Spinning Yarns

When I was a young child, probably first or second grade, my parents — to their lasting chagrin — gave me a joke book. I don’t remember the exact title; it was something appropriate like The Big Book of Jokes, but that doesn’t really matter anyway; you probably know the type of book I’m talking about. It had a floppy paper cover with cartoon characters on the front doing silly things, and was printed on cheap pulp paper barely one grade above newsprint. More importantly, it contained probably the worst collection of D-grade quips, puns, knock-knock jokes, and dumb one-liners ever assembled in one place. In effect, it was the pure essence of first-grade humour, distilled down into a powerful concentrate, guaranteed to make even a saint flee the room in terror.

Like every child at that age, I thought these jokes were uproariously funny. I would sit reading this book for hours, laughing until my stomach hurt and tears ran down my cheeks. This in itself was noisy, but largely inoffensive. The part that really drove my long-suffering parents completely around the bend was — and I bet you can see it coming — I would insist upon reading my favourite jokes to them. Over. And over. And over again. In retrospect, I find it a marvel that they did not simply hang me up by my toes from the nearest tree, and leave me for the vultures.

Eventually, these jokes got old, and I tired of them. I do not know what happened to The Big Book of Jokes, but I have always sneakingly suspected that my mother might have discreetly spirited it away, and given it to my father to use as kindling for the woodstove. And who could blame them? Ye gods, those jokes were awful! That point was driven home for me a few years later, when I heard some younger children telling those same old jokes and laughing fit to burst. After several weeks of being told and re-told these old chestnuts, I had a very clear sense of just what my dear parents had been called upon to tolerate. (I was not as charitable as Mom and Dad were. When the younger kids wouldn’t stop, I told them to go screw themselves, or words to that effect).*

For a long time after that, I imagined that once people had learned this lesson, they would be more careful about inflicting all their new jokes and crazy revelations on family and friends. Got a new joke? You first ask, “did you hear the one about the mathematician, the hooker, and the priest?” And if your audience says they have heard it, you move on. A joke that’s funny the first couple of times you hear it usually loses its humour after several re-tellings; a clever twist only has so much energy in it. Unfortunately, it seems that this lesson rarely carries over into other parts of our adult lives.

Okay, granted, most adults will not rush to tell everybody they know the latest knock-knock joke they heard, unless it’s really dirty, or it involves George Bush. But that doesn’t mean we won’t share every other little idea that pops into their head with equal gusto. Some random joke list arrives on the Internet, it gets forwarded — who cares if everybody’s seen it ten times! Someone reads a new diet book, and suddenly they’re instant experts on nutrition and exercise, full of free (and unsolicited) advice on how to eat right and stay fit. A few yoga and meditation classes later, you’ll get an earful on how to be an enlightened being, and if only you poor suffering bastards would wake up and see the light! Join a new club, or take up a new sport, and all at once, you’re bursting with “new” truths about team play, strategy, and athletics. Just like the joke book, these fads usually ease up once the novelty wears off, but in the meantime, everybody else gets load after load of recycled old cruft presented as in the guise of an exciting new revelation.

Now, I’m not saying we never discover anything truly new and exciting in our lives. But genuine novelty is actually kind of rare, and what I am saying is that, the lessons of childhood to the contrary, we tend to assume that anything which is novel to us, must also be novel to everyone else around us. It’s usually not true — and it can, at times, put quite a bit of strain on our relationships with family and friends, if we let the repetitive proselytizing get too far out of hand.

We all have a reasonable right to learn and grow and make our own lifestyle choices, and it’s good to share the fruits of our experience with those we love. But there is definitely also a line to be drawn between “sharing” and “totally miring everybody around us in an endless babble of lessons, lectures, and so-called `discoveries’, just because we’re convinced nobody ever had our particular insights before.” Sharing ideas and insights is one thing; but it’s probably best to try and stop short of preaching.

Of course, in writing this, I’ve violated my own advice. Isn’t that exciting? Let me tell you all the wonderful new insights I’ve had lately on the subject of hypocrisy! Or maybe you’d rather hear the one about this piece of string who walks into a bar, and the bartender asks him, …

Oh? You’ve heard it? Well, never mind then.

* Since writing this, I heard back from my mother, who assures me she does not remember The Big Book of Jokes. All I can say is, thank heavens for the ability of the brain to block out really unpleasant memories.

“There are two laws no human being can escape: The first idea that comes into a person’s mind will be the most obvious one; and, having had an obvious idea, nobody ever thinks that others may have had the same idea before.”

– Umberto Eco, How to Justify a Private Library

Filed by Michael at 17:32 under Personal, Story
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If you’ve had e-mail for any length of time, or if you have ever used one of the popular “instant messaging” programs currently in vogue (“all the disadvantages of electronic mail, without any of those pesky benefits!”), you have probably seen the wonderfully creative ways people have found to abbreviate their messages, and save a few keystrokes worth of typing. And when I say “wonderfully creative”, in this particular context, what I really mean is “painfully annoying”. Some of my favourite techniques include:

• Avoid all capital letters, except to indicate that you are SHOUTING. This saves repetitive stress injuries to your outside fingers, which would otherwise have to press the Shift key periodically.
• Drop all punctuation except exclamation points, unless you can convey the entire message using only punctuation (e.g., ;-) or !!! or ???). If you do use punctuation, be very careful to avoid using it in any such way that your grammar-school teachers might have given you a gold star for.
• Spelling is optional. Everybody knows it is simply another tool used by the patriarchal elite to promote and sustain the dominant paradigm. Poor spelling is a sure sign that you are too cool to care about the conventions of polite society, and will insure you a good social position when the revolution comes.
• Homophonic substitution is really cool. Never write “to”, or “two”, or “too”, when you could simply replace any of these with the more compact “2″. Same goes for “are” and “r”, “you” and “u”, “be” and “b”, “see” and “c”, “for” and “4″, “-ate” and “8″, et al. The list goes painfully on and on.
• Use whitespace as punctuation. Since you really don’t want to bother with punctuation, use carriage returns to separate phrases and clauses within your messages.
• Complete sentence = Bad.

I don’t care if this makes me sound like a stuffy old codger, I find these stupid blip-text things really irritating to read. It’s especially bad when I get them from my students. Sure, I can figure out what they mean, at least most of the time, but it still bugs me. If their time is too precious to bother giving me capital letters, full stops at the ends of sentences, and the word “too” typed out in full, why should I feel any strong motivation to take ten minutes out of my life to write them a carefully-considered answer? “What,” I wonder, “makes you think your time is worth more than mine?” Worth more to you, maybe. But don’t expect me to share your priorities.

Of course, there are degrees of blip-text, and some are worse than others, depending on context. Omitting capital letters and using common acronyms in an AIM conversation is not particularly bothersome; whereas in an e-mail, it’s annoying. Imagine how terrible it would look in a formal business letter!* On the other hand, I pretty much always hate homophonic substitution (and before you ask, no, that doesn’t make me a homophobe), and I generally prefer to see at least some punctuation here and there, no matter what the medium.

So with that in mind, I got to thinking — in the abstract, these blip-text mutations are really just ad hoc lossy text compression algorithms. They live on a continuum along which acceptability has an inverse relationship to the compression ratio. Usually, the point of text compression is to find an encoding that doesn’t discard any information. The blip mutations actually do — and yet, we can still understand the message just fine, thanks to the enormous redundancy of natural language. So the question is, how far can we take this? How much bandwidth could we save if we just gave up on the antique notion of writing things out longhand, and just compress the hell out of everything? I can imagine the (d)evolution might go something like this:

The original message: “What are you up to today?” (1 : 1)

Okay, right away we clearly need to get rid of that silly capital W, and there three obvious homophonic substitutions. That leads us to the first revision, namely:

Version 2: “what r u up 2 2day?” (1.3 : 1)

Better, but there’s still some unnecessary punctuation, lots of spaces, and a big interrogative. Why don’t we replace “what” with a question mark, trusting the reader to figure out which question word was intended from context, then dissolve the question mark at the end? That brings us to:

Version 3: “? r u up 2 2day” (1.67 : 1)

Now, what if we replace “up” with “^”? It points upward, and again, the reader can infer what we’re talking about from context. That leaves us with only single-character values, except for the “2day” at the end:

Version 4: “? r u ^ 2 2day” (1.8 : 1)

Finally, we don’t really need those spaces, since every word has been reduced to a single character except at the end of the sentence:

Version 5: “?ru^22day” (2.8 : 1)

As you can see, this is obviously much easier to read than the original, and it takes up so much less space — we’ve gotten nearly three to one compression! Clearly this will put to rest, once and for all, the complaints of all these these pesky and pedantic grammarians obsessed with strict spelling, good grammar, and proper punctuation. Pah! Those old fuddy-duddies. Nobody cares what they think anyway.**

But wait! We’re not done yet! In fact, we can do even better than this! Suppose we bring back capital letters, but now instead of using them in their boring, traditional roles, we adopt the following convention (I stole this idea from my friend Christine Chung and some of her compatriots):

1. Each capital letter (A, B, C, …, Z) or digit (0, 1, …, 9) is always pronounced as its name in the American English alphabet. So, for example, “B” is pronounced like the word “bee”, and “T” like the word “tee”.
2. Each lower-case letter is given its “usual” American English pronunciation (with variations allowed)
3. Punctuation is pronounced like its first syllable. So, for instance “@” becomes “at”, “%” becomes “per”, “,” becomes “com”, “-” can be “dash” (although it is really a hyphen), “+” can be “plus”, and so forth. We’ll leave “.”, “?”, and “!” alone, and let “&” stand for “and” (technically that’s what the first syllable of “ampersand” is derived from anyway).

This is a fabulously clever scheme — especially if you are willing to be somewhat flexible in your pronunciation of a word. Want to write “infantile”? Simple! It’s: “NfNtIl”, given that “N” is pronounced “en” and “I” is pronounced “aye”. Combining these rules with the original bliptext mutations, we can compress “What are you up to today?” even further:

Version 6: “?RU^22dA” (3.1 : 1)

UC? its EZ!

B4 long AvrE1 wil B duN it! its %4mNs Rt!

Or maybe, just maybe, we can stomp out this ridiculous insanity, and spend a few extra seconds making it right. But don’t hold your breath.

*Actually, I know somebody in law school who writes like this all the time. My only hope is that this doesn’t reflect how they write their legal documents, or their clients are going to fry in the chair.

** It was pointed out to me, later, that a really experienced bliptext writer wouldn’t bother trying to keep around this much of the message. Instead, they’d just write: “sup?” (or worse, “asl?”), and leave the reader to infer everything else from context.

Filed by Michael at 17:17 under Diatribe, Social
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From a recent article by Mitch Wagner, I learned that researchers at the Infosecurity Europe conference polled an informal sample of office workers at the Liverpool St. Station, and discovered several interesting things: 71% of those surveyed were willing to give up their passwords in return for a chocolate bar. Four out of ten said they knew their colleagues’ passwords. Barely more than half said they would not give their passwords to a telephone caller claiming to be from their IT department. Even if some of them were lying, it is instructive to see these figures.

Now, I can hear you all saying: “Why is everybody so worked up about passwords, anyway? It’s not like I have anything really important in my e-mail account. So, what’s the big deal?” (more…)

Filed by Michael at 17:13 under Miscellaneous, Social
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