JO24 - The Invention Of The Press Release
When building the New York Subway Lines 2 & 3, in order to quell the rumours that twenty people a day were being killed because of workplace danger (the five-cent press found it easy to sell newspapers by embellishing the truth a.k.a "making stuff up", with sensationalist claptrap), the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. hired a chap called I.V. Leadbetter-Lee.
Leadbetter-Lee who would late go on to do public relations for the Third Reich and the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda (he was that good at his job), worked out that journalists are at heart lazy and/or openly corrupt. He correctly determined that lazy and/or openly corrupt journalists, if you give them copy which has already been written (which means that they do not have to put in the effort of collecting the story, or writing it), will in fact print it word for word most of the time.
Thus in 1916, Ivy Leadbetter-Lee practically invented what we would now call the Press Release.
It should be noted at this point that giving copy to glorified stenographers who like to cosplay as 'journalists' has only gotten worse in the century and a bit which has followed. Public Relations Departments of big corporations have successfully written all kinds of lovely articles which media companies never check. Those same departments of corporations have on occasion also worked in conjunction with Legal Departments of big corporations and have not only written copy but legislation; which when presented to politicians who have very little legal training, will in fact present the copy that they have been given word for word most of the time, to parliaments.
RA17 - Can You Eat Rats?
Before we go any further, we need to ask "What is Rat?" What is Rat? Rat, is a small rodent of the class Rodentia. Other things that are rodents, are rabbits, mice, capybaras, and other rats. Are these things fine to eat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. As rodents are for the most part vegetarians which will also eat garbage, they are nominally fine to eat. In fact, in the city that I live of Sydney, we have a professional Rugby League team which is named after the guy who would come around and sell you rabbits for your dinner. The South Sydney Rabbitohs are not named after the rabbits which are on their logo but the guy (the rabbitoh) who would sell you rabbits. Are these things fine to eat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. I have eaten rabbit and guess what? It's fine. Anything that you can do with chicken, or turkey, or duck, or even pork, you can do with rabbit. For that matter, it is probably find to eat mice and capybaras and while we are at it, let's eat pandas as well. Can you eat a rat? Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. I would.
And here's what I do not understand. We live in the twenty-first century where rats are unlikely to be carrying bubonic plague any more. Your average rat in your average city is unlikely to to have anything particularly nasty that can't be cured by curing them and then putting them through a microwave oven process. Rather than waste what is clearly a resource which we have for free, why not make use of it? It is the same kind of rationale why I think that we should be able to get kangaroo meat at the butcher's shop, or rabbit, or whatever is free that isn't going to kill us. Australia (where I live) has a problem with all kinds of feral animals: deer, camels, rabbits, hogs; I think that we can and should eat all of them.
BN09 - Benny's Wawa Order
This week in "Weird Things That I Learnt", I learned that homicidal and genocidal maniac and mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu, spent at least some of his time as a teenager in Philadelphia. MA. I have also learned that Benjamin Netanyahu, spent at least some of his education at Cheltenham High School in Philadelphia. Henceforth, instead of giving this particular knave the deference that he does not deserve, I shall refer to him as Benny From Cheltenham High.
This means that Benny From Cheltenham High, apart from being a future homicidal and genocidal maniac and mass murderer, must have had a Wawa order. As a Jewish kid, one suspects that it might have been kosher but as a rebellious teenager who has subsequently gone on to defy all kinds of laws of decency, I would not be surprised if Benny From Cheltenham High's Wawa Order was a Double Cheeseburger With Bacon because if you're prepared to be a genocidal maniac and mass murderer, then breaking kosher seems like a very low hurdle that you would have jumped over a very lone time ago.
TP02 - Toki Pona Ungood Bugsum
Mrs R and I were watching a video on YouTube about the Constructed Language Toki Pona and how with a total vocabulary of less than 200 words, while it can describe most concepts, it does so with such a degree of vagueness as to be almost useless. It should be apparent very easily that if you limit the scope of what people can say, then their ability to say it is compromised. As an aside, that is the central premise of Newspeak in George Orwell's "1984". By limiting what people can say by means of language, then you even limit what people can think because they lack the language to think it.
One of the things that Toki Pona attempts to do is use only a very small number of words. Mathematicians will tell you that when you only have a very small number of glyphs because the underlying base is small, then the number names get very long very quickly. Take the number 77. In Base-10 that is merely two glyphs. In Base-2, binary, then that same number is written as 1001101. Toki Pona only has word tokens for one and three, and ten. I honestly have no idea what base Toki Pona uses but if it uses base ten, then 77 becomes three-three-one, three-three-one. or perhaps in glyphs 331,331. Already we are using six word tokens to describe a relatively small number.
I happen to be a fan of the dozenal number system, where instead of base-10 it uses base-12. I think that had we all decided upon that then within a few generations, we'd all be happier as 12s can be divided into halves, thirds and quarters, whereas 10s can only be divided into halves and fifths. In base 12, the number 100 divides into, pieces of 60, 40, 30, 20, 16, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, and 1; all nicely. In base-12 our base-10 77 becomes 65, because there are 6 twelves and 5 ones.
On this note (because I like numbers), I think that the old Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency was secretly excellent and that owing to inflation and people's demonstrated hatred of doing maths, that we lost something. One shilling was made of 12 pence. Base-12 is already nice because it can be cut into 6, 4, 3, 2, and 1. However, the old Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency married this with 20 shillings in the pound. One pound could be cut many many different ways.
One Pound divided by:
1 is 20/- (which is £1)
2 is 10/-
3 is 6/8
4 is 5/-
5 is 4/-
6 is 3/4
8 is 2/6
10 is 2/-
12 is 1/8
15 is 1/4
16 is 1/3
20 is 1/-
24 is 10d
30 is 8d
40 is 6d
48 is 5d
60 is 4d
120 is 2d
240 is 1d
To a modern audience, an amount of money such as 2/6 (which is two shillings and sixpence) seems daft. To anyone who has ever seen a clock though, the idea that you can cut a circle into twelve pieces, is utterly normal. 6 pence is half a shilling. 2/6 is two and a half shillings; which although intuitively feels like it should be a quarter of something, is actually an eighth of a pound. The number of glyphs required to convey that amount of information is only two, whereas in decimal your need four. One eighth of a Dollar is $0.125. One fifth of that again is 6 pence. 6d. is a lot shorter than $0.025
Owing to the fact that I had an Accounting 1 teacher who was the author of the textbook that we were using, which was 31 years old at the time, I think I might have been possible one of a very small cohort to be the last people in the world to have to use the Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency on a regular basis. From an accounting perspective always having amounts divide nicely into discrete pieces because they are divisible by 12 is excellent. If you multiply quite literally any amount which ends in a penny by twelve (because there are twelve months in the year), they will always always come out to some whole number of shillings with no remainder at all. 2/6 x 12 = £1/10
It follows that if each glyph can contain a wider scope of information, then you need less of them to convey that same amount of information. Chinese with its compound character system, can contain all kinds of nuanced ideas into a single character; which means that Chinese Language books end up being physically smaller because the information is contained more densely. The flip side to that is that the reader needs to be able to hold all that information in their head as to how to read the glyphs and Chinese with thousands of characters, is an exceptionally hard language to learn to read. It doesn't exactly help that Chinese dialects incluing Mandarin and Cantonese are tonal; which means that you can get close homophones separated only by tone. In that respect, Korean Hangul is a nice glyph set which contains all of the sounds and just like English or any other western language using a Latin character set, very little meaning. C is a nice letter but can be pronounced two ways. Do not even get me started on how you pronounce the letter O (even inside this sentence).
Very clearly the learning curve for Chinese text is big but the reward for doing so is a highly nuanced printed language which is able to convey complex things in a very short space. I have a copy of that great Chinese novel (?) "The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms" in three volumes but in the original Chinese, it can be printed in just a single tome which occupies less than half the volume of one of my three.
I mention all of this by way of comparison to Toki Pona with its vocabulary of less than 200 words. If it was dealing with maths where the concepts are discrete and the object of the language being conveyed is only discrete provable truth, then it might be a useful language. Language is after all, just a set of vocalised word tokens which convey meaning. If a Pounds, Shillings and Pence system of currency can convey more nuanced and more useful information in smaller units than a Decimal currency system, I really have no idea how Toki Pona is supposed to convey anything other than the most basic information. Anything beyond a list of demands for basic things and Toki Pona from the outside looks to be utterly useless.
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