ham and cheese

It's fascinating going over the videos for the very basic stuff, addition, subtraction, et al. It's getting the theory for the stuff that was impressed on the primordial ooze of my brain, that stuck without real understanding. (The bit on borrowing in subtraction, where he said, "We don't know how to get numbers less than zero yet, don't worry" was funny)

It's been a long time since I've felt my brain giggling in the delight of intellectual endeavor.

Someone brought in teacakes today.

Oh my god, that cupcake was the best I've ever eaten. Tiramisu explosion in my mouth! NOM.

I love the penguins in sweaters! So cute!

And my coworker in Cleveland never replied. I will bet a beer that she won't. She doesn't track this stuff.

I am trying -- and failing -- to come up with a way to explain, in VERY simple, non-technical terms that a photo/image that one grabs off the internet is NOT going to be high enough resolution to print.

And when I say "VERY simple, non-technical terms," I mean people who don't understand "resolution" as it pertains to image quality.

I don't mean to be snarky; we have authors with multiple PhDs and PharmDs, and I can't claim to understand more than a fraction of what they know. So, in turn, I don't expect them to be on intimate terms with image resolution, dpi, print specs, etc.

But the rapidly increasing problem is that people grab an image from the internet or from PowerPoint (I hate PowerPoint for that very reason alone), and it's acceptable resolution for screen viewing but not remotely close to acceptable for printing.

And our authors reply with "But it looks fine on my screen!"

So we need a simple, non-technical way to explain that print publications need more pixels than web graphics. It's driving me mad.

Something that looks fine on the screen could look like crap when you print it out.

"It may look good on the screen, but the picture will be too fuzzy when printed on paper."

Are you ok with saying that pictures on the internet appear blurry when printed and lea e it at that or are you being asked "why?"

Also, maybe you could have an example PDF on hand to send to them -- Ask them to view the PDF on their computer, and then print it out, so they can see for themselves what you're talking about.

Oh Steph ... I know! I've gone through that a number of times with people writing for our magazine. They also have this cute trick of sending a story in a Word file or an e-mail with the images embedded and don't understand why I can't just use them as-is.

The big struggle I'm going through these days is trying to explain to people - one person in particular - that just because a page on our website looks fine on your computer (the website's hosted on-site, so it's on our LAN) doesn't mean that (1) it'll look the same on everyone else's and (2) bandwidth DOES matter.

I'm sort of surprised you're marking college level papers on hard copy in the first place.

For grad school (2005-2009) all papers and exams were hard copy. Everything.

a photo/image that one grabs off the internet is NOT going to be high enough resolution to print.

Well, you mean the ones they're grabbing off the internet aren't. I've gotten some lovely large photos off random google searches. Maybe just send them back until they come to you with images a certain size?