why proofreading is hard

Proofreading is hard, because there's a lot of processing going on between seeing and reading.

After reading the
the sentence, you are
now aware that the
the human brain
often does not
inform you that the
the word 'the' has
been repeated twice
every time.

We are pretty insensitive to letter shape (fortunately, given the plethora of fonts), so can quite readily overlook O-0 and I-l-1 problems, although these are worse in some fonts than in others.  An extreme example doing the rounds at the moment (although it's not new), based on maximal substitution of digits for letters, is:

‎7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5 1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5! 1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG 17 WA5 H4RD BU7 N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3 Y0UR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17

By it's not just doubled words and simple substitution that we can overlook.  The most extreme example I've seen is:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Spell checkers, though, are a boon for many of these problems.  So today's proofreaders can concentrate on higher-level issues

---

Sources:

1. After reading the...
2. an early reference to 7H15 M3554G3
3. the research behind Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch

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my work here is overshadowed

I like to collect witty and apposite quotations. I also like to make sure that they are properly attributed.  There are many incorrect or apocryphal attributions around on the net of a million lies; anything unsourced should be treated with suspicion.  In my zeal to track things down, I have even been known to buy two different translations of a well known quotation in order to examine its meaning.

I've learned a lot hunting around for the correct attribution, such as the fact that Edmund Burke did not say

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

that Ralph Waldo Emerson did not say

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

and that Voltaire did not say

 I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Today I was hunting around for a source for the well known:

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

There appears to be an even split in opinion between Mark Twain and Lincoln, but they are all unsourced. Everything witty is eventually attributed to Twain, so these are always doubly suspicious, and if Lincoln had said it, surely there would be a source available somewhere?  More googling landed me at the Quote Investigator, a remarkably well-researched and well-referenced resource, putting my puny efforts to shame.  This will definitely be my first port of call from now on.

The correct attribution for the quotation?  Neither Twain not Lincoln, it seems.  It appears to have evolved over the years into its current form.

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interesting use of the present tense

I was surfing an on-line TV channel guide, to find when a particular episode of Wizards v Aliens  that we had missed was being repeated.  I came across:

TV channel guide. See what you can watch today, yesterday and tomorrow.

"See what you can watch yesterday".  This really is living in the future (but watching the present)!

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le banana split

On my recent trip to France, a particular menu item, in a menu entirely in French, was “Le banana split”. This caused great hilarity among the Brits present. We also quizzed out French colleagues, “why ‘le’”? They professed ignorance, particularly due to the fact that it is, au contraire, “la banane”. Is it that all foreign introductions are assigned masculine gender? They didn’t know.

This then segued off into a discussion of gendered languages, with the French asking the Brits, “so, if you were to give the sun, or a table, a gender, what would it be?” and the Brits responding with baffled incomprehension. The question makes about as much sense as, or possibly even less sense than, the party game “if you were a piece of furniture, what would you be?”

Another aspect of the discussion caught my attention. The menu item is pronounced by the French something like (to my English-tuned ears) /lʊ  bæ'næ'næ  spliːt/ (“le ban-ann-ah spleet” *): all three “a”s the same, and a long “i”. In contrast, banana in (my dialect of) English is pronounced /bə'nɑːnə/ (“buh-nah-nuh”) , or even /bə'nɑːnəː/ (“buh-nah-ner”), with three different pronunciations of “a”.

And that led me to recall the peculiar sentence (there are different variants of it, but this is the one I know):

The thoughtful rough-necked dough-faced ploughman strode, coughing and hiccoughing, through the streets of Scarborough. 

If you are a native English speaker, you will have read that with no trouble (except, possibly, for hiccough). If not, you may possibly have groaned at the eight oughs there, each with a different pronunciation. Let’s enumerate them:

1. ough can be pronounced /ɔː/ (“awe”); thought is pronounced /θɔːt/. Other words ending in /ɔːt/ include aught, bought, brought, caught, court, daughter, fraught, fort, fought, haughty, naught, nought, nautical, ought, port, quart, snort, sort, sought, taught, taut, tort, wart, and wrought.
2. ough can be pronounced /ʌf/ (“uff”); rough is pronounced /rʌf/. Other words ending in /ʌf/ include bluff, buff, chough, cuff, duff, fluff, gruff, huff, muff, enough, puff, ruff, scuff, slough, stuff, and tough.
3. ough can be pronounced /əʊ/ (“oh”); dough is pronounced /dəʊ/. Other words ending in /əʊ/ include blow, bow, crow, doe, foe, Flo, flow, go, glow, grow, hoe, Joe, low, mow, no, oh, roe, row, sew, show, sloe, slow, snow, so, though, throw, toe, and tow.
4. ough can be pronounced /aʊ/ (“ow”); plough is pronounced /plaʊ/. Other words ending in /aʊ/ include bough, bow, brow, cow, dhow, how, now, ow, pow, prow, proud, row, scowl, Slough (the place), sow, tao, vow, and wow.   And drought has the same ough sound.
5. ough can be pronounced /ɒf/ (“off”); cough is pronounced /kɒf/. Other words with /ɒf/ include coffee, doff, off, quaff, slough, soft, toffee, trough, and waft.
6. ough can, in one word only, be pronounced /ʌp/ (“up”); hiccough is pronounced /'hɪkʌp/. Other word ending in /ʌp/ include the much more prosaic cup, pup, sup, up. Hiccough is a somewhat archaic spelling, and is more likely to be written hiccup today. 
7. ough can be pronounced /uː/ (“oo”); through is pronounced /θruː/. Other words ending in /uː/ include blew, blue, boo, chew, clue, coo, do, due, dew, flew, flu, flue, goo, grew, grue, hew, Hugh, Jew, lieu, loo, moo, new, poo, queue, (kanga)roo, rue, shoe, shoo, shrew, slew, slough, sue, too, threw, true, view, who, woo, zoo 
8. ough can be pronounced /ə/ (“uh”), the unstressed schwa sound; Scarborough is pronounced /'skɑːbərə/, or even /'skɑːbrə/. Other words ending in /ə/ are legion, and include anger, author, cellar, colour, comma, sofa, thorough. 

Presumably the strode is in there to try to trick you into writing something like stroughed. And why not?

Then there is the town of Loughborough, with two ough occurrences, each pronounced differently: /'lʌfb(ə)rə/ (“Luff-bruh”). Variant pronunciations don’t end with ough, of course. The examples above show that each vowel sound has several possible spellings; in particular, both bow and sow can be pronounced to rhyme with either plough or with dough. The other way round, slough must hold the record, with the same word having three different meanings, each with its own different pronunciation of ough: /slʌf/ (“sluff”, to shed), /sluː/ (“slew”, a swamp), and /slaʊ/ (the town of Slough, and, confusingly, the Slough of Despond, or swamp of despair).

Why? Why so many vowel sounds with the same spelling? And why such a weird spelling at that? Well, it’s actually one vowel sound and following consonant, that has meandered off in many directions over the years. The clue is in yet another pronunciation of ough, as /ɒx/. That’s a sound that is no longer in English, except in the word loch (as in Loch Ness), also spelled lough for Irish lakes, for example Lough Neagh, and some lakes in the north of England. Even this sound is fading, as many people pronounce loch as /lɒk/ “lock”. Computer scientists will also know this /x/ sound, as the final sound in Knuth’s TeX (but not necessarily LaTeX).

More detail (as ever) on ough can be found on wikipedia.

This disappearance of original sounds explains some (but by no means all!) of the weirdness of English spelling. Take, for example, bright, light and night, pronounced /brʌɪt/ (“brite”) /lʌɪt/ (“lite”), and /nʌɪt/ (“nite”) respectively. Aargh! It’s that silent gh again! And for the same reason: it did used to be pronounced. It is still be heard in some Scots dialets.  Consider:

It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht.
(It’s a grand bright moonlit night tonight.)

Here the gh, morphed to ch, can still be heard, pronounced /x/.

At the front end of some English words is that other weird silent letter, k, as in knife (/nʌɪf/, “nife”), knee (/niː/, “nee”), and, just to combine the pain, knight (/nʌɪt/, “nite”). As you can guess, the k was originally pronounced. These words all derive from Old English words beginning cn. But that’s also not a sound that has survived into modern English. Where the initial k is still pronounced, the English form has added a vowel: good old King Canute of wave fame is actually Cnut.

So, knight was once probably pronounced something like /knɪxt/ (“k-nicht”); now we’re (somewhat) in Monty Python territory, and back to French!

And after writing this, I was so thoroughly fraught that I thought I’d forgotten how to spell. If I just tough it out, though, I’ll get through it.


------
* pronunciations like /kʌp/ are written using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), as given by the online Oxford Dictionaries.  I also append my attempt at transliterating these (“cup”), but this is, of course, ambiguous, precisely because English spelling is not phonetic. 

The IPA is explained on wikipedia, including some variant transcriptions.

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tracking down mad dancers, eventually

So, I was looking for the source of the quotation “Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music”. Googling, everyone says it's Nietzsche, but of course, hardly anyone gives a source. One suggestion I did find was that it comes from The Birth of Tragedy (originally written in 1872), and helpfully included a fairly substantial quotation.  I couldn’t find a source that exactly matched the provided snippet, but I did find one very close:

In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John's and St. Vitus's dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.
     There are men who, from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly away from such phenomena as from a "sickness of the people," with a sense of their own health and filled with pity. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost-like this very "Health" of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, NuVision ebook, 2004

However, while tracking this down, I found a different translation:

So also in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, were whirled from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. In these dancers of St. John and St. Vitus, we rediscover the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their early history in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are some, who, from obtuseness, or lack of experience, will deprecate such phenomena as "folk-diseases," with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own "healthy-mindedness." But, of course, such poor wretches can not imagine how anemic and ghastly their so-called "healthy-mindedness" seems in contrast to the glowing life of the Dionysian revellers rushing past them.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. In Albert Hofstadter, Richard Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, University of Chicago Press, 1964 (p501) (translation, Clifton P. Fadiman, 1927)

And yet another one:

In the German Middle ages, too, ever-growing throngs roamed from place to place, impelled by the same Dionysiac power, singing and dancing as they went; in these St John's and St Vitus' dancers we recognize the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their pre-history in Asia Minor, extending to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are those who, whether from lack of experience or from dullness of spirit, turn away in scorn or pity from such phenomena, regarding them as `popular diseases' while believing in their own good health; of course, these poor creatures have not the slightest inkling of how spectral and deathly pale their 'health' seems when the glowing life of Dionysiac enthusiasts storms past them.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1999 (translation, Ronald Spiers), pp17-18 

One thing that struck me was the sheer variety in these translations. Just pulling our a single phrase (let's take one that has something to do with the original search), shows the great variety of translations possible:

1. under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing 
2. singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, were whirled from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse 
3. ever-growing throngs roamed from place to place, impelled by the same Dionysiac power, singing and dancing as they went 

While we have hordes waltzing, crowds whirling, and throngs roaming, they are all nevertheless uniformly “singing and dancing”. Similarly with the final phrase:

1. when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them 
2. the glowing life of the Dionysian revellers rushing past them 
3. when the glowing life of Dionysiac enthusiasts storms past them 

Throngs roar, revellers rush, and enthusiasts storm, but all with “glowing life”. It makes one wonder – how much do translators read earlier translations, how much do they consciously decide to change certain phrases and orderings, and why they leave other phrases the same?

But another thing struck me, which was more relevant to my original quest: although close, none of these passages seem to capture the full spirit of the original search topic: “Those who dance appear insane to those who cannot hear the music”.

A link from that original helpful site took me to a discussion about the source being Henri Bergson. The Bergson quote is given in the original French, and in translation, as

• Il suffit que nous bouchions nos oreilles au son de la musique, dans un salon où l'on danse pour que les danseurs nous paraissent aussitôt ridicules
• “It is enough for us to stop up our ears to the sound of music, in a room where people are dancing, in order for the dancers to at once appear ridiculous.” 

Henri Bergson, Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique, 1900
Henri Bergson, “Laughter, an essay on the meaning of the comic”, 1900 

Note Bergson says “ridicule” (ridiculous), not “fou” (mad, crazy, wild, foolish).   Nevertheless, this looks closer to the quote than the Nietzsche passage.  So I felt satisfied.

However, whilst searching around for an image of "mad dancers" to enliven this large wodge of text, I came across a website containing a copy of Meyer Levin’s The Golden Mountain (1932), which is “a collection of tales of the Eastern European Hassidic Jews”. It includes the tale of “The Mad Dancers”:

a deaf man passed outside the house; he looked in through the window and saw the people whirling about the room, leaping, and throwing about their arms. 'See how they fling themselves about!' he cried, 'it is a house filled with madmen!' For he could not hear the music to which they danced. 

Now, this seems much closer, and I suspect may be the "true" source. I wonder how much each might have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the earlier publications?

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overheard on the train

I wasn't actually listening to the people next to me on the train the other day; in fact I was trying not to listen, so that I could concentrate on my book.  However, I couldn't help but hear their concluding sentence:

I'll see you then, then.

That is, "I'll see you at that time, in that case".  Not as good as the three thats, but enough to make me smile (into my book).

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fallen syllepsis

A classic syllepsis, due to Dickens, is "Miss Bolo ... went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair".  Syllepsis is a figure of speech where one word ("in" in this example) is used in two different senses simultaneously ("in a flood of tears" and "in a sedan chair").

I have a small collection of these at my website.  They are usually mildly amusing, or used for effect, resulting in a kind of mental double-take.  So I was surprised, and mildly amused, to see one today that doesn't appear to be used for these reasons:

Fresh snow and temperatures have fallen over the Cairngorms
--- BBC News, 31 March 2012

Someone must have enjoyed writing that!

And note also that, despite the date of this blog post, the original appeared yesterday.

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Mondegreen global warming

Driving home last night, listening to the weather forecast on the radio:

Dry.  Patchy mist and fog. Minimum temperature sixty nine Celsius.

What?!

Oh.  Six to nine Celsius.  Whew!

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When "organic" is not "good"

The word "organic" is nowadays associated mainly with "environmentally friendly", as in "organic food", "organic agriculture".

Back when I was a student, Chemistry was taught in three main parts: organic chemistry (essentially the chemistry of carbon, and hence the chemistry of molecules in living stuff); inorganic chemistry (essentially the chemistry of everything else); and physical chemistry (focussing on the processes and laws rather than the constituent elements).

And I learned that many organic compounds are toxic and/or carcinogenic. When I was at school, benzene was the organic solvent of choice in practicals. By the time I was at university, benzene was no longer used, because it was realised to be a carcinogen, and toluene was the organic solvent of choice. Thanks, school.

Also, we were gleefully informed (by the physical chemists) that the lifespan of a bench organic chemist was reduced by 10 years on average. I have no idea if this is true (or if it was true then), but it certainly stuck in my mind.

So my strongest association with the word "organic" is "probably a nasty poison!", followed by  "molecules found in living stuff". This makes my reaction to the term "organic food" go something like:

1. Potentially poisonous?  Surely not...
2. Made from living stuff? Isn't all food made from (once) living stuff? If it's not "organic", it's not food. (Well, okay, except for salt.)
3. Oh... food produced without the use of inorganic chemistry

I often have this problem of trying to figure out what people mean when using a technical term I know, but in a non-technical context. My favoutite example is when I first saw a sticker saying "Nuclear power? -- No thanks" with a picture of a smiling sun.  "They want to turn off the sun?  What?  Oh..."

Anyway, if "organic" is the adjective of choice to mean "envinronmentally friendly", what should we call envinronmentally friendly chemistry, given that we can't call it "organic chemistry", because that almost means the opposite?  Well, it uses that other environmentally friendly adjective; it's green chemistry.

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improved!

So here's the latest box of tin foil we bought (yes, I know it's aluminium, not tin, but tin cans are made of steel, tin foil is made of aluminium, and silver paper isn't silver):

 

What caught my eye was this:

Improved thickness!  That must be good, eh?  It's improved!

But just what precisely is improved?  Well, the thickness, obviously.  But in what way?  Careful scrutiny of the box revealed no further clues. (Yes, yes, I know.  Anything to delay actually having to do any actual cooking, you see.)

Improvement presumably implies change. What changes could one make to foil thickness? I could think of four:

1. thinner
2. thicker
3. more even thickness
4. less even thickness (added simply for completeness)

But are any of these improvements? Thinner might mean less waste, but more fragile; thicker would then be more waste, less fragile.  More even thickness might be better if that made cooking times more predictable (I haven't a clue whether it does or not, I'm just hand-waving); then maybe less even thickness would make life more interesting by adding greater variability to the cooked result. 

On eventually opening the box and feeling the foil, it's definitely thicker than the previous batch.  So, that's an improvement because ... more waste?  And lo!  This box has 30m of foil, whereas the previous box of thinner, unimproved, product contained 40m of foil.

So the improvement is that I have to buy foil more often?  Well, sarcasm aside, presumably the implied improvement is that it's less fragile, that it is stronger.  But then, why not say so? Why not:

 

Or even:

Or if that doesn't have enough oomph, what about:

But ... improved thickness?

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scientific abstract

Scientific and technical writing is a little different from the kind of "creative writing" you are taught at school. There are different conventions. For example, "vary your vocabulary" is a complete no-no if you are striving for precision and lack of ambiguity. If you think using the same word several times may sound a bit clunky, and you decide to make things "read better" by using synonyms instead,  imagine the internal dialogue of your readers going something like this: "You talk about a thingumabob here, a thingamajig there, and a whatchamacallit in your other paper. What subtle distinction are you trying to make? I've been trying to puzzle this out for ages.  Oh, I see.  You are just varying your vocabulary. Come here and say hello to this two-by-four." That should help you decide not to do it.

One important part of a scientific paper is the abstract. It should be short yet comprehensive. It should tell you what the paper is about, the question the paper addresses, and the answer it discovers. It is not a spoiler to put the answer in. You are not writing a blurb for a whodunnit. Don't worry that you are giving away the punchline. The abstract may be the only part of your paper the reader even sees.

So I was delighted to see a paper with an excellent abstract quoted at Ben Goldacre's secondary blog. (Actually, it's only the perfect abstract when combined with the paper's title; techincally, abstracts should be stand-alone. But, hey.)

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hyperbolic hyperbole

What's with hyperbolic discounting? It's everywhere! I first consciously noticed the term at a workshop about six weeks ago, and now I can't turn around without tripping over another paper, article, or blog post on the subject. The most recent example is a post I read yesterday, from the [citation needed] blog, about how Future Self is able to be so much more productive than Present Self: "things that would take me a week of full-time work in the Now apparently take me only five to ten minutes when I plan them three months ahead of time". The post also contains the wonderful:

It’s about large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data. In fact, it’s so about that that that’s the title of the paper*.

Yet I didn't even notice how wonderful it was, until I read the footnote:

* Three “that”s in a row! What are the odds! Good luck parsing that sentence!

Three "that"s in a row, and yet I parsed it just fine. It reminds me of the time (many years ago) when my English teacher at school expressed surprise at how bad a speller I was (I'm better now, partly due to several decades more practice, but mainly due to spell-checkers). "I don't understand how you can spell so poorly given you read so much." It took me a while to realise that some people see the letters in the words they read; when I'm deeply into reading something (fiction or technical) I don't even see the words. I know when I've been pulled out of the book when I start seeing the words. That may be because something is wrong, which may include a misspelling. But there's a big difference between recognition (I see it and know it's wrong) and recall (I can spell it from scratch).

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serial commas

Well, Scalzi's blog Whatever is providing a rich source of grammatical fodder. One post gave me a great example of it's v its, then soon after we have a mention of the serial comma (the one that some put before the final "and" in a list).

We've all heard the famous example of how a serial comma can help disambiguate a sentence:

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

Xopher's comment gives a a link to a great new example:

Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

Language Log also has something to say about this new example.

Despite the fact that the serial comma is standard American usage, and its omission is standard British usage, I tend to use it anyway, simply because it provides less chance of an ambiguous parse (even in less hilarious cases than those above). However, I do follow the British usage that punctuation goes outside the quotation marks when it is part of the quoting text and not part of the quoted text. It's only logical.

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Perhaps it’s its forbidden nature

One of the many things that can get me riled is the use of "it's" when the writer means "its". C'mon, it's not difficult: "his" and "hers" don't have apostrophes, so why would "its"? And formal writing (where the mistake also often pops up) tends not to use contractions; it should either be "it is" or "its", never "it's".

Given my pedantrypassion on the subject, I immediately noticed the sentence

Perhaps it’s its forbidden nature that consumed me.

in a "Big Idea" blog post. What a gorgeous juxtaposition. Why have I never noticed such a construct before?


obBTAF:

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modelling reality

I first came across the difficulty of modelling reality when I designed a database for my books. This was back on the early 1980s when I was a physicist, and had barely even heard the word "database" before I got ViewStore for my BBC Micro. What's a book? Easy, you might think. But what about Ace Doubles? (two novels in one binding). Or a novel in three volumes? Or the same book with a variant title? Or a new edition? Or a translation? Or an abridgement? Or a book published over several editions of a magazine? Or...

The next big realisation was alphabets. In the 1990s I was involved in the international standardisation of the Z formal specification language. We needed to standardise the character set, which included lots of mathematical symbols. And our Japanese collegues wanted non-Latin alphabets. How hard could it be to allow different alphabets? So I went off to read the Unicode Standard. Oh.

I was remined of these issues when I saw a post by Charlie Stross discussing the post "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" by Patrick McKenzie. People's names are difficult to model.

So is time. Different calendars. Calenders with negative and positive years, but no year zero (which is why some people ended up celebrating the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon a year too early). Changing calenders from Julian to Gregorian -- give us back our 11 days (of tax payments, that is). Changing calenders at different times in different countries. Leap years. The algorithm for leap years (and the difference between the Julian and Gregorian algorithms). The argument about whether the year 2000 should be a leap year. Time Zones. Changing time zones. Summer time (aka daylight savings time). Summer time coming and going at different days in different countries. Double summer time. Leap seconds. And so on.

One of the comments in Charlie's post references "Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective", a post with an interesting analysis of marriage database design (ignoring the name problem), and how some designs make changes harder than they need to be.

Notice the continual use of "ids" in that post. Names (even if we decide how to model them adequately) are not unique, and so are not suitable for an identifier. What properties might make a good unique identifier? I recall hearing of a new police database that used "Surname, initial, date of birth" as a unique id. The story goes that this database was installed a few days before the Kray twins were arrested...

In fact, no attribute is immutable, and so should not be used in such an identifier. The same person who told me the Kary twins story also told me of the problems a hospital had in assuming that the "sex" entry was immutable when they did their first sex-change operation.

Wait a minute. No attribute is immutable? What about "date of birth" (dob)? How can that change? Well, remember this database information is a model of reality, not reality itself. Models can have errors. The dob might have been mis-entered, or been lied about (when my maternal grandmother died, the family discovered from her birth certificate that she was 10 years older than she had let on to her children), or it might simply be unknown.

So ... if modelling designed (social) reality is this hard, why are we surprised that it is hard to model the natural world? If our own names, dates, whatever, refuse to fit some neat classification system, why should biology, geology, astronomy? Is a virus alive or not? Is something a separate species or not? Is Pluto a planet or not? When reality doesn't fit our classification, the fault lies not with reality, but with the classification system.

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mangling language

I'm now inured to things like having to press the "start" button to stop Windows. But even so I boggled slightly at the message I got when I last upgraded Firefox:

"Click Finish to continue starting Firefox"

Wait, what?

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A History of Celtic

BBC4 (the new BBC2) is currently showing a four part series "A History of Celtic Britain", presented by Neil Oliver, he of the delicious Scottish accent, and of the permanent crick in his neck as he strides along addressing comments to the camera just behind his left shoulder. I love the awe and excitement with which he fondles prehistoric artefacts; I love somewhat less the Just So Story feel to the "wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact" that follows discovery of some fragment of bone juxtaposed with some fragment of rust. (We play the game of coming up with different "plausible" explanations of why someone was buried with three spears, or curled up with a mirror, or whatever.)

We record this series so that we can watch it at the weekend. Our PVR truncates the title to "A History of Celtic". This might not seem so odd, except that "Celtic" by itself refers to a football team, and is pronounced with a soft C ("Seltick"), whereas in "Celtic Britain" it is pronounced with a hard C ("Keltick"). Hmm.

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