Back in the olden days I was a pressman for a newspaper. We would grab the newspapers coming off the press, and hold them upside down to check the print quality, color registration, etc. This was almost necessary to see errors, not because you would be distracted by reading, but because you see what you expect to see. Turning the newspaper around changed those expectations, and allowed you to see errors.

This reminds me of a trick for finding spelling errors I was taught in elementary school: read the text backwards. It's basically the same principle.

Infantrymen on patrol are also taught to scan their eyes from right to left. I can save their life, by increasing the probability of spotting something unusual.

Artists do this too.

Yeah, when you are taught to draw, they always tell you to hold the picture up to a mirror. Any errors become blatant when you do that. Its also why you have to be careful when you draw at an angle when sitting down. As soon as you sit the picture up right once again errors show up where you didn't see them before.

In one particularly embarrassing example, I once spent dozens of hours on a project for a drawing class, only to find I’d included perspective distortion on the entire image from the angle at which I’d been viewing the canvas.

Luckily it turned out to be a good-looking effect, and I got a good grade by passing it off as intentional.

http://lorempixel.com is good enough for images

Last year I was using Django's django.contrib.webdesign.lorem_ipsum to generate dummy data for Django model instances. I grew tired of the Latin and sort of monkey-patched it to use words from the "Karel ende Elegast" medieval Dutch epic poem. ( http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/2391/ )

My team and I found the medieval-Dutch title fields of model instances much easier to remember and to refer to.

Is est bonus video vidi visum computer programmers perceptum magis super vicis veneratio institutio of graphic intentio

All you need to do is jam some images from the first page of a google search in there and it's an Atwood post.

I wrote a script to greek the text nodes in XML files for use in testing https://github.com/tingletech/greeker.py

It only "greeks" the nouns, so the output XML reads sort of like mad libs.

This Cicero guy seems like a very good writer. That is a nice presentation of stoic(?) philosophy.

> This Cicero guy seems like a very good writer

Um, yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero

The section on Legacy [1] is especially illuminating. Looks like Cicero is of the big guys referred to when they talk about the wisdom of the ancients.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero#Legacy

HN's atmosphere of respect and decorum make me feel bad for doing this, but I can't resist

>facepalm.jpg

I have browsed through the The Harvard Classics [1], but totally missed Cicero. I read XII. Lives, by Plutarch, but IX. On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero, must have seemed like a bunch of platitudes at that time. Now I know better and will read it.

[1] http://www.bartleby.com/hc/

Disrespect is generally tolerated. Memes are pretty no-go, however.

Except if the memes involve common startup, functional programming, or fad-of-the-year memetic behavior, in which case they are encouraged.

First thing that popped in my head for a "Lorem Image" would be Lena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Of course it's not quite a placeholder image used in design, but still the closest I could think of.