(1) I acknowledge that the author already states that "[they are] quite well aware that this uses Unicode not ASCII."
(2) Having said that, as a request to everybody for future text-based creations, could we please stop referring to non-ASCII text as "ASCII". Using characters that aren't in ASCII really shouldn't be referred to as ASCII. Pretty please.
(3) The more generic label of "text QR" or "text-based QR" would be better, in my opinion. In this particular situation, saying "Unicode text QR" or "Unicode QR" would also be appropriate.
It seems like "ASCII QR" is a play on "ASCII art", which is an existing compound word with a specific history and meaning that the term "text art" simply does not have. When I think of ASCII art, it reminds me of old plain-text video game FAQs, which often included elaborate ASCII art throughout. "Text QR" or "Unicode QR" does not have that association.
Of course; but ASCII art only uses ASCII characters. Back in the BBS days you could use ANSI to give you different characters and colors; but that was called ANSI, not ASCII.
"Unicode QR" is probably the best term for what's happening here.
It's typically used to refer to certain Microsoft 8-bit code pages, like Windows-1252, that extend 7-bit ASCII to 8 bits. My understanding is that these code pages were proposed as an ANSI standard, but never adopted. ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) is similar but not identical to Windows-1252 (Latin-1 has control characters in some positions where Windows-1252 has printable characters -- and Unicode inherits those control characters from Latin-1.)
You can't fight semantics. Words take on new meanings all the time. "Literally" and "nonplussed" used to mean one thing, now they mean the opposite thing.
"ASCII" is becoming ubiquitous for "Of or relating to printing characters in the style of a terminal shell/CLI"
Just look at the package that was the #1 link yesterday - Asciinema or whatever.
I bet you a dollar Asciinema isn't actually printing ASCII encoded characters.
The meaning of words change. Selfie used to mean a self-taken photo of yourself. Now people call every photo of a person a selfie.
ASCII used to mean a specific encoding, but its most widely known usage was in ASCII Art. And so the meaning of the word changes: ASCII starts to mean “ASCII art” even when it’s Unicode.
Note well: "tobacco use" is a umbrella term that includes e-cigarette use (with nicotine), since the nicotine in vape juice is derived from tobacco plants. Also note: "combustible tobacco product use" declined.
"Among high school students, during 2011–2018, no significant trend in the reported use of any tobacco product overall was observed (Figure 2). However, changes were observed for individual tobacco products over this period. A significant nonlinear increase in current e-cigarette use occurred from 2011 (1.5%) to 2018 (20.8%). During 2011–2018, significant linear declines in combustible tobacco product use (from 21.8% to 13.9%) and ≥2 tobacco product use (from 12.0% to 11.3%) occurred; by product type, significant linear declines occurred for cigars (from 11.6% to 7.6%), smokeless tobacco (from 7.9% to 5.9%), and pipe tobacco (from 4.0% to 1.1%). A significant nonlinear decline was observed for cigarettes (from 15.8% to 8.1%). A significant nonlinear change during 2011–2018 was observed for hookahs (from 4.1% to 4.1%).
Among middle school students, no significant change in use of any tobacco product overall occurred during 2011–2018 (Figure 3). However, changes for individual tobacco products were observed. A significant nonlinear increase in e-cigarette use occurred (from 0.6% to 4.9%) during 2011–2018. A significant linear decline was observed for combustible tobacco product use (from 6.4% to 3.3%), ≥2 tobacco products use (from 3.8% to 2.4%), cigarettes (from 4.3% to 1.8%), cigars (from 3.5% to 1.6%), smokeless tobacco (from 2.7% to 1.8%), and pipe tobacco (from 2.2% to 0.3%); a significant nonlinear change occurred for hookah smoking (from 1.0% to 1.2%)."
Thanks for the link. If I'm understanding this correctly, we could say that _actual_ tobacco use by minors has decrease by roughly half in 7 years, with a slight over all increase in nicotine use by minors.
This sounds like an improvement to me. Also, categorization of e-cigarettes as tobacco products, and the way that their use rate in minors is not explicitly reported separately from tobacco seems incoherent if not suspicious to me. If reporting actual rate of e-cigarette use were one's real goal, it would make far more sense to report it _alone_ instead of combined with tobacco.
Tobacco and smoking cessation products are effectively regulated cartels. I quit smoking years ago, using nicotine patches, which I noticed were made by GlaxoSmithKline. Other nicotine delivery vehicles seemed strangely un-competive considering that nicotine is cheap enough to spray as an insecticide. Generics existed, but they were hard to buy and surprisingly inferior. I belive these are regulated medical products and subject to patent; at any rate, I only ever saw generic nic patches at Wal-mart, and they were bad to use, and still pretty expensive. So for practical purposes it cost $100-$200 a month for patches, about the same as a few cartons of cigarettes. These products always had a peculiar way of costing a just a little more then a similar supply of cigarettes, even as the price/tax regime of tobacco changed by an integer factor over time and space. If I recall correctly, GSK turned out to own shares in Altria (might have been the other way around?).
In so far as E-cigarettes are a threat to incumbents, I would expect them to lobby aggressively to have them similarly regulated, taxed, and finally, priced. I suspect this is at least partly behind the sensation and obfuscated statistics surrounding vape use.
I know first hand that nicotine is viciously addictive. One of the reasons I quit is that I knew I was being farmed. Consider that Altria is famed as "dividend aristocrat". I would expect an aggressive campaign to prevent disruption of that market, or fold it into the extant cartel.
Yeah, seems like a moral panic to me. If we smoked coffee, it’d probably be carcinogenic, that doesn’t mean that consuming it otherwise is an “epidemic.”
Note: 090310.pdf (9 March 2010) is an older version of the textbook. The latest revision of the textbook PDF (091117.pdf, 9 November 2017) is available at:
(I have not tried either of these solutions, so I'm not sure if they actually work.) Although still separate applications, Karabiner and Scroll Reverser are both free. (I mention this since you stated having to "pay for an app".)
Curious: (1) Do you have some screenshots demonstrating this issue and (2) perhaps an example PDF that others could download for the purpose of issue reproduction? (I have not seen this issue, nor am I able to reproduce this issue after repeatedly trying under Preview. I have compared it with on-screen rendering under Acrobat XI, as well.) // Preview 10.0 (944.5), macOS 10.13.4 (17E202), MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017)
> At 100% zoom level, the type is not rendered with crisp edges. It looks as if someone had applied a mild gaussian blur. Only once you zoom in, the outlines are sharp as they should be.
a number of times.
Running on a 12" (Retina) Macbook w/ macOS 10.13.4 and Preview 10.0 (944.5).
For anyone that wants to download the books, I strongly recommend downloading the PDF archive on Archive.org because the image scans within the PDFs are of much higher quality. https://archive.org/details/Harvard-Classics
Sprite_tm’s presentation at the 2017 Hackaday Superconference... “Small Fruit: Disembiggening the Macintosh Plus” (31 min.) → https://youtu.be/V-PiNVPp5h0
