psmv6: Gemini gush

At the tail end of yesterday's reference 1, I asked Gemini about the change of appearance of the TLS, observing that it now seemed to be the same size as the Guardian. At the time I was quite impressed with his response - but did no checking.

This morning, it occurred to me that checking the size against that of the Guardian would be easy enough. There was a copy of the Guardian downstairs and there was a tape measure in the study desk drawer.

I find that the new TLS is in fact slightly smaller than the Guardian and, as it happens, slightly smaller than the freebie, the Surrey Comet. It also happens that this Guardian had been printed off centre, with the fold not being quite in the middle, with the result that the front page was getting on for a centimetre wider than the back page. The sort of thing that I had thought, without thinking much about it, that would be right every time.

I had thought also that 'tabloid' was a standard size which both newsprint manufacturers and printing press manufacturers worked to. Without there being much flexibility about it once you had bought your printing press. This turns out to be untrue, with tabloid being a generic term for small, taken from pharmaceutical industry at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, newspaper page sizes have nothing to do with the international standard paper sizes exemplified by the ubiquitous 'A4'. At least I have learned that the aspect ratio of all of these last is the square root of 2, roughly 1.414. For which see reference 2.

While the new TLS is 270mm by 333mm, conforming to none of the standard sizes and with an aspect ratio of 1.23 recurring. Another neat number, but a different one.

Gemini did not seem to know about any of this, contenting himself with the new TLS being much the same size as the Guardian. Nor does he appear to know about the actual size of the old TLS. He did give a size for the Guardian, but got it quite wrong. When corrected this morning, I get a nice little essay about size, including the information that his source might have been the specifications for advertisers available from News UK, but no explanation of why he got it wrong before.

So long on waffle (& flattering gush), short on fact. Not yet reliable.

PS: one of the things he mentions is column width and ease of reading. The new TLS is printed in four columns, while the illustration at reference 5 suggests that it used to be three. I had not noticed this change under my own steam.

So still a bit careless with the facts, but I have now been treated to an interesting little essay on column widths and I have learned that Gemini can read blogs if prompted so to do.