Laurence Penney

Fonts (variable), maps (one-dimensional & Ptolemaic), books, cataloguing. Creator @axis_praxis and Samsa, co-creator @FauxFoundry and @LetterLuvvers.

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

I just launched my Axis-Praxis tool, for playing with #variablefonts in the browser :) Video intro https://t.co/nFmgduVUPQ https://t.co/5V1YCpS9bs

[Axis-Praxis @axis_praxis]

Introducing Axis-Praxis, my new tool for playing with #variablefonts in the browser https://t.co/5X3IVwq5Hk

[One-dimensional maps @longthinmaps]

Objects of high aspect ratio benefit from specially designed cameras to avoid perspective distortion. Daniel Lawrence Lu’s photos of San Francisco streetcars, like Adam Magyar’s earlier ones of NYC Subway trains, use line scan cameras, capturing 1000s of pixel columns/second.

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@Only9built 🪷Ω

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@LissaKEvans Let the shop be. Let there be bagels.

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

Hey font people, the OG optical corrections are under attack!

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

Everyone has heard the story about how the horizontal lines of the Parthenon are subtly curved to adjust for an optical illusion that would make them *look* curved if they were *actually* straight.

According to recent research, however, there is simply no evidence for this optical illusion. The slight curves of the actual building are real, but they are not correcting for anything, and they are probably too slight to be perceptible. We don't know why the Athenians included them – perhaps to help shed rainwater.

We might really have guessed this before, since, after all, countless other classical buildings have straight horizontals without looking weirdly curved to us.

The moral here is not to trust elaborate mathematical theories of why buildings are good and bad. The huge pretentious literature on the Golden Ratio is, in my view, similarly bogus. Aesthetic theories need to be tested contrastively: do people actually like buildings less when some feature is not there?

https://t.co/b1ZFNQXNr0

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@DoggyCapital @DylanoA4 Reminds me of the “crisis of proliferation” that @jattali wrote about in Bruits/Noise (1977). Excellent radio programme in 2015 by @SamYorkMusic “The Pop Star and the Prophet” interviews Attali, well worth a listen. https://t.co/Xcpe7N9nna

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@kiffboet @dhh Indeed, surprising Claude wasn’t in the first round

[Antigone Journal @AntigoneJournal]

@Mytho_1776 @JamesWHankins1 @JSTOR @grok If @elonmusk used just 0.5% of his wealth to play the modern Carnegie, and to reestablish the physical library as a shared community asset for curious minds, especially the young, and as a fortress to defend information, it would be the greatest philanthropic act of the century.

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

Is there any better example of ancient perspective?

[Roberto Gualtieri @gualtierieurope]

Roma non smette mai di incantare il mondo.
Siamo sul Colle Oppio, nelle gallerie sotterranee delle Terme di Traiano, e qui sotto c’è una meraviglia unica al mondo: la “Città dipinta”.
È un affresco straordinario, una vera e propria città vista dall’alto, con le mura, le torri e gli edifici rappresentati in prospettiva. Ed è ancora più incredibile pensare che è stato realizzato quasi duemila anni fa, in epoca neroniana o flavia, quindi prima ancora delle Terme di Traiano. E poi c’è un altro capolavoro: il mosaico della “Musa e del Filosofo”, che faceva parte della decorazione di una grande sala affacciata su un ninfeo.
Sulle pareti, i mosaici riproducono addirittura una grande scenografia teatrale, con statue e personaggi reali. Insomma, qui sotto Roma continua a sorprenderci. E ogni scavo aggiunge un pezzo alla storia straordinaria della nostra città.
Ma la sorpresa non finisce qui.
Perché anche sopra abbiamo completamente riqualificato il giardino e la grande esedra delle Terme di Traiano.
Abbiamo realizzato una nuova cavea per accogliere il pubblico e valorizzare questo luogo con piccoli concerti, conferenze ed eventi. Ci sono una nuova illuminazione, il nuovo manto erboso e nuovi percorsi pedonali.

L’apertura al pubblico inizierà in via sperimentale, solo per alcune giornate e in piccoli gruppi, per poter monitorare e valutare l’impatto della presenza antropica sulla conservazione delle delicate opere. Per il mese di settembre, a partire da sabato 12 e domenica 13, la galleria sotterranea e l’esedra saranno aperte al pubblico nel fine settimana con visite guidate gratuite, in lingua italiana e su prenotazione. Poi, a partire dal 2 ottobre, le visite si svolgeranno dal venerdì alla domenica. Per ciascuna giornata sono previsti sei turni, alle ore 10.00, 11.00, 12.00, 13.00, 14.00 e 15.00 per un massimo di 15 partecipanti per fascia oraria. Prenotazione consigliata allo 060608.

[Spiros Staridas @StaridasGeo]

Following the UN vote on #EqualEarth I built a light #D3 app with sliders for central meridian/reference parallel. I like using 45° instead of the equator; balances distortion, brings the Arctic Circle into view, shows northern landmasses clearly. Try it:
https://t.co/faDcDkEroi

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

Now implement zoom

[UN News @UN_News_Centre]

On Friday, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries�� true size relative to one another.

In favor: 164
Against: 1
Abstentions: 6

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@AntigoneJournal Nice! Acquiring all of them at once is the only way. They share a single ISBN, so almost all advertised volumes, being catalogued via ISBN, are misidentified. Still, it’s meant I got several free (after refund) in my effort to purchase those I wanted :)

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@AntigoneJournal https://t.co/ehdVe8L8k6

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@0xBOYD I want Scramble, the classic horizontal scroller!

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

Credit to Drew’s Campfire, original video is here https://t.co/bG9BkTOZdd

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

Investigating the order/chaos boundary of the double pendulum. Probably the best mathematics visualization I’ve ever seen.

[fintex @_yusufknl]

As someone who ships LLM systems in production, this double pendulum video is the closest thing to a "why one changed word breaks Claude and GPT-5" explainer I've ever seen released for free.

Everyone thinks LLMs are deterministic machines. They're not. Every prompt to GPT-5 is a chaotic double pendulum - a tiny perturbation in the initial state (one comma, one whitespace) sends the entire response into a completely different attractor.

Bookmark this 26-min video and watch tonight. Same butterfly-effect chaos that broke Poincaré's math, now the exact reason your API calls to Claude feel unreliable.

[Antigone Journal @AntigoneJournal]

In other words, a disgraceful dereliction of duty for a site of cross-cultural significance, that should be open to all curious visitors, to say nothing of its alleged protection by @UNESCO. Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[One-dimensional maps @longthinmaps]

Great to see an animated version of the dimension-busting Flatland photography by @aydinbuyuktas. It would be fantastic to try this in a navigation app.

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@carolemadge Arrian to Hadrian: Your statue … bears no resemblance to the original, and the execution is in other respects but indifferent. Send therefore a statue worthy to be called Yours
Source: ToposText

[rebekah farr @bekhovsgun]

Remembering the night I got fixated on paper data storage and learned you can fit about 140 pages of (encoded) plaintext on a single sheet of paper. The page below includes the encoder legend and its source code repeated 26 times

It's illegible at a glance and breaks when photographed or shared on social media, but is totally reconstructable without guidance if printed, scanned, and handed to an LLM for decoding

Do with that what you will!

[Laurence Penney @Lorp]

@TimBryars At least now we know where all those large mystery orders were coming from! Don’t let the props people pulp them all after the filming…