We might call a common or garden spade–

• A personalized earth-moving equipment module
• A mineralogical mini-transport
• A personalized strategic tellurian command and control module
• An air-to-ground interface contour adjustment probe
• A leveraged tactile-feedback geomass delivery system
• A man-machine energy-to-structure converter
• A one-to-one individualized geophysical restructurizer
• A portable unitized earth-work synthesis system
• An entrenching tool
• A zero-sum dirt level adjuster
• A feedback-oriented contour management probe and digging system
• A gradient disequilibrator
• A mass distribution negentroprizer
• (hey!) a dig-it-all system
• An extra terrestrial transport mechanism

Spades, not words, should be used for shoveling. But words should help us unearth the truth.

–Computer Lib (1974), Theodor Nelson, p44

♠

An enthusiastic follower, Bohdan Zograf, has translated SkunkLink into Belorussian, available here. He’s also mentioned translating all of XForms Essentials, which I completely support, and is just the kind of thing I hoped would happen when I put the text under a liberal content license.

Awesome. -m

Class size is limited, so I’ve been actively psyching myself down for the last month, not getting my hopes up too high. Then when the acceptance came, I had computer down time, and nearly exploded from holding the news in for 3 days. :-)

Ahhhh. I should say more, but I believe I may still be in shock. -m

P. S. OK, how about 25 great opening lines.

But this really caught my eye, from Nalco, the manufacturer of the oil dispersant Corexit 9500 which is being used both in unprecedented quantities and depths in the Gulf. Here’s how they cleverly describe the ingredients of their product, an ingredient list they protect as a trade-secret:

1. One ingredient is used as a wetting agent in dry gelatin, beverage mixtures, and fruit juice drinks.
2. A second ingredient is used in a brand-name dry skin cream and also in a body shampoo.
3. A third ingredient is found in a popular brand of baby bath liquid.
4. A fourth ingredient is found extensively in cosmetics and is also used as a surface-active agent and emulsifier for agents used in food contact.
5. A fifth ingredient is used by a major supplier of brand name household cleaning products for “soap scum” removal.
6. A sixth ingredient is used in hand creams and lotions, odorless paints and stain blockers.

That is one impressive bit of verbal agility, my complements to their staff writer(s). It would be a fun exercise some day to see what kinds of toxic sludge could be described in similar terms. But let’s see if we can figure out the exact ingredient list: here’s the MSDS for the substance. According to it Propylene Glycol is clearly one of the ingredients, as are “Distillates, petroleum, hydrotreated light” and “Organic sulfonic acid salt”. “Wetting agent” and “surface-acting” are both code words for a surfactant. A little knowledge of chemistry along with household product label reading might go a long way… Got insight? Add a comment here to describe what you find.

-m

6/10 Update: Nalco released the full ingredient list and cheat sheet:

The * footnote indicates, essentially, “contains propylene glycol”.

The ** footnote indicates that this chemical is found only in Corexit 9527, not the one most commonly used in the Deepwater Horizon cleanup.

This pushes all of my buttons. It’s got structured documents, Web, parser geekery, writing, engineering, and standards. There’s a bunch of open source prior art, including PyXMLWiki, which I adapted from some fantastic earlier work from Rick Jelliffe.

Sadly, MarkLogic employees aren’t eligible to enter. Get your write-up done by July 15 and sent to balisage-2010-contest at marklogic dot com. The winner will be announced at Balisage and will take home some serious prize winnings, and also will be strongly encouraged (but not required) to give a brief summary (~10 minutes) of their winning entry.

Can’t wait to see what comes out of this. -m

I had some question of whether this would work on a Mac or not, but the FAQ assures one that “Mac users are able to use WhiteSmoke’s online interface (also known as the Online Editor), which contains all grammar, enrichment and spelling features” and (in curiously clumsy language) “Should you be running Safari MacOS x10.3 and encounter any problems, please use FireFox.”

Sounds good.

The spell checker is decent, probably about as good as the one in WordPress.

The thesaurus is pretty good. Clicking on almost any word will prompt a drop-down list of synonyms. This sometimes makes selecting text troublesome. The list itself is often too small, and entries toward the bottom are obscured.

The grammar checker is OK, but I couldn’t point to anything it does that Word couldn’t have handled (though it has been a long time since I have run Word).

The user interface is terrible. Any errors are shown in slightly bolder text either red or green with nothing distinguishing in the background. I’m not too good with colors, so it’s hard for me to say. The text is very difficult to scan. It has an AutoCorrect mode, which can fix some mistakes without interaction, but just as often breaks your text. For example, it changed the previous paragraph from “Sounds good.” to “remark: Incomplete Sentence good.” The changed text is bold, but only until the next scan, when it becomes indistinguishable from actual text.

At the XML level, it produces horrible output, with stacks upon stacks of nested spans, with duplicate IDs. Some of this may be from the necessary back-and-forth between the web interface and whatever your actual editor is. View source on this posting to see what I mean.

It gets worse. The online interface is limited to 10,000 characters-at-a-time–not words–characters. To compare, this short posting contains slightly more than 3,000 characters. I did some experimentation and found the actual limit is somewhat less than the stated 10K; somewhere north of 7K characters, it will show a spinner forever and never finish checking. Clicking the browser “back” button from the forever-spinner screen takes you back to a blank page–all your text is gone. For someone working on, say, a 60,000 word (360,000+ character) project, it would have to be diced up into maybe 50 small pieces, each individually checked, each introducing the prospect of adding rather than fixing problems. Making even a single pass through all the text would require a senseless amount of tedious cut-and-paste work. It’s essentially unusable.

To make sure I know what I’m talking about, I composed this posting in WhiteSmoke, which very well may be the last time I use it. -m

• Easy start: blogger (299 posts in 24 months)
• Succumbing to the desire to roll your own (259 posts in 12 months)
• Realizing that rolling your own is too difficult: Pyblosxom (172 posts in 12 months)
• Moving to a mature platform you don’t need to worry about much: WordPress (500 posts in 42+ months)

-m

Next time you have something ready, by comparison it will be ever so much better, and you’ll have no excuse to avoid submitting that as well.

More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.

[Two men in a satirical dialog] managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite sequence of “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable  when the ‘something doubted’ is still a preceding statement ‘unknowability’ of something doubted,” that the limit of this process at infinity can only be equivalent to a statement of absolute certainty, even though phrased ans an infinite series of negations of certainty.

It’s not like the whole book is like this…far from it. But it is chock full of little gems.

-m

Something like that could explain a lot: many of the claims of perpetual motion machines, cold fusion a la Stanley and Pons, the placebo effect, Steorn Orbo technology (previous discussion), and numerous similar endeavors. Who’s to say that some aspect of what we call consciousness doesn’t involve some kind of probability manipulation?

The conventional scientific method would be at a loss to deal with such a situation. True Believers would proclaim miraculous results from their experiments, but Skeptics would be unable to reproduce the results. Strong skeptics would set up million dollar rewards to prove crackpottish claims under “controlled conditions”, and nobody would ever collect.

Such a conceit is the basis for a story I’m working on. The first drafts were written 18 months ago, as part of NaNoWriMo 2007. I may be ready for some early reviewers by the summer. Interested? -m

I’m perhaps finally switching to a Mac-native text editor, TextWrangler, or if I really like it, BBEdit. Within that app, what’s the easiest way to enter unusual characters not found on a keyboard, say š (Latin s with háček) or ḫ (h-breve below)? In jEdit, one can set up longer strings that get automatically converted into harder-to-type ones. What’s the equivalent in TextWrangler or BBEdit? -m

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense.

and on the popularity of the book

This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian.

The article goes on to cite numerous examples at various levels of pedantry.

Many people including myself appreciate straightforward guidelines, a framework in which to think about good and bad ways to put prose together. Strunk and White does this better than anything else I’ve seen. Effective writing leaps off the page–picky rules can go leap elsewhere. As for me, I’ll stick with Strunk, though not as a religion. Sin and Syntax is another great roadmap to the wonderful wacky English language. -m