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Comment by jkaljundi | Hacker News Reader

There is also this one: Legible, are you sure? An experimentation-based typographical design in Safety-critical context http://lii-enac.fr/articles/vinot-chi-2012.pdf

Wired had an article a few years ago: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/aircraft-typography

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I've been writing a book on ways design can play a critical role in our lives. This reminds me of one of the stories in the book: A pilot cashes a plane because he didn't realize which decent mode he was in and 3.3 and 33 look awfully similar in the display. These things can be the difference between life and death.

For those interested in more: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920038887.do

It's somewhat frustrating how long O'Reilly books can spend in the early release phase.

I've been waiting for this one for a year now. It looks like an excellent read on the topic of bad design.

As one of the authors, I don't suppose you can shed some light on when it might be "finished"?

In schematic design, it is a common practice to use a letter in the place of the decimal point. For example, a resistor with value 2700 ohms is written as 2K7 ohms, or a capacitor wiht a value of 2.2 uF is written as 2u2F.

It's more than that. Medicines should be in bottles where the category is indicted by the bottle shape and color, and the stronger the color the more concentrated/dangerous the medicine is. This would reduce a lot of hospital accidental deaths.

Bottle shapes indicating content have a history going back to wine bottles.

For people interested in this, there are examples on Twitter

https://twitter.com/EzDrugID

https://twitter.com/ismp1/status/840239328467001345

https://twitter.com/TerryFairbanks/status/848743485213724672

https://twitter.com/EzDrugID/status/652036570313154560

The medical industry's resistance to this (and checklists) is a shameful travesty.

Absolutely. I loved Atul Gawande's book The Checklist Manifesto, about how to transfer safety lessons from aviation to the medical industry. Airplane accidents are somewhat more visible than individual deaths in hospitals, so the focus is clearly there, but I'm sure more people die of mistakes in hospitals than in airplanes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto

In most small aircraft cockpits, the lever for flaps features a little rectangular "flap", while the lever for the wheels consists of a little wheel.

https://twitter.com/mmsBA/status/731040643674472448

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-landing-gear-lever-in-an-ai...

Edit to add: Apparently it's called Shape Coding, see the inventor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis

I always find it odd that Americans often don't write a zero before the decimal point, if a value is between 0 and 1. Like .1

It's easy to be confused with 1 and looks like a typo to my German eyes. I much prefer 0.1

Btw., we would write: 0,1 I think this is even more clear.

A side question, do you know the Germans always used a comma as the decimal point, or was it changed over because it was clearer.

The history isn't entirely clear. Early on, a lot of separators were used, but it seems that in the 18th century, France standardized on the comma, spreading it to the rest of continental Europe, while Britain settled on the decimal point.

And their spheres of influence pretty much settled the question internationally: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/DecimalS...

Thanks for the book. Just read the introduction and will be recommending it to my sister (worked once as a test pilot, will work in that field again). I've also started a lunch & learn thing in my office, I will probably be recommending excerpts from this as reading material in a couple months.

For anyone interested, it is also on Safari Books Online if you have access to that.

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