Challenge Turku Background and Objectives

Chal­lenge Turku 2013

”Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…”

”There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain…”

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ip­sum is sim­ply dummy text of the print­ing and type­set­ting in­dus­try. Lorem Ip­sum has been the in­dus­try’s stan­dard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an un­known printer took a gal­ley of type and scram­bled it to make a type spec­i­men book. It has sur­vived not only five cen­turies, but also the leap into elec­tronic type­set­ting, re­main­ing es­sen­tially un­changed. It was pop­u­larised in the 1960s with the re­lease of Le­traset sheets con­tain­ing Lorem Ip­sum pas­sages, and more re­cently with desk­top pub­lish­ing soft­ware like Al­dus Page­Maker in­clud­ing ver­sions of Lorem Ip­sum.

Why do we use it?

It is a long es­tab­lished fact that a reader will be dis­tracted by the read­able con­tent of a page when look­ing at its lay­out. The point of us­ing Lorem Ip­sum is that it has a more-or-less nor­mal dis­tri­bu­tion of let­ters, as op­posed to us­ing ’Con­tent here, con­tent here’, mak­ing it look like read­able Eng­lish. Many desk­top pub­lish­ing pack­ages and web page ed­i­tors now use Lorem Ip­sum as their de­fault model text, and a search for ’lorem ip­sum’ will un­cover many web sites still in their in­fancy. Var­i­ous ver­sions have evolved over the years, some­times by ac­ci­dent, some­times on pur­pose (in­jected hu­mour and the like).

Where does it come from?

Con­trary to pop­u­lar be­lief, Lorem Ip­sum is not sim­ply ran­dom text. It has roots in a piece of clas­si­cal Latin lit­er­a­ture from 45 BC, mak­ing it over 2000 years old. Richard Mc­Clin­tock, a Latin pro­fes­sor at Ham­p­den-Syd­ney Col­lege in Vir­ginia, looked up one of the more ob­scure Latin words, con­secte­tur, from a Lorem Ip­sum pas­sage, and go­ing through the cites of the word in clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture, dis­cov­ered the un­doubtable source. Lorem Ip­sum comes from sec­tions 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of ”de Finibus Bono­rum et Mal­o­rum” (The Ex­tremes of Good and Evil) by Ci­cero, writ­ten in 45 BC. This book is a trea­tise on the the­ory of ethics, very pop­u­lar dur­ing the Re­nais­sance. The first line of Lorem Ip­sum, ”Lorem ip­sum do­lor sit amet..”, comes from a line in sec­tion 1.10.32.