ONE of my pet peeves is attempting to read small fonts online. Many Web publishers use teeny-tiny type and mash everything together.

This is a throwback to an era when editors had to worry about the cost of paper and ink. 

Surprise!

Words now exist as electronic impulses, scribblings in cyberspace.

Cyberspace is F-R-E-E--E---E!!! 

There is an infinite amount of it, with more being "manufactured" at this moment.

Check out "Quintessential Universe."  

Apparently the universe has been contracting and expanding. Just the other day it started to expand like mad and it will never contract again. Honest.

Of course, the article had a few errors.

1. The authors, (Ostriker and Steinhardt) are slightly off on their figures. Their calculation that the universe is 12 billion years old and contains 15-billion-year-old stars is embarrassing.

Ostriker obviously forgot to tear the months off Steinhardt's calendar for three billion years. I sometimes leave January on my calendar well into February, but seldom does this oversight last past March of the same year. Maybe April if I am, as Dorothy Parker said, "f****** busy-or vice versa."

2. The notion that the universe was once the size of a grapefruit is laughable. My calculations make it the size of a toaster oven, the kind you can use to warm up an entire one-pound Sara Lee chocolate cake. This is based on a 12-billion-year-old universe. Maybe the "grapefruit" is for a 15-billion-year-old universe.

3. The conclusion that something happened in the last blink or two of time that changed the universe into an accelerating entity instead of a contracting thingamabob and that this coincides with the development of a life force that could recognize such a change is too coincidental for my way of thinking.

A true scientist would tell you that this "sudden shift" had nothing to do with anything except the Harvard Special Endowment Grant to Prove the Universe Is Doing Something.

The deadline for that grant was probably about an hour before Ostriker and Steinhardt applied for an awful lot of money to prove something.

Anything, actually. So although the article has errors, what does it mean for us?

As of this instant, we have more cyberspace to park our picas in than ever before.

Therefore, I beg of everyone who communicates online to please use at least 12- or 14-point type. And lots of white space.

By the way, if you want to see how I do it on my website, have a look: www.jaronbs.com.

Big type, big spaces, big ideas.

You can read dozens of my hilarious and instructive columns.