what I was reading.

    What good does it do to increase memory retention but decrease comprehensibility to th

  • This is a great idea, and I have already implemented similar ideas into my education products. There is evidence it works. Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning(PDF) [chicagobooth.edu]
  • COD -> ( () )

    no thanks.

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