| In this edition: IRL, homelessness, Blade Runner typography, the end of facts, the rise of data visualization, and an argument against loving experiences over stuff. *** Event! Tonight, 7pm! At Fusion's Oakland office right by the 19th street BART station! We'll discuss the delicate balance between online and offline, FOMOZ and nomophobia, all over food and drinks at our Oakland office. These are intimate and fun and free. With special guests Graham Dugoni, founder of Yondr, a company that makes cellphone-free events a reality and Levi Felix of Camp Grounded.*** 1. Santa Clara county, in Silicon Valley, built a predictive model of government expenditures on individual persistently homeless people. "Those stats came to light after Santa Clara County commissioned an unprecedented breakdown of its public expenditures on the 104,000 people who had been homeless in the county over a six-year period. Conducted by the Los Angeles-based Economic Roundtable, the 2015 study concluded that the county's 2,800 most persistently homeless people used an average of $83,000 in public services a year, far exceeding the cost of simply providing them with permanent supportive housing. The researchers found 26 people who had annual costs of more than $300,000. One was a 32-year-old man with schizophrenia and a musculoskeletal disorder who spent 322 days in the hospital and 10 days in jail in a single year, at a cost of $1.5 million." + For far, far more coverage on homelessness in the Bay Area, check out the SF Homeless Project, a vast media collaboration spearheaded by the SF Chronicle. 2. A comprehensive review of the typography of Blade Runner. "After studying Alien in intimate detail, it’s time to look at the typography and design of Ridley Scott’s other classic sci-fi movie, Blade Runner. Based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner cements Scott’s reputation for beautiful, gritty, tech noir science fiction. (As with my previous articles, I should note that there are spoilers aplenty throughout the next 5,000 words. If you don’t want to know when Blade Runner’s sole appearance of Eurostile Bold Extended occurs, look away now.)" 3. In a Brexit examination, we find this fascinating disquisition on the rise (and fall) of facts. "What is a ‘fact’ exactly? In her book A History of the Modern Fact, Mary Poovey argues that a new way of organising and perceiving the world came into existence at the end of the 15th century with the invention of double-entry book-keeping. This new style of knowledge is that of facts, representations that seem both context-independent, but also magically slot seamlessly into multiple contexts as and when they are needed. The basis for this magic is that measures and methodologies (such as accounting techniques) become standardised, but then treated as apolitical, thereby allowing numbers to move around freely in public discourse without difficulty or challenge. In order for this to work, the infrastructure that produces ‘facts’ needs careful policing, ideally through centralisation in the hands of statistics agencies or elite universities (the rise of commercial polling in the 1930s was already a challenge to the authority of ‘facts’ in this respect)." 4. A brilliant exposition of the long history of data visualization. "Neurology was not yet a robust science, but Playfair seemed to intuit some of its principles. He suspected the brain processed images more readily than words: A picture really was worth a thousand words. 'He said things that sound almost like a 20th-century vision researcher,” Spence adds. Data, Playfair wrote, should 'speak to the eyes'—because they were 'the best judge of proportion, being able to estimate it with more quickness and accuracy than any other of our organs.' A really good data visualization, he argued, 'produces form and shape to a number of separate ideas, which are otherwise abstract and unconnected.'" 5. Experiences are good, but what a strange religion to worship. "The superiority of experiences has become our era’s reigning banality. Consider last year’s Time profile of American anti-stuff advocates: 'Minimalists like to say that they’re living more meaningfully, more deliberately, that getting rid of most material possessions in their lives allows them to focus on what’s important: friends, hobbies, travel, experiences.' We hear much the same from more recent awestruck portrait inThe Guardian of the new Japanese minimalism, from a man who owns just 'four pairs of socks': 'Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off.' It’s hard for me to picture how having enough socks to last an entire wash cycle could possibly impede a social life; the reverse seems more likely." 1. motherjones.com 2. typesetinthefuture.com | @marsroverdriver 3. perc.org.uk | @vaughanbell 4. smithsonianmag.com 5. newrepublic.com Subscribe to The Newsletter Blade Runner’s Sole Appearance of Eurostile Bold Extended | 