I simply typed paragraphs, no special effects, to this post. It came back to me a mess but when I hit reply, the original formatting appeared as the message below. I have no idea what you folks get from me. All I know is that when it comes from you, it has long and short sentences in no particular order and very hard to read.
REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 9:46 AM To: [email protected]; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] [META] Re: email info Thanks for all of the work Mike. That was huge and very informative. I still agree with John Warfield that the problem of prose [which as you say us-ascii is limited to] is not sufficient to reduce the complexity inherent in modern language. I've gotten into the habit of re-editing books that I need to use on a daily basis because common prose, which is cheap to print, is impossible to scan, and at my age to remember, if you are doing anything more than writing simple sentences. Even the regular grammatical rules for paragraphs have had to be ignored and rewritten by news papers to make the text scan-able and memorable by a public that is uninterested due to time use. There is nothing more strange, dull and ugly than a book of poetry or even a textbook without illustrations. But illustrations and pictures are expensive and that is the only issue. Same as orchestras. Rock and Roll was not better it was cheaper to produce than the big bands and the big bands were cheaper and more replicable than a Brahms orchestra. But reducing cost does not mean that you have done it better. Reality is complicated and you don't reduce complexity by making the symbols over simple to accommodate a generic standard for brain power that is set too low. The only choice in us-ascii is simple written prose grammar, verbal pictures or metaphor and that is inadequate just as math is no substitute for music or cuisine. Try describing a color which is what they had to do to have color in a computer. Cog has been having a heck of time describing haptics, hearing and chemical perception which unfortunately seems to be connected to the human judgment that Cog is trying to replicate. http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/overview.html As for your comment about our machines talking behind our backs and redoing everything, I believe you are making my point. The problem is the generic standard is set far too low in order to allow for market difference and the profit model. Consider the automobile which is the perfect market product. It's big, expensive to buy and cheap to make because its inner workings stay the same from year to year while the surface changes to satisfy the public's esteem needs. The only way that relating happens between automobiles is through the human driver who constantly monitors everything within a simple generic grid. If the machines interact it's called an "accident." Americans love that. It's the metaphor for freedom in American life. Not mine but theirs. But the automobile, at present, is a lousy model for a computer, even for simple mail. Computers, have to talk to each other and they have different levels of generic grids. They are dumb machines trying to do human activities with no human driver to moderate because the complexity of the problem is above seven which is the limited number of activities a human can do at one time consciously. Computers can handle far more than seven but they are all speaking different languages. The capitalism tower of Babel. Common information is far more complicated than writing and writing is far more complicated than us-ascii. It's time to send our machines to school and develop their generic semiotics [star trek's universal translator] so that humans are not reduced to the lowest common denominator in the dialog. I realize the scientists will scream their heads off but they should remember the difference between and facts and truth and remember also that John Warfield is known as the father of the scientific study of systems complexity. Perhaps they should listen to Dad rather than just doing things on the cheap. Is it safe for me to come out of the closet or should I still be anonymous? :>)) REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 2:48 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] [META] Re: email info Natalia wrote: Darryl just checked to see if we could do either/or on Text/HTML, and apparently not anymore. Perhaps because AOL bought out Mozilla, but HTML is what works for us for our needs, and has worked well for Futurework stuff. HTML email is evil. Ask any Unix hacker. :-) See: http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml or this, which emphasizes the security hole that accepting HTML email represents: http://www.mkanderson.com/portal/archives/199 Natalia again: Mike, you can download Mozilla for free. I have Mozilla Firefox. I would use a web browser for email less frequently than I would use a chainsaw to carve a roast turkey. Natalia: How often are FW's emails arriving as octo's? Email doesn't "arrive as octal". Email arrives as it is sent. If I receive email in which some bytes are rendered by my client as octal numbers, it's because those bytes have numerical values greater than 127 and thus aren't part of the us-ascii character set. This happens often when the sender uses a windows-nnnn charset. Grepping through a large (25 meg) collection of saved FW posts, I see numerous instances of these character sets being used: utf-8 windows-1252 windows-1250 windows-1256 iso-8859-1 unicode us-ascii The windows-nnnn sets associate high-value bytes (>127) in a Microsoft's choice of glyphs. Details of how these charsets relate, overlap or diverge would be even more tedious than this is already. Ray wrote: I guess what it all comes down to is this: as long as there is not a good high quality generic model set by a central authority that at least doesn't rearrange the formatting of what we've done and allows for individual expression, we will just have to take up the slack individually. Well, the standard for email has long been us-ascii. Agreed that this doesn't allow for typographic creativity but email isn't about artistic page layout. It's about substantive text. But alas, as more and more people joined the net, a clamor arose for email that was more like slick magazine pages or television, and not just from couch potatoes and chicken-boners, either. Hanging out at Project Athena 20 years ago, I heard people saying, "Won't it be great when a student can submit homework by email, complete with a video of her project, with voice-over, animated diagrams and audio of noise in the high-speed bearings she's designing?" Well, yes and no. For specific venues, that's great. For most email, that's like showing up for a nice little dinner party with your own 5-piece jazz combo, video projector and sound system and asking the host for suitable potables (for the band) and plugins for the electronics. So MIME was developed. This mechanism essentially allows anything than can be digitized to be incorporated into email. Microsoft, Mozilla and the other major software vendors charged into it like a starved ferret into a pipe full of raw meat. Now people are accustomed to putting anything whatever into email because their email clients allow it. MIME (what most users call "attachment") is useful in specific instances but the browser and email client vendors have gone hog wild with it, making the naive user's email a dog's breakfast of miscegenated formats, charsets and media along with compensatory encodings. Ray wrote: I find these little >>> marks to really be annoying and hard to read so I spend fifteen, twenty and even thirty minutes sometimes just taking them out and rewriting the formatting so that I can read objectively what someone has honored me by taking the time to write. This is an inheritance from Usenet news, which actually antedates the internet. It's a method of making nested quotes from previous posts to a public forum, supported by all classic NNTP software. I agree it's ugly and can be confusing. An alternative is to manually indent quoted paragraphs but this may fail because client software may simply remove your indents. (I've indented quoted text in this post using spaces. If quoted text isn't indented, it's because your client is reformatting the text.) Ray again: My paragraphs are always jumbled when they return, with long and short sentences and no paragraph break. This is why your own posts come back in garbled format: Some reader's client software thinks it knows better than you how your text should be rendered. Or worse, your own software doesn't send exactly what you write. If you lay out a page with lines of specific length -- say, as you would for poetry -- but your mail client marks it, in the MIME headers, as "format=flowed", that designation will be taken by the reader's client as authorization to reformat the lines to suit itself. More likely, the reader's client designates the "flowed" format in a reply or overtly reformats what you wrote. Ray wrote: It's not their fault and it's not my fault that I'm getting older and have to adjust to these goddamned glasses. Well, I'm pushing 70, too, and have to have two pairs of glasses to do everything. I tell all my software to render everything in a 24pt or larger serifed font. Works everywhere except for one very weird web site in Chechnya that uses the Windows-1251 charset. My commonest annoyance is multipart/mixed posts that include two versions of what the author wrote: one in (ostensibly) plain text and one in HTML. I use grep to search in archive files. When I grep in my FW archive, if I haven't manually edited out all the HTML versions before saving, grep returns a mess of HTML markup along with the target words. So like Ray, I manually edit every post that I'm going to save to remove the MIME headers and the HTML version. Tedious. Distracts me from replying to the substance. The web page copied by Natalia that included the "soft hyphens" (0xAD) was an unusual case, created by the original web site which included soft hyphens in every word. Insane. Natalia just copied them because they were invisible to her -- not rendered at all in her mail client. I think that Windows Notepad only allows us-ascii characters. Copying web text into notepad should either eliminate non-ascii characters or render them as weirdness that can be edited out. But that's just a guess. Enough. More than enough, probably. - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ Sent from my DecWriter II _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
