Gallimaufry of Whits
Being for the Month of 2007-04
These are quick notes taken by Sean B. Palmer on the Semantic Web, Python
and Javascript programming, history and antiquarianism, linguistics and
conlanging, typography, and other related matters. To receive these bits of
dreck regularly, subscribe to the feed. To browse other
months, check the contents.
Countryfile was awesome today. It's fast becoming one of my favourite shows,
actually. This edition had features on beach art, follies, encroachment, cob
building, and slavery estates, as well as a feature about the central location,
Tyntesfield. And the weather report was by Kirsty McCabe; good show. Though not
many follies are being built these days, I wonder if things like Zap are internet equivalents? Of the twenty
nine follies listed on the Wikipedia entry, only a small percentage
have photos sadly, but Williamson's
tunnels stand out, and I rather like the Dunmore Pineapple for
some odd reason... I think it reminds me of Kew. And, of course, Portmerion is
the most stunning of all; an entire folly village.
The cob building piece was cool too, though I don't like the
environmentalist bent all that much. The principle is great, but the aesthetic
is terrible. At least the tradition itself is grounded thoroughly in the tried
and tested past, and the few people practicing the trade seem to be outstanding
at it; the dude that was profiled on Countryfile at least was superb.
Weird, textwrap thinks that it can break on hyphens:
>>> textwrap.wrap('hello-there ' * 8, break_long_words=False)
['hello-there hello-there hello-there hello-there hello-there hello-', 'there
hello-there hello-there']
>>>
But that causes problems in HTML as it adds a space after the hyphen in such
hyphenated words. I've had a brief skim through textwrap.py, and I can't find
any obvious indication of where the hypen breaking goes on. Also, incidentally,
the return of Allo Allo is going to be awesome.
Ah here we go, it's in the splitter regexp:
wordsep_re = re.compile(
r'(\s+|' # any whitespace
r'[^\s\w]*\w+[a-zA-Z]-(?=\w+[a-zA-Z])|' # hyphenated words
r'(?<=[\w\!\"\'&\.\,\?])-{2,}(?=\w))') # em-dash
So that's easily fixable:
>>> import re, textwrap
>>> textwrap.wrap('hello-there ' * 8, break_long_words=False)
['hello-there hello-there hello-there hello-there hello-there hello-', 'there
hello-there hello-there']
>>> r_wordsep = re.compile(r'(\s+|(?<=[\w\!\"\'&\.\,\?])-{2,}(?=\w))')
>>> textwrap.TextWrapper.wordsep_re = r_wordsep
>>> textwrap.wrap('hello-there ' * 8, break_long_words=False)
['hello-there hello-there hello-there hello-there hello-there', 'hello-there
hello-there hello-there']
>>>
Still, somewhat annoying; there should be an option for it.
Somebody on Ars Technica wrote
that the main top secret feature in Leopard may be a 3D interface, but the idea
is hardly new. Oliver Roup said in November 2006 that a Google
Maps style UX might be the rumoured feature, saying that it'd be cool if
you could zoom into and out of the desktop. And that was before the iPhone!
Earlier in 2006 I wrote that I'd like a kind of graphic space desktop one of
the primary features of which is that you get to zoom into and out of it. I
didn't make the connection to Google Maps, and I certainly didn't make any sort
of link to Leopard, but it'll be nice if this little feature I've been wanting
for some time actually makes it into a product that I can get. It'll be like
golf balls all over again. But of course the rumour mill is only a rumour mill,
so best not to get your hopes up—probably the best warning story is that of
the levitating Segway. Doesn't hover after all, does it?
I've been looking for a bit of Chassignite from the original meteorite that
fell near Chassigny in 1815, and I haven't found anyone selling it on the web
yet. But it occurred to me, I could place a want ad on my own site, and then
somebody with some Chassignite might stumble across it and take pity on me and
offer to sell me a bit.
So with that in mind, I've just written Desperately Seeking
Chassignite. If you've come here from a search engine and have a piece of
Chassignite for sale worth up to $150, please contact me! Thanks.
Beginning of the month! Font time!
The Type Directors Club held a competition for new fonts, and some of the
results are pretty nice. Especially good are EMT Lorena and Corundum Text.
Lorena is just a nice, smooth, professional looking font that reminds me (and
this is high praise) a little bit of Mrs Eaves. But check out that uneven ff
ligature in Corundum Text! And is that a non-joined ct ligature in the
italic?
Sadly the designer's site is down, so it's hard to find out more
information. Some of the novelty fonts such as Flexion are
interesting, but the most interesting of all is Subtil because it
embodies perhaps everything that is bad about modern sans-serifs. The rounded
terminals, the quirky "experimental" capital Q, the ampersand that looks like
Rotis Sans ("One of the worst ampersands available", says Mark Boulton)... it's
just hideous through and through. And yet Jason Kottke calls it his
favourite of the competition. One man's Adobe Garamond Pro is another man's
Curlz MT, I suppose.
One annoying thing about SmartyPants is that it outputs entities rather than
utf-8. Obviously that's often good, but there should at least be an option for
it. At least the documentation notes the other big annoyance:
'Twas the night before Christmas.
In the case above, SmartyPants will turn the apostrophe into an opening
single-quote, when in fact it should be a closing one. I don't think this
problem can be solved in the general case -- every word processor I've tried
gets this wrong as well. In such cases, it's best to use the proper HTML entity
for closing single-quotes ’ by hand.
I think you could probably work that out by checking for a closing single
quote, but of course it doesn't help in this case:
'Twas the night before Christmas, and the mice were rockin'.
So TINOS, perhaps.
PatternNames are awesome: they're the modern equivalent of the ancient
formularies. William's writing a book about Exclusivity and The Greed
Incentive, and I'm now thinking about what patterns to get from it...
- TheExclusivityVice
- GazeOfTheMob
It's quite difficult to get patterns from it really. Patterns are encodings
of understanding that you want to refer back to to reinforce that
understanding, and I'm not sure that I understand the principles behind what
William's writing about yet, even though he's written some good points.
Actually, he asked me for comments, and the comments that I gave probably
could be encoded better as patterns:
- GordianButPrecise
- CompetetiveCoöperation
- VastCommunication
- MicroMeritocracy
- ChassigniteInterests
GordianButPrecise is based on this quote from H.L. Mencken in 1956:
"The imbeciles who have printed acres of comment on my books have seldom
noticed the chief character of my style. It is that I write almost scientific
precision - that my meaning is never obscure. The ignorant have often
complained that my vocabulary is beyond them, but that is imply because my
ideas cover a wider range that theirs do. Once they have consulted the
dictionary they always know exactly what I intend to say."
—H.L. Mencken, 1956
CompetetiveCoöperation is my idea that by making charity into a competetive
game, you get the benefits of exclusivity without their perjorative
ramifications; indeed the opposite.
VastCommunication, as well as MicroMeritocracy and ChassigniteInterests, are
based on my little chassignite request that I pasted into the
web. The idea of VastCommunication is that I can reach a lot of people and the
want ad stays up as long as my website does; it's cheap and targeted, perhaps
much more targeted than even advertising in a big newspaper. The
MicroMeritocracy comes from me wondering what would happen if everybody in the
world wanted a piece of this rare mineral. Since it's not the case, the only
qualification you need for deserving a piece is wanting a piece. In other
words, it's a very low bar meritocracy. And hence ChassigniteInterests to
describe interests that only a few people have, and so don't suffer the tragedy
of the commons (TragedyOfTheCommons!) as a result. Anyone can indulge
themselves in such things. Literature is kinda a large scale Chassignite
Interest since anybody above a rather hideous poverty line can read what they
want to.
Lo and Behold! is coming along rather nicely. After initial posts
about the seasons and meteorites, I'm now working on one that possibly doubles
the amount of known Cumbric in the world (or reduces it by a sixth, depending
on how you look at it).
At the moment I'm rather focussed on words and etymologies. I figured out
that that's because they're easy discoveries, but I'm worried that it'll become
too easy and they'll lose their shine. At the moment the commentary that's
going with the discovery merits them though.
So what direction in future? I'm trying to scribble down things that I'd
like to investigate. It's notable that I start off on subjects that I quite
like and then get specialised into one particular nook of it that yields
awesome results and sometimes discoveries. Doing the groundwork really
matters.
All the same, I'd like to diversify. Diversification and innovation are what
made What Planet what it was. Getting stuck in an etymological rut
wouldn't be a good idea, but getting stuck in a rut of innovation is no bad
thing. Of course, most actual value from things is only decidable across the
ages, so it is prudent to just try to make whatever progresses you can but not
get too conceited in focussing on what you think is valuable. The incidental
things can sometimes turn out to be the best things.
One guiding principle which helps is that you have to record things. If
there's no record and no impact, then that doesn't help people all that much.
So making as much noise as possible whilst maintaining good intentions is
probably a recipe for success. That's pretty much why I'm maintaining the
Gallimaufry of Whits too: you just dunno how this stuff is going to
benefit people!
Oh, and another thing is that you shouldn't try to control your perceived
image, but you also shouldn't try to control your control of your perceived
image. Just follow the Tao, man. (The mysterious
book of mystery that I got was about Simon Forman...)
“He
kent no his erse fae his elbick” - the best phrase in any language?
A little scriptlet that I just wrote:
$ cat $(which avo)
#!/bin/bash
${EDITOR:-emacs} $1
avocet $1 > ${1%.avo}.html
It lets you edit a master document using Avocet and then converts it
automatically to an HTML counterpart. I'm really enjoying using Avocet!
I've been designing a system for a project that I want to work somewhat like
paper organisation, only with the digital benefits of searching and backup etc.
It's based on the ideas that:
- You create a new note, and it's assigned a new number and stamped with the
current time.
- When you want to edit that note, the old one is archived and gzipped, and
the new one has the same number and the old timestamp, plus the new timestamp
corresponding with the edit.
- When you want to compose a large document that isn't just a series of
random notes, you include the notes using an inclusion syntax.
Since the notes get updated in place, the inclusion syntax should work quite
well. Oh, and of course the input text is formatted with Avocet.
“The bishop agrees, because the mouse is in fact his wife.” - the best
sentence in Wikipedia's summary
of the Mabinogion. Even in context.
The current Old
Norse orthography article on Wikipedia has a pretty funny, and unexpected,
pun: "The orthography of the Old Norse language since the introduction of the
Latin alphabet in Iceland is a thorny subject." The pun is even linked to the
character, just to make it clear!
The Quarrymen recordings are really good. Pretty much every comment that
I've found about them on the web says that the quality of both sound and
playing is terrible but it's a good bit of history and you can hear some
"promise" in there. But I enjoy them just for what they are, rather than the
promise of the future Beatles. In any case, there are only a couple of
recognisable Beatles songs in there, and the lineup changed; it's a different
band.
Perhaps my liking them is just due to the fact that I like seeing how things
are constructed, and this gives an ample view of that. But I also like the very
raw quality to the music... it sounds exciting, like they were just messing
around and had a lot to play for but were enjoying it too. Yet that's tempered
by their less able playing, so it all kinda balances out.
Hello Little Girl and You'll Be Mine are probably the highlights (the more
that I listen to You'll Be Mine, the more I like it as a track rather than a
piece of comedy that most see it as), but there's good work all the way
through. For example, the strumming on One After 909, the "chack cha-chack
cha-chack", is a simple but effective one, making it again sound more "raw"
than what eventually turned up on Let It Be.
They also have their own distinctive sound. The recording equipment, the
guitars... it sounds like it fits the turning point between the '50s and the
'60s, but it's not really the same as any of the polished stuff from that
period. It's nice to hear all the covers too as an indication of what stuff
they were listening to around then.
It'd be nice if the sessions were released professionally engineered, as a
few of the tracks were for Anthology I, but I doubt it'll happen given the
general consensus about their quality. That's a shame.
For those unfamiliar with and unable to get their hands on the Quarrymen
sessions, Alan W. Pollack's notes
thereon give some indication of the flavour. Pollack's notes are pretty good in
general; they usually come up in any extended searches or commentary on the
Beatles' music.
Hmm, all the provenance notes on the Quarrymen sessions say that they were
recorded in 1960, possibly at Paul's house (and other locations?) on a borrowed
tape recorder. Now, if the year is correct then the Wikipedia page on The Quarrymen states that
during 1960 the constantly shifting band lineup was actually called "Johnny and
The Moondogs", "The Silver Beetles", and "The Beatles" throughout that year;
nothing of The Quarrymen at all. It's thought that Sutcliffe was the bass
player, which would rule out Johnny and The Moondogs. The band were The Silver
Beatles from May through to August; that's when they went to Hamburg for the
first time.
So whilst it's difficult, and perhaps impossible at this remove (unless some
fan out there has delved deeply enough), to find out exactly what the name of
the band was, and even the players, who did the recordings in the Quarrymen
sessions, it seems that they weren't calling themselves The Quarrymen.
Good news on the nostalgia front. The Pickering to Whitby steam
train service is back in action after 42 years. I think that BBC News were
saying it's become the only mainline steam train service in Britain. There are
several good private ones; I've been on one or two and they're great fun.
Also on the nostalgia front, I've applied for an ISSN for Lo and
Behold! I did the same for What Planet is This? several years ago
but was turned down because it didn't have a paper counterpart. Since Lo
and Behold! does, they'll either have to come up with another reason for
turning it down or, you never know, accept it. At the moment I'm planning to
publish it quarterly, but I might bring that down to annually if it gets to be
too much hassle. The publisher I have in mind is Lulu. It's great how the computer age makes
things like this easier.
Okay, I like Flickr. There, I said it. Whilst I'm still annoyed at its Web
2.0ishness, I have to conceed that the usefulness of the site is immense. If I
want an image to illustrate some article I've written, I go straight to
Flickr—not Google Images or any of the free stock images sites. Flickr is
awesome.
Who knows, I may even publish photos there myself at some point. It seems
only fitting to give works back to the commons. As long as there's a good API
for sorting it all out... then again, I'm not adverse to writing my own
code.
Why are thin columns of text easier to read than fat ones? I thought it was
because of the newspaper tradition; perhaps practice at that thickness means
that we're more adept at it. After all, the time that it takes to scan back to
the beginning of the line is equal to the total length of text itself, which
has nothing to do with the width at which it's printed. Right?
Well this morning I realised that that's thinking of the field of view as a
point, when in actual fact it's likely to be a fuzzy blob. So if the column
were really thin, probably about ten characters wide but maybe more, you
wouldn't have to track horizontally at all! But then of course you'd be
changing the mode of reading from vertical to horizontal, so that'd change the
mode of reading entirely. I guess that 50-80 characters as used in newspapers
is about right as a tradeoff between not having to track as much, and keeping
the reading horizontal.
Whoo, Countryfile. So far they've profiled working horses and they're now on
the possible demise of dairy farming. It's made me think about how I'd run a
country... I'd make it like Sark, with motorised vehicles available only for
the emergency services (which would include doctors and vets).
Apparently in 1995 a pint of milk cost 42p and farmers got 24.5p of that;
and in 2006 though the price rose to 55p the farmers only get 18.5p. Five main
dairy producers have 2/3 of the market in the UK. Ah, yields have gone up
(thanks to breeding and stuff) as farmers have quit the business, to fill the
gap. "Rather than call it intensive, we like to call it high care." It'd be
nice to have fresh milk delivered straight from the farm like in the olden
days; I wonder if there are any local farms that give that service?
Ooh, photography tips with Chris Packham now.
Yesterday the UK's ISSN centre assigned a provisional ISSN to the print
version of Lo and Behold!, ISSN 1754-453X. I suppose that it's
contingent on a print version actually appearing, which I'm confident enough it
will be to be happy at their decision. They actually assigned it to "Lo and
behold!", so I asked about the case (they said that even very small changes
must be reported), and they said that it can be printed as "Lo and Behold!" but
they have to enter it as "Lo and behold!" because of their style guide. I'm
rather of the opinion that more words should be capitalised in titles than
less, but oh well; I think I'd even support the capitalisation of nouns in
English, like we used to do at times around the 18th century.
I reasoned whilst out walking this morning that in the future when all cars
are fitted with anonymous GPS that only beams back the speed of the car to the
government, there'll be no such thing as speeding. A plausible
prognostication?
Coincidentally enough, when I got home, my morning news trawl brought up a
piece by a guy from 1900 who had predicted several things to happen by the
year 2000. Until I found the image
version of it, I was wondering if it wasn't a hoax—the predictions are,
in some places, so amazingly precise! On the other hand, there's absolutely no
indication that the aeroplane would become popular, which is interesting given
that there was a lot of interest in heavier than air flight at the time. I
guess it was just the more eccentric that were into it.
Yesterday I wrote an essay called "So Witty Worded" about Shakespeare's
mysterious words, words whose meanings are lost, on Lo and Behold! It
was also, probably, Shakespeare's birthday, though that is often celebrated
today, on St. George's Day.
Compsci is exciting to get into, but it seems that innovation (like they say
about nostalgia) just isn't what it used to be. Perl6 and Tabulator are
probably the two most enticing things in compsci at the moment to me, but
they've both become microstagnant. Shame!
I'm getting incrementally more convinced by the "patchock" reading of
"pajock" in Hamlet (III.ii.279), but I do wonder just how common the tch -> j
rendering was in the admittedly very fluid Elizabethan orthography. The fact
that Spenser used it does point to it being one of those words "in the air" at
the time, used by the literati and written down by, it seems, two of them. As a
diminutiviser, I wonder if modern writers could get some mileage out of -ock.
Computock. Lampock. Televisiock. It appears to need some measure of practice
and patience.
Anyway, the thing that tipped me over the edge with the patchock suspicion
was the note, by Majorie Garber in Quotation Marks, that Hamlet not
much later calls the king a "king of shreds and patches" (III.iv.103), which
links it to "patchock", said to be a pejorative term for a patchman, a
clown.
"He never gave anybody the ball, he only lent it to them, because he'd pass
it to them and then he'd run off and expect the return." - Bernard Halford on
Alan Ball.
"RBS WOOS ABN AMRO" says a BBC headline on the TV right now. It got me
thinking that the common mistake of putting an apostrophe in words such as
"woos" isn't too bad after all. It's just a slightly murkier version of the
acceptable practice of using an apostrophe in plural letters: lots of s's; lots
of t's. It enables you to parse the word into its constituents more easily; and
after all, isn't effective communication the most important reason behind
language?
Excerpts, lightly edited, from emails sent to William Loughborough
today:
When England unexpectedly turned to Civil War, suddenly the idea of the King
or Queen as God's annointed (used as an excuse by Henry VIII to break away from
the Catholic Church and thus marry Anne Boleyn!) disappeared, and people
started thinking about what should replace it.
Lots of groups with awesome names, many religious, sprung up at the time:
for example the Ranters, the Seekers, the Levellers, the True Levellers, the
Quakers, and the Muggletonians. The last Muggletonian, Phillip Noakes of
Matfield, Kent, died in 1979! The Quakers are still going.
Ironically, once Cromwell the dictator died, the parliament disintegrated
under its own weight and Charles II was restored to the throne. A law was
passed saying that the interregnum had never even happened, and that was
that.
Broadsides are most effective when there's revolution in the air.
* * *
This Wikipedia article, apropos of the radical beliefs in the interregnum,
just gave me a really nice phrase to epitomise one of those CamelCase patterns
that's been sparkling about in the air waiting to be encapsulated:
"In the disappointment of the moment, they imagined that there had been a
moment of revolutionary purity when all these writers had agreed on something
intrinsically republican and good"
- Good Old Cause
In The Disappointment Of The Moment! Not exactly a good CamelCase candidate,
but it's valuable all the same: the idea of revolutionary purity, cf. the
framers and the US constitution, is something that's quite prevalent and seems
to have some kind of (jazzy) truth quality behind it somewhere.
It's the vector, not the resultant! [Note: which is to say, there is as much
truth in the disappointment as in the revolution, etc.]
* * *
Blindless and Exclusivity are clear attempts to make
incremental improvements to our condition, much like the social counterpart to
all our scientific and technological discoveries. I used to call that quality
of science its "compoundative" nature. These days I like to use the word
"atomos" to identify that principle of creating lots of small, indestructible
gains.
Sometimes I think that with a few bits of plans in place, we could do a lot
better. Is there a recipe for the kind of freethinking of the [English] Civil
War or the '60s?
If our atomos, our digital daubings, could go towards something that will
snowball and create other such efforts, that'd probably be the best kind of
central effort. Rodia et al. are inspriring; is there such a thing as
metainspiring?
Palaeography is hard, especially when it comes to secretary handwriting (and
mixed or transitional handwriting), so finding English Handwriting 1500-1700:
An Online Course today was rather a welcome discovery.
The actual methods of transcription still leave a lot to be desired though,
I think... the range of original, analogue, devices, is not properly
represented in the range of digital codes. When we just use ASCII, we're
naturally limited quite a bit... Unicode doesn't alleviate it much because it's
missing a lot of necessary scribal stuff which is considered beyond Unicode's
remit; so we're going to need XML or some similarly complex crap to be able to
encode this kind of stuff if we're going to do it properly.
I have seen one or two sites that try to be really comprehensive about
transcribing old stuff, but not many. There's also an awesome book that
apparently indexes and catalogues all of the printers' devices used in the
Elizajacobean period. I rather like that. EEBO uses the codes when describing
its books in the metadata.
A bizarre new topic for all
and sundry. I like Wikipedia for that kind of random stuff almost as much as
the obvious primary information content.
The Poodles
as Pets story this morning is bizarrely funny. The "But the scam was only
spotted after a leading Japanese actress said her 'poodle' didn't bark and
refused to eat dog food." part is the bit that got me most... There's a kind of
comic timing to news article writing, I suppose, and that has it in spades.
Found whilst searching for information about John Woodhouse, philomath:
Some almanacs were written by rather odd people. In the 17th century there
was William Poole, for instance, described as 'a nibbler at astrology', who had
been a gardener, drawer of linen, plasterer and bricklayer, and used to brag
that he had "been of seventeen professions". He was something of a wit - if a
coarse wit. Accused by Sir Thomas Jay JP of stealing a silver cup, he waited
until Sir Thomas was dead, enquired where the grave was, and left a note on it
saying:
Here lyeth buried Sir Thomas Jay, Knight,
Who being dead. I upon his grave did shite.
The evidence, we are told, was nearby.
—The Rise and Fall of the Astrological Almanac, by Derek Parker
"There are a lot of puzzles back there in the wilderness we call the past."
- Steve Urkowitz,
on SHAKSPER
Victoria's Empire was good last night. For some reason I wasn't
expecting it to be, but it was really good... very much along the lines of
Michael Palin's stuff in style, but Victoria Wood is a very different
presenter, and it has a single theme to concentrate on (the empire). Looking
forward to the next two in the series... shame there aren't more, in fact.
Television for the past five years or so has been a bit dire, especially
when it comes to comedy. The Catherine Tate Show and the IT
Crowd are probably the highlights of the last few years; and it's funny
that Ruddy Hell! exists since I thought Harry and Paul had fallen out.
Some of the sketches in that show a lot of promise, even though they don't have
Charlie Higson writing. I wonder what Charlie Higson's doing at the mo'?
Aha! Some of the datacentres are showing a PR of 7 for Whits now, so something that I did
must've worked. I'm thinking about having the latest Whits entries on the
inamidst.com homepage, so that more people come across them. Seems that if I'm
writing all this crap I might as well export it as best I can... it's the
inamidst.com way!
Sean B. Palmer, inamidst.com
