Tag: defensible cases
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Reconciling Gothic
Another tech history quickie to entertain my brain without spending much time on it. I’ve been thinking about typesetting lately. This recent item on prescription alcohol during prohibition linked to the ‘standard’ web picture of those prescription blanks. The blanks were set in what I call Record Gothic. We used this font for most of…
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Double significance
Today is Braille Day and also Dimpled Chad Day. Braille is interesting since I’m in the middle of adapting courseware for blind students. After I finish the required but dubious verbal descriptions, I’ll run up a far more useful braille version, making the images directly tactile. There is a (somewhat) standard coding method to feed…
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More silliness
Continuing the Not New theme. Silly people constantly misunderstand the origin of the web. The origin was not mysterious or secret. It was started by Deepstate for its own purposes. It didn’t suddenly switch from a grand festival of freedom to a surveillance monster when Trump was elected. Like every data web, it was meant…
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From examining to incorporating
I’m always aware of the long history of computing, algorithms and data webs. I’ve made dozens of tech history pieces exploring the history and emphasizing that our “new innovations” are permanent parts of all such systems. This blog could be titled No, it’s not new. Here’s a not new I hadn’t noticed before! This 1977…
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Linked discoveries
NewScientist summarizes a neatly constructed experiment on the parallels between birds and humans. Cuckoos and a few related species are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in other nests and let other birds raise their kids. The researchers noticed birds making a unique ‘whining’ sound when brood parasites were around. Other members of the species,…
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First sighting!
Found in the Engrish area of Reddit. First sighting anywhere on the net! Ðe original instructions are in ICELANDIC, and ðe English translation is dubious. Icelandic never appears on ðe web. Ðe letters shared wiþ Anglo-Saxon make it stand out immediately. Later, I guess the rarity makes sense numerically. Iceland’s population is 400k, about the…
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Today is & day!
Time to reprint again the genuine history of the symbol, which doesn’t match the standard etymology. = = = = = START REPRINT: I’ve always been bothered by the bizarre-sounding etymology of Ampersand. The symbol itself is no mystery: just a stylized version of et. But the usual etymology for the name doesn’t make a…
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Red and black in daily life
The oldest principle in the ceremonial side of life is Say the black, do the red. Poets, politicians, priests, and publicists followed this rule. Churches formalized it with a series of actions (red) to be performed by the priest and the people, with standard TUNES (black) accompanying each action. Mainline churches and megachurches have abandoned…
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Latin note
Random language note while I’m thinking of it… Sherri Olson’s books on medieval England are full of quotes from village documents, always including both the actual text and the modern version. The court rolls were mostly in Latin, and church services were also in Latin. Villagers took part in the courts often, monthly in some…
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Black Rod
The king’s presence in parliament was announced by Black Rod. Many years ago I was tickled by the ancient offices with strange names like Portcullis Pursuivant. Each officer and ceremony continues to represent a tradition or an incident. Human memory was meant to be a continuum, not a digital sequence. The old world maintains this…
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Who invented the long-d ditto?
Earlier I named and described the long-d ditto, a common practice in pen and ink business records. The standard computer keyboard, and the conventions of digital writing, have brought several punctuation marks into common use. @ and # are most obvious. Oddly, both were essentially obsolete, a vestige of quaint business usage along with pr,…
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Satisfying metaphor
A dream this morning formed a metaphor. I had finished one piece of a courseware project … [this is true, not a metaphor] … and told the maid to send out the result. [THE MAID? WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? I’VE NEVER HAD A MAID!] Later I checked the mailbox and saw that the maid…
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Materials and Methods
Following on previous item that mentioned the primacy of MATERIALS and METHODS. I’ve hammered this subject repeatedly. Here’s one of the better hammers from 2014. = = = = = START 2014 REPRINT: Reading another stupid “study” on improving nutrition, it struck me that Portion and Serving are extremely peculiar units. They are new instances…
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Proof of the old rule
After working on a project for a while I develop an internal dialect with some new words to resonate with the newly developed skills. This fits my basic rule: Language is encryption, not communication. Like birdcalls, language is MEANT to be private within a family or tribe or workplace or lodge or church. Language is…
Polistra's Mill 