Proofreaderoleth
A fairly old cartoon that popped up in some memes:



Funny. It also hits several resonant notes with me. Jail experience, teaching, grammar, and ABOVE ALL .... proofreading.

I was slow to get the joke because I was stuck on the incorrect 2nd plural form.

Labels: Entertainment, Jail mode, Language update, Leth

  ¶ 3:40 PM

  Chartered territory
Three salient things about this grotesque picture:



1. Democrats are all unmuzzled. They should be thanking Gov Abbott for unmuzzling Texas early and firmly. Instead they're fucking around with stupid shit about voting. Abbott is also fucking around with stupid shit about voting. I forgive him for returning to the stupid shit because he showed GUTS on the ONLY FUCKING THING THAT MATTERS. He gets a free pass forever on stupid partisan shit.

I don't forgive the demons. From the start they've been unmuzzled in their giant mansions and exclusive private clubs while clubbing the rest of us to death.

2. Unchartered territory has pretty much replaced uncharted territory. In this case it's literally wrong, since this is obviously a chartered plane. Commercial flights, along with public transit, still require ballgags. Again the fuckheads should be thanking the charter operator for supporting HEALTH instead of MURDER, but they're not.

3. Even allowing for the turboprop malaprop, there's nothing uncharted about politicians playing quorum games. It's an old routine, used by both "sides" at various times.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 6:02 AM

  Unnecessary credential of the year.
From Quora.




Incidentally, the former English teacher broke an ACTUAL rule of punctuation in the same phrase where she was "correcting" a fictional rule of grammar.

(My credential: Former proofreader.)

Labels: Entertainment, Language update, SES

  ¶ 10:48 PM

  Train songs reprint and add
Reprint from a couple years ago.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

As I make these models of Box Depots and related equipment, I'm learning about the equipment. The mail crane was a remarkable font of wasted creativity. Hundreds of inventors patented improved versions, but the original version was vested and amortized in equipment cost and mail-clerk skills, so it stayed.

I chose one of the unused patents because it struck me as especially elegant, and because the patent had a nice clear schematic.



Another bit of learning: Water tanks were simple machines with no particular variation... but real variation sprang up around them, along with grass and trees. This one has a simple float-based 'flag' indicating its level, so an engineer could decide at a sufficient distance whether it was worth stopping here vs the risk of making it to the next tank. The more prosperous railroads installed automatic detectors that signaled the nearest telegraph office when the inlet pump failed or the level was too low. The telegraph office could then send a message to the appropriate train dispatcher. Morsenet of Things.

The Pennsylvania RR developed an in-flight rewatering system for its fast expresses. A quarter-mile long trough was sunk between the rails, kept filled from a nearby tank. When an engineer needed water, he dropped a scoop-pipe into the trough, and the speed forced the water up into the engine's reservoir.



Here's a tender (water tank behind loco) with the scoop in dropped position. The lever mechanism is fairly simple and obvious on the diagram. Fancier versions powered the drop from the compressed air in the air-brake system.

I'm also trying to implement my earlier decision to resume humming and singing while I work, a habit that I abandoned many years ago. As I make these models, I end up humming train-related songs. Chattanooga Choochoo, Sentimental Journey.

To a first approximation, travel songs are train songs. We don't have many popular songs about traveling in other vehicles. Early rock-n-roll gave us plenty of car songs, but they're about racing or tragic crashes. None of them are about road trips. I can only think of one song about traveling in a jet plane.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Added: Here's an unexpected train song. MacHarrie explained it in an episode of 'Can You Imagine That'. The composer was taking a train trip to visit his girlfriend in Hiawatha, Iowa. He wrote a train song about the trip and the girl, but later decided to change the words into fake Injun form. Nevertheless, the music is pure train, complete with Doppler whistles!

The song itself, extracted from the episode by the Youtube channel that specializes in the Transco Chorale:



Incidentally, this pronunciation of Hiawatha was standard and universal before 1950. The first syllable switched from /hi/ to /haɪ/ after WW2, along with several other words and grammatical forms.

Labels: Entertainment, Language update

  ¶ 10:42 PM

  Tension and tenses
The familiar old song about Casey and the strawberry blonde has a highly unusual verb tense.

Here's the Transco Chorale version:



Part of the words:

Matt Casey formed a social club
That beat the town for style
And hired for a meeting place a hall
When payday came around each week
They'd grease the floor with wax
And dance with noise and vigour at the ball.

Each Saturday you'd see them
Dressed up in Sunday clothes
Each lad would have his sweetheart by his side.
When Casey led the first grand march
They all would fall in line
Behind the man who was their joy and pride.


Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde
And the Band played on;
He'd glide cross the floor with the girl he adored
And the Band played on;
But his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded,
The poor girl would shake with alarm.
He'd ne'er leave the girl with the strawberry curls
And the Band played on.


First, brain is clearly a euphemism. The song is about the body part that serves as a young man's brain. If the actual cranial cavity was pressurized, the girl wouldn't notice it while dancing. Alarm is also a euphemism for the source of the girl's quivering.

Second, the constant use of would is rare and possibly unique among songs. It's not a conditional or volitive; it's a past/present imperfective. Waltzing is what Casey habitually did and still does.

Labels: Asked and not worth asking, Language update

  ¶ 5:17 AM

  Which came first?
Mentioning chickens in previous item reminded me... Girls were sometimes called chickens in 1930s and 1940s radio shows. NOT chicks. Chicken wasn't nearly as common as dame or doll or gal, but it appeared now and then in jokes and songs.

Example 1 from a 1933 Mirth Parade:

Why are you so grumpy today?

A chicken got into my new garden and ruined it.

Well, you shouldn't feel bad. The same thing happened to Adam in the Garden of Eden.


Example 2 from a 1950 'Ignorant':

Why is a man like a worm?

Because some chicken always gets him.


Chick seems to have started in the '50s, probably with the Beats.

This online discussion completely misses the chicken to chick transition, mainly assuming that chick came from chica.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 9:19 PM

  Brilliant experiment, brilliant description
Paleontologists at Yale are using casts of the inner ears of dinosaurs to infer the lifestyle of the dinos.

Because we've been making such casts of modern skulls for a long time, we know how the configuration of the vestibular system correlates with motion patterns of living animals.

The form of the vestibular system is a window into understanding bodies in motion.

One vestibular cluster corresponded with "sophisticated" fliers, species with a high level of aerial maneuverability. This included birds of prey and many songbirds.

Another cluster centered around "simple" fliers like modern fowl, which fly in quick, straight bursts, and soaring seabirds and vultures. Most significantly, the inner ears of birdlike dinosaurs called troodontids, pterosaurs, Hesperornis, and the "dino-bird" Archaeopteryx fall within this cluster.

In other words, dinobirds were chickens.

We also know how the configuration of the cochlea correlates with frequency range of living animals.

Bhullar said the data suggest that the cochlear shape's transformation in ancestral reptiles coincided with the development of high-pitched location, danger, and hatching calls in juveniles.

It implies that adults used their new inner ear feature to parent their young, the researchers said.

"All archosaurs sing to each other and have very complex vocal repertoires," Bhullar said. "We can reasonably infer that the common ancestors of crocodiles and birds also sang. But what we didn't know was when that occurred in the evolutionary line leading to them. We've discovered a transitional cochlea in the stem archosaur Euparkeria, suggesting that archosaur ancestors began to sing when they were swift little predators a bit like reptilian foxes."

An important distinction on the production side might complicate these inferences about the reception side. The configuration of the vocal tract determines the style of singing.



Default mammals, with spine and head horizontal, have very little resonance. The larynx is immediately followed by the mouth, which is typically open on both sides. There's no cavity or tube or column after the larynx.

Humans, with spine and head vertical, are built like a pipe organ or train whistle. The pharynx is a closed Helmholtz resonator above the larynx, with the mouth branching off and providing another closed resonator.

Birds are bugles. The mouthpiece or reed is at the bottom of a long resonator with muscular control. The beak is open on both sides like a cat, but the beak isn't needed as a resonator.

Resonators phase-lock the song into discrete notes.

The cochlear inferences are mixing fox-type and bird-type dinos together, which misses an important part of the signaling and coding ability. Bird-like discrete notes make language possible. Fox-like howling is a signal, but doesn't allow for detailed coding by discrete symbols.

Labels: Grand Blueprint, Language update

  ¶ 4:51 AM

  Another thing Zamenhof missed
Random language thought.

I'm back on courseware, trying yet again to make the IMS Common Cartridge work. The Canvas and Brightspace e-learning platforms urp up Scorm packages and ALLEGEDLY swallow Common Cartridge. Last fall I tried to set up CC packages, but had to stop because more urgent specific debugs intervened in the systems that we officially support. (Canvas and Brightspace are not official, so you're 'at your own risk'.)

After a long and needed break, I'm coming at CC from a different angle, which seems much more promising.

Yesterday I wrote in the daily worklog:

Now we're getting somewhere!

Today I made another forward step without any new failures, and I wrote:

Now we're getting morewhere!

= = = = =

Comparatives belong in the family of whats and whos and whens and wheres and hows. Morewhere should be between somewhere and everywhere. Lesswhere should be between somewhere and nowhere.



Zamenhof built a fully orthogonal but clumsy system of wheres and whens and whys and whos in Esperanto, but he didn't include the comparatives. Yet another missed opportunity.

Labels: Asked and not worth asking, Language update

  ¶ 1:59 PM

  Super-random sloppy thought chain
Speaking of smartasses having fun, I'm having fun trying to "retrobuild" an analog computer that could have been used by the astrometeorologists. As with all animations, whether for real courseware or 'courseware without a course', a lot of study is needed along the way. I'm learning the symbols and patterns and geometry of astrology.

One of the small pleasures of reading old library books, whether physically or virtually, is seeing evidence of previous readers. This astrology book was read and notated intensively by one reader. She asked questions and tried to answer them.

Why do I say she? I'm never PC. I know it was she because she made notes in shorthand.



She was easily mixing the astro symbols with the squiggles and curls of shorthand. Humans are miraculous creatures.

Here's where the sloppy thought chain started.

Shorthand reminded me that women in the 20s had special skills from office work. They wrote and read shorthand, typed like an AK-47, and knew the peculiar legalistic boilerplate of business correspondence. Yrs of 14th ult to hand and similar cryptic phrases.

This in turn reminded me that those women used some of the boilerplate as slang. They especially used the legalistic said and same.

This led to an observation.

Same is a reflexive pronoun, and those former flappers used it actively as a reflexive pronoun. Standard English doesn't have a reflexive pronoun. Russian retained the Indo-European se in its full use. Latinate languages retained it but use it ambiguously.

We missed the chance to regain a useful bit of grammatical mechanism.

Footnote: The text visible in the screencaps above is typical of this book. The author classifies all the possible human types by planetary aspect, and all of them are ferociously negative. Only a few types might halfway deserve to live for a while in secure captivity. The exact opposite of the usual newspaper horoscope or fortune-teller who gives out vague and pleasant descriptions that could apply to anyone.

Labels: Language update, se-lu, skill-estate

  ¶ 8:55 AM

  Flagellum equo
Pointed by Zuhlsdorf, an interesting proposal to restore Latin as the official language of Europe.

It's not clear if the reformers are aiming for classical or Vulgate. Sounds like the latter.

Obviously it can't and won't happen because English owns the digital world. But contrapuntally, the digital world would make the switchover much easier than ever before.

Latin is trivially central to the Latinate languages in the western half of Europe. It's also central to English vocabulary if not English grammar. Slavic is more distant, but Russians would have the partial advantage of familiarity with noun cases, which have vanished from the Latinates and English. Krauts would get the short end, with no vocabulary or grammar parallels. German has always refused to adopt Latin words as its own.

The author commits the modern Creative Destruction error here:

Another reason Latin went extinct was because of how difficult and complex it is. The language is by design, highly affected by vocal inflexion. That means nearly every spoken word can be modified based on context, voice, mood, person, number, gender, tense, and delivery. With no central authority governing what was authentic Latin, it quickly fell out of everyday usage.

As with buggy whips and dinosaurs and Neanderthals, LATIN DIDN'T GO EXTINCT. It smoothly morphed into Italian and other Latinates, and it became a major part of English by interbreeding and HGT. The Latinates kept most of the verb forms and lost the noun forms, so complexity itself wasn't the problem.

= = = = =

Later and sharper thought:

Among animals and plants, AND among products and skills and languages, EXTINCTION NEVER HAPPENS NATURALLY. A successful item in all of those categories may seem to disappear if you're classifying it narrowly. But in reality a successful item always adapts, always finds a way to reuse its genes or skills. Dinosaurs become birds, carriage builders become automobile builders, Latin becomes Italian.

In all of those categories, true extinction requires intentional mass murder. When you shoot all of the passenger pigeons, they are extinct. When you offshore all of the steel and electronics and textile industries, or when you lock down the barbers and restaurants, those skills become extinct. The people who owned those skills, now deprived of purpose and income, die out just as surely as the pigeons.

The "endangered species" fraud focuses our attention on purported natural extinction caused by change in habitat. The "endangered" laws remove land from successful human use, causing REAL extinction of human skills and communities and cultures.

LIFE IS PURPOSE. TECH IS DEATH.

Labels: Carbon Cult, Happy Ending, Language update, skill-estate

  ¶ 12:18 AM

  Another example of language in (ahem) flux.
Found another example of experimentation in language from the Ayrton book.



Transcribed:

The particular specimen of Weston instrument shown is called a "milammeter", because a current may be directly measured with it in "milli-amperes", or thousandths of an ampere.

Condensation of unit and prefix happens sometimes when the prefix and unit meet in a vowel. Megavolts and Gigavolts are uncondensed, but Megohms and Gigohms are condensed. Milamps would seem to follow the same rule as Megohms. Not clear why it didn't last. Is a front vowel more sticky than a back vowel?

Incidentally, Weston was among the companies that followed Social Economics, treating workers well and receiving quality and loyalty in return. Newark, America was a rich city with abundant hi-tech jobs as late as the 1960s.

Labels: Equipoise, Language update, the broken circle

  ¶ 6:25 AM

  Ayrtonameter
Continuing the theme of Italian metrology.

Found this 1896 book by Ayrton while looking for better diagrams of galvanometers. Excellent text on basic electricity, with a couple of ideas I could have used when I was teaching at DeVry.

Unexpectedly, the book answers an etymological question I asked earlier. I was wondering why the Italians didn't fully honor their own Volta by using his name properly.

Turns out the English did honor him at first, and then truncated the name into a standard unit. Ayrton mentions in the preface that part of this book was written in 1886 and re-used in the 1896 edition. The two parts show the transition.



The 1886 parts describe Voltameters, and the 1896 parts talk about Voltmeters. A nice little gem for linguists, who don't often get to see a transition in one book. [Later: No, it wasn't language change. At that time Voltameter was specifically reserved for devices that used electrolysis to measure voltage, while Voltmeter was reserved for magnetic devices measuring voltage.]

= = = = =

Needless to say, Ayrton devotes considerable space to shunts, though he modestly doesn't call them Ayrton shunts. He gives his technician Mather co-credit on most inventions, including the shunts, and claims only one ammeter as his own sole invention.



I'd never thought about why it was better to build a voltmeter by placing a known resistance in series with an ammeter. Ayrton shows why. Pure voltameters were clumsy and dangerous. Galvanometers were much easier to handle and less messy.

Sidenote: Nature disagrees. As I've often noted, Nature strongly prefers using static fields for both meters and motors. Human technology strongly prefers using magnetic fields for meters and motors.

= = = = =

Here's a typical galvanometer of Ayrton's time. Elegant and simple and clock-like, a cross between a compass and a motor. The needle is suspended on a silk thread. Before applying current you turn the knob on top to set the needle at zero, perpendicular to the coil.

The galvanometer was especially suitable as a balance sensor for bridge arrangements. The needle deflected in opposite directions for very small currents in opposite directions, so you could find the null point easily.



Modern meters, like modern motors, take the opposite approach. The magnet around the needle is permanent, and the coil is mounted on the same shaft as the needle, with delicate spiral wires connecting the coil to the terminals.



This 1908 Olivetti meter shows the post-Ayrton method.

= = = = =

To illustrate the messiness of pure voltameters, here's a liquid voltameter from Ayrton's book. This is basically a battery running in reverse. In a wet battery, a chemical combination releases positive ions in one direction and negative ions in the other direction. Here a voltage is applied to a battery, causing a decombination or electrolysis of sulfuric acid. (Yikes!). The bubbles from the electrolysis push the liquid up the tube, where the gas pressure can be measured as height.



This is a sample-and-hold device. You briefly push the key to apply the voltage to the battery, then watch the fluid rise to an asymptote in the measuring tube. Let go of the key and the fluid stays there, because the backwash tube is closed.



To restore balance, open the valve on the backwash tube, letting the bubbles out. The backwash tube has a siphon on top, pouring the overflow back into the measuring tube. The little 'vase' on top of the measuring tube is meant to restrain overflows, but it's pretty clear that you'd often have splashes of sulfuric acid. Fun.

= = = = =

Ayrton also includes a nice roller-coaster model of a basic ckt, showing how the potential energy is raised by the battery and consumed by the load.



And he features some complex water models:



Reminds me of Lukyanov's water-based computer:



Finally, here's an Ayrton design that hasn't changed much since 1896:



Historical note: Like many other technicians, Mather went into business for himself. He moved to Connecticut and started making shunt-wound dynamos and meters, with considerable success. Later he expanded into incandescent bulbs to use the electricity, and crashed into Edison, the ultimate system-monopolizer. After losing the drably predictable litigation, Mather's company went bankrupt and Mather spent the rest of his life in heartbroken solitude, using kerosene lamps instead of electricity. Moral: Don't get uppity. Know your skills and your place, and stay there. When you're Mr Shunt, make shunts. Let Mr Bulb make bulbs.

Labels: Equipoise, Language update, Metrology

  ¶ 9:41 AM

  Super-random language note
Reading old Italian tech books, I was struck by a difference in terminology. In French an electromagnet is electro-aimant. In Italian an electromagnet is elettrocalamita.

Lover or attractor seems like a pleasant word for magnet, but calamity?

Turns out both assumptions are wrong.

Per this online dictionary, the aimant in electro-aimant comes from adamant, hard as a diamond. (Pyrite isn't really diamond-hard, but it's considerably harder than plain iron.) The calamity comes from Latin calamus, a straw or piece of wood, because early compasses were made with a magnetic needle floating in a bit of wood or cork.

Calamity as disaster comes through French from the same Latin root, but the transfer of meaning is obscure.

My misassumption shows my basic bias. I think of the world in terms of function, not material. I was trying to translate both words as functions, but they were really named after qualities of the materials. The English word magnet is named after the place where magnetite was first found.

Labels: Asked and not worth asking, Language update

  ¶ 2:05 PM

  More Italian electronics
Continuing to look at the Italian electronics mags newly added to American Radio Library.

An article on Commodore Basic from 1980 leads to a closer examination of language choice. I had thought about the subject before and dismissed it quickly. English has no diacritics and very simple inflections, so it was obviously better for early computing. If you need to distinguish between ä and a, or if the noun forms must agree in gender and number with the adjectives, an early computer couldn't handle it.

Looking at the Italian, I can see that the advantage wasn't really so obvious.



Italian does use acute and grave accents, but they don't really matter. Leaving them out doesn't cause any ambiguity. Umlauts in German are much more phonemic, and would have been more of a dealbreaker. But the substitutions ue for ü, ae for ä, and oe for ö are common even in handwritten German, and would be instantly understandable.

More importantly, the keywords in computer language are confined to imperative verbs, singular nouns, and prepositions. In all the Western Euro languages, those words are unvarying. A singular or informal imperative is always the shortest form of a verb, and a singular noun is always the 'standard' form.

Agglutinative languages like Hungarian and Turkish would fail on prepositions, because most prepositions are firmly glued to the end of the noun and change their vowels in harmony with the main vowel of the noun.

So there wasn't a good reason to have keywords always in English. The major Euro languages could have established their own versions, which would have helped to maintain local computer industries and local software creators.

Another point of interest: DATA ERRATA. Italian is closer to Latin, so DATA was treated as fully Latin, requiring a Latin adjective form. English grammarhoids try to have it both ways, treating data as a plural without really using it in Latin.


Aside from language, I see that Commodore Basic had a multi-choice ON statement, akin to SWITCH in C. I'm pretty sure this wasn't available in IBM/MS Basic. Nice feature. Makes me wish I'd paid more attention to Commodore.

Labels: Alternate universe, Language update

  ¶ 7:09 AM

  Fussy semantic quibble about digital vs analog
The basic D vs A opposition is almost always misleading. It doesn't match the real distinction between ways of thinking.

Strictly, digital simply means on/off, and analog simply means continuous. Integer vs rational.

BUT: Many familiar digital and analog systems are a complete mix of the two modes.

Example 1: A light switch is strictly digital. It's designed to be either perfectly conducting or perfectly insulating, with as little time as possible between the two extremes. But it controls a light bulb which is strictly analog. An incandescent bulb starts to glow as soon as any current flows, and its light output rises smoothly (but not linearly) with increasing current. An LED lamp is mostly analog, with an area of zero conduction near zero voltage. Fluorescent is closer to digital, requiring a high initial voltage to start, but still varies with voltage after it starts.

Example 2: A thermostat on a heating system or electric stove is an analog knob or slider, controlling the pulse width of a strictly digital system. The burner itself is either all on or all off.

The important distinction is not on/off vs gradual.

The real distinction is digital software versus all other types of systems.

Digital software operates in a series of discrete snapshots of time, and operates in only one direction. There is never any actual feedback in a software system, and there is never any actual motion. Software CANNOT represent reality no matter how fast or powerful the CPU, no matter how many cores or threads are running in parallel. The boundary is perfectly unbridgeable.

It's hard to express this distinction accurately because the precise wording is syntactically clumsy.

So: When I say digital, I mean software, and when I say analog, I mean non-software, which generally includes both on/off and gradual elements.

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 6:50 AM

  Intro hall
I've observed the distinction between the Beadboard Zone and the Plaster Zone.

In commercial and residential buildings from 1880 to 1930, the high-status display areas had plaster walls, while the low-status work areas had beadboard.

In a business, the showroom or front office was plaster, while the repair shop or print shop was beadboard.

In houses and apartments, the front entry and parlor, seen by distinguished visitors, were plaster. The laundry and back porch, seen by maids and lodgers, were beadboard.

While listening as usual to old radio during bedtime, I noticed a parallel distinction in language.

The intro was the display room, literally the entry hall. The announcer always followed EVERY grotesque incomprehensible false "rule" in the grammarrhoid book.

Lie/lay, shall/will, who/whom, always use subjunctive after if even when it doesn't belong there, never split an infinitive, always use possessive with gerunds even when it doesn't belong there, always pile up prepositions at the start of the sentence even when they aren't really prepositions. Never use do with have. Have you money? No, I haven't money. Di/a/mond and vac/u/um and car/a/mel are three-syllable words. Pull and push are vulgar, and should be replaced by draw and press.

Plaster zone = grammarrhoid zone.

The story itself was the working zone, where characters were busy manufacturing real entertainment. In the story, characters usually talked the way real people talk.

Beadboard zone = real language zone.

One peculiar exception was lie/lay, which was never "violated" even in the beadboard zone. A semiliterate hoodlum would say "I ain't done nothin wrong. I was just lyin there."

The parallel was triggered by a 1946 episode of 'This is your FBI', which starts out:

Upon whom should rest the greater weight of guilt for illicit operations: the criminal operator himself, or the professing good citizen with his double code of ethics?

Not just plaster. Polished marble with Ionic columns.



Upon whom was completely unnecessary, even by grammarrhoid standards. The real language version wouldn't be:

Who should the greater weight of guilt rest on?

The real language version is:

Who should bear the greater weight of guilt?

or just

Who is more guilty?

No "preposition" at all, so no "need" to stack it on the nose of the sentence.

Labels: Entertainment, Language update

  ¶ 12:06 AM

  Another pointless puzzle
Since I'm in random puzzle mode today, here's another.

Differential measurement is HUGELY DOMINANT in our nervous system and other body processes, from circulation to digestion.

Diff instruments are equally dominant in serious lab settings, for chemistry or acoustics or electronics.

The diffness of measuring tools is mostly hidden in consumer products like cars and even weighing scales. Modern scales no longer have two pans and a fulcrum; they just use well-calibrated piezo pressure sensors.

Diff is also dominant in math on paper. The equation is a balance, and algebra (by exact definition) is a process of adding and removing weights from the two pans to null out the = sign in the middle.

I've asked before why diffness doesn't show up in computer languages. Analog computers had been STRICTLY AND ENTIRELY about diffs and balancing. The whole concept never appeared at all in the digital world, even though every single CMOS gate in a CPU is a diff amp.

Some languages halfway distinguish between the proper algebraic meaning and the computer meaning, at least in a declarative way. The usual computer meaning of X=Y is actually "take the number stored in Y and put it in the box labeled X." This is not the same as saying "X and Y are identical."

But no language has a provision for balancing. There's no command to keep the totals on both sides of the = balanced while fiddling with one or both sides.

Well, how about real human language? Even more surprisingly, there's no built-in function for balancing. We can certainly compare the two sides. We can say my house is bigger than yours, or my house is the same as yours. We can form balance-ish sentences to describe our intrinsic balances: The colder it gets, the more I shiver. But as with digital computers, these are only descriptive. There's no fulcrum in the sentence, no mirror, no forced reflection between the two sides of the balance.

There is some natural fulcruming between inflective endings. In languages with lots of redundancy between noun and adjective endings, or redundancy between subject and verb, adding more weight to one side can reduce the other side so the sum of morphs remains constant. This shows up in German strong vs weak adjectives and articles. When you add an article that bears the weight of the case form, the adjective loses the case form. In Latin languages, when the verb ending includes the person and number of the subject, the pronoun is often omitted. Even in relatively morphless English, specifying a number relieves the noun from bearing the plural weight. (How many feet of lumber do you need? Five hundred foot.)

Labels: Equipoise, Language update

  ¶ 1:02 PM

  Clairvoyant!
I always read Wolfstreet for a well-measured and well-baselined view of economics. Wolf always puts current developments into full historical context, with the best graphs in the world. His commenters include real landlords and business owners who know what's really happening behind the trends.

Today Wolf discusses a superfancy skyscraper in SF, across the street from Twitter headquarters. (Why in the FUCK would anyone live in a skyscraper ANYWHERE, let alone an active earthquake zone? I can't begin to comprehend.) Since the lockdowns and work-from-home orders and riots, the tenants are leaving and the owners are having trouble with their equally stacked-up multistory $274 million mortgage.

One commenter brings out the initial promotion for this skyscraper back in 2013:

NEMA, “an array of lifestyle enhancing packages that fit the new normal.” Residents can choose between the “remote worker,” which includes 12 months of a cable/internet credit up to $200 per month, an Amazon Echo Dot, and Tile™ Mate Tracker, the “mind-body mover,” which includes 12 personal training session, six 60-minute massage sessions, a fitness cooling towel, fit tracker, and NEMA-branded yoga mat and glass water bottle; the “do-gooder,” which includes a $2,000 donation to the local charity of your choice; or the “move maker,” which includes a credit toward movers or a relocation expert up to $1,000, bedroom blackout shades, a Dyson air purifying fan and a bottle of wine and NEMA-branded wine glasses to celebrate.”

Remarkably prophetic, isn't it? Advertising for Karens and OCD types to live the NEW NORMAL in 2013.

Deepstate is never clairvoyant. Deepstate knows what's going to happen because Deepstate MAKES IT HAPPEN. The demons know this "suddenly" "emerging" "surprising" "unprecedented" "virus" is a fucking hoax because they CREATED the fucking hoax.

= = = = =

Language footnote: Other Wolf commenters, belonging to the day-trader species, dismiss real info from real landlords as "anecdotal". Day-traders are accustomed to seeing the world through their simulations and models.

"ANECDOTAL DATA" IS A RETRONYM. "Anecdotal data" used to be called data. A direct personal observation in one particular place was formerly the definition of data. Now only the models and simulations are data, and real observations are DENIER TROLL ANECDOTAL.

Labels: Language update, Metrology

  ¶ 12:21 AM

  Metadata, 1917 style
Let's revisit the linear vs circular theme, from clocks to recorders.

Would we think of time differently if we were accustomed to linear clocks? Would we value the rest of each day more, and use it more efficiently or enjoyably, if we could see and anticipate the consumption as we do on the Ridhwan and the scribal? I've found that modeling and animating these devices tends to steer my thinking in that direction. Constant exposure to the real thing should do even better.

The Dictaphone, like the Ridhwan clock, was strictly linear. Sound runs from one end of the cylinder to the other. This form of indication makes sense for a segment of audio. Only politicians emit endless loops of meaningless poison. Humans speak with a start, middle and end.

Later recording and playing machines lost the linearity, but still tried to create a linear indicator. Music LPs are circular with circumferential 'cuts' between songs or segments. Locating those cuts was tricky, requiring a steady hand and a good eye. Wire and tape recorders have no visible indications at all. Poulsen's original wire recorder had a circular dial that indicated position, with marker hands to record in a specific interval and guard other parts from erasure. Later wires and tapes lost the limiting feature and only had an odometer, which was unreliable because tape stretched and slipped.

Digital players don't have a physical reality, but typically represent the sound linearly as a wave pattern moving through a long rectangle. (Reverting to the first visual representations of sound before the phonograph.)

The typical Dictaphone cylinder ran one hour, and usually contained a variety of letters, telegrams, and documents. Dictaphone recordings were permanent, not automatically erased like wire or tape. Many offices had a separate shaving machine that could erase each cylinder a few times, but this wasn't the default. Archival permanence was seen as a feature, making the Dictaphone useful for legal proceedings where the audio of testimony could be retained 'as is'.

Dictaphone operators were required to keep track of the contents on a printed form, which was then rolled up inside the cylinder when it was put away in storage. The time track depended on observing the indicator on the top bar, which was error-prone. In modern terms the printed form was the metadata for the sound.

From a Westinghouse Manual For Dictators:

Before beginning to dictate, the dictaphone should be located so that the dictator can talk directly into the mouthpiece of the tube and at the same time see notations on the letter to which he is replying. SPEAK DISTINCTLY AND ALWAYS SPELL UNUSUAL NAMES OR TERMS. Read carefully all the notations on the pink slip, Form 631. Indicate the length of each letter by the scale shown on the pink slip, Form 631, so that the typist can properly arrange the letter.

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Here's a gimmick that took advantage of the Dictaphone's strict linearity. It was invented in 1917 by Martha Hunter. This gadget made it easy to register important points for the metadata. It didn't seem to help with reading the metadata, which may be why it was never manufactured.

Heretofore it has been proposed to supply a specially printed sheet, properly ruled and provided with stock phrases, said sheet to receive upon its face penciled marks made by the dictator to convey the necessary information relative to the matters in the record for the convenience of the transcriber.

Great difficulty has been encountered by users of this memo sheet in properly marking it and also in locating from the marks thereon the position in the phonograph record of the matters to which such marks apply.

In the present invention this objection has been overcome by the provision of mechanical means for carrying on these operations.

It would have looked like this when mounted on a Dictaphone:



Just under the button-panel is an ink ribbon, reeled over and under the paper platform.



As the Dictaphone's transducer moved linearly over the cylinder, the Annotator tracked with it.



When dictating, you'd push one of the buttons after you paused the Dictaphone's motor with the foot pedal, to indicate that you were about to start another item, or to mark a correction or a rush job or a telegram.

It's not clear from the patent how the Annotator would help on the transcribing end. There wasn't an easy way to write with pencil on the form, so the dictator would have to take the paper out later and fill in detailed notes, or else write the details separately on 'pink slip Form 631'.

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Footnote: The Manual For Dictators included a splendid guide to effective communication. Syntax, structure, and style. Its approach to grammar was descriptive, not grammarrhoid. This seems to have been typical in the '20s; after WW2 the grammarrhoids regained dominance, especially in neocon and Deepstate circles.


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Later, I bumped into this by accident. Five years ago I made a sort of Dictaphone-style clock in HTML, with unwrapped cylindrical tracks, resembling a spectrogram or periodic element chart. I don't remember anything about it now! The dude who programmed this must have been pretty smart.

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Links for Early Recorders so far:

Poulsen's wire recorder

The last windup phono

The Dictaphone

Dictaphone annotator.

Labels: Language update, Patient things

  ¶ 3:10 PM

  Stir-crazy
Meanwhile, everywhere except Sweden, the world is ruled by holocaustal psychopaths making total war against their own people, which will not stop until all the people are dead. Insanity is starting to spread, and there's no natural immunity against a knife or gun.

Last four items at Spokane News:

Monroe and Summit, SPD with a reported self inflicted stab wound and a tourniquet has been used by officers. -CS

600 West 1st, commercial burglary reported at the bank. Male kicked in a window and entered the bank. #Update male used a fire extinguisher in a room and has been taken into custody -CS

5000 North Lacey, reported male walking down the alley shooting a gun. #Update officers have detained a male that was armed with a gun -CS

4200 South Scott, reported arguement with an adult at the location yelling about everyone being "infected with the virus" -CS

Admittedly it's not binary.... some of this stuff happens all the time .... but it's getting more common and crazier.

STIR-CRAZY is a real word describing a real phenomenon. In a real prison the guards can keep this shit under control. In a city where everyone EXCEPT the criminals is under house arrest, it's a lot harder to control.

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Language footnote: Modern sources miss the origin of stir, considering it to be a nickname for Newgate Prison. The nickname and the phrase have the same source, given correctly by the 1874 slang dictionary. Stir, a prison, a lock-up; Anglo-Saxon STYR, correction or punishment.

An 1882 Anglo-Saxon dictionary clarifies further. Styrian generally meant move, as stir still does. But in medieval times styrian was specialized for violent or tumultuous or riotous motion. On the fucking dot. We retain the original specialty in phrases like stirring up trouble.

Labels: Jackboot stomping forever, Jail mode, Language update

  ¶ 4:21 AM