Irreal

This post is a little outside the usual Irreal sphere of interest but its subject matter is so delightfully geeky and interesting that I couldn’t resist writing about it. Over at the hot word (on Dictionary.com) they ask, “What character was removed from the alphabet but is still used every day?” The answer, of course, is the ampersand.

It turns out that the ampersand was once the 27^th character of the alphabet. That’s vaguely interesting in a Jeopardy answer sort of way but it’s the rest of the story that really captured my imagination. The first surprise is the origin of the shape of the character. By the first century Romans were using cursive writing so the linked e and t of et, Latin for and, came to take on the shape of the modern day ampersand. You can see that clearly on this Adobe page about the ampersand. The hot word post recommends the William Caslon font (Figure 6) as a particularly striking example of this but I find Figure 9 even more so.

The second surprise is how the character came to be called an ampersand. In the early 1800s, when the ampersand was still considered part of the alphabet, school children reciting their ABCs would end with “X, Y, Z, and per se and.” Per se means “by itself” so they were saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” The hot word explains that that was to avoid the clumsy ending “X, Y, Z, and.” Over time the “and per se and” became slurred together into the word ampersand.

There’s many more interesting facts in the hot word post so you should go on over and take a look. Among other things, you’ll learn that the slurring that produced “ampersand” from “and per se and” is called a mondegreen. If you follow the link they give, you’ll discover where the name mondegreen came from. It’s another interesting story.

I’ve written before on how I have pretty much stopped writing anything with pencil/pen and paper. These days the only things I use a pen for are to sign credit card receipts and the very occasional check. For all that, I assumed that I was an outlier, perhaps bordering on the eccentric. But maybe not; Anne Trubek has an interesting article over at Miller-McCune in which she argues that Handwriting Is History.

It turns out that people are very emotional about the subject. Some invest good handwriting with a moral dimension and equate the end of handwriting with the end times. An earlier article by Trubek along the same lines encountered vehement opposition and extremely hostile comments. Still, there’s no denying that cursive handwriting is on the wane—I haven’t used it since elementary school—and children today simply aren’t learning it.

That’s interesting but the larger question is whether even printing will eventually die out. On the one hand, as my own experience shows, it’s perfectly possible to get by without pen and paper. Indeed, I believe you’re better off that way. You can get your thoughts recorded much more quickly and keep them around in searchable form without the clutter of files and stacks of paper. Already, things like the Starbucks iPhone app are pointing the way to the end of credit card receipts and it’s almost certain that the next generation of smart phones will have NFC capabilities that will hasten the demise of the credit card system as it exists today.

On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine doing mathematics without pencil and paper. Perhaps that’s just a failure of imagination on my part—look at Mathematica, after all. If I had to guess, I’d bet that handwriting is heading where physical books are: neither will die out completely but will survive in niches that the ordinary person will find quaintly charming. What do you think? Will handwriting die out or will it, like rock and roll, always be?

I just got back from another family visit, this time to upstate New York. I was well out of Irene’s path and except for a rainy Sunday wasn’t affected at all—I thought. Upstate New York wasn’t affected but New York City certainly was: JFK shutdown causing 1600 flight cancellations.

I’ve written before about traveling with an iPad as my only computer but this time I had to completely rearrange my travel itinerary. I was flying out of Syracuse and there were no flights to Tampa so I had to fly to Orlando. That meant arranging for a rental car to drive to Tampa from Orlando. Because the flight left early, I booked a room near the airport so my family wouldn’t have to get up at 3:30 to make the hour and a half drive to Syracuse.

I’m happy to report that I was able to all this easily with the iPad. I had to call the airline directly to rebook the flight and I just entered the new information into FlightTrack Pro manually and pushed it to Tripit. I made the car and motel reservations on line and forwarded the email confirmations to Tripit. When I finished, I had the new itinerary in Tripit complete with confirmation codes and other essential information. All of that was mirrored automatically to my iPhone for instant reference when needed.

As it happens, my family has WiFi but even if they didn’t, the broadband connectivity on my iPad would have enabled me to do all this. For that matter, I suppose I could have done it all on my iPhone but the iPad certainly made for a more pleasant experience.

This was only the second time I’ve traveled with just my iPad but after this trip I feel pretty comfortable doing so. I missed Emacs and my development environment but I probably wouldn’t have used them anyway. I shudder to think what a nightmare making a new itinerary would have been without my iPad and a few key apps like FlightTrack Pro and Tripit. The only phone call I had to make was to the airline (with a 30 minute wait for a representative). Everything else was handled quickly and easily on-line.

Emacs is incredibly useful for repetitive editing chores. For example, this Xah Lee post shows how Lee performed major surgery on hundreds of pages of HTML by using a little Emacs Lisp.

Not everyone can or wants to write Emacs Lisp but even without it you can still do a lot of automation with keyboard macros. Most Emacs users are familiar with the fundamentals: use 【Ctrl+x (】 or 【F3】 to start recording your keystrokes, perform the repetitive action one time and stop the recording with 【Ctrl+x )】 or 【F4】. Then you can repeat the keystrokes with 【Ctrl+x e】. After the first repeat you can simply type 【e】 for subsequent repeats.

Here’s a little trick I learned from the EmacsWiki. Suppose you want to create a list of host names where each differs from the others by a number at the end

host1.irreal.org
host2.irreal.org
...

To do that, follow these steps

1. 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+k Ctrl+a】 1 to set the amount to increment the counter on each repetition.
2. 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+k Ctrl+c】 1 to set the initial value of the counter.
3. 【Ctrl+x (】 to start recording the macro
4. host 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+k Ctrl+i】 to insert the current counter value after host.
5. .irreal.org 【Return Ctrl+x )】 to stop recording the macro.
6. 【Ctrl+x e】 to generate the next host name.
7. 【e】 to generate another and so on.

You can also use 【Ctrl+x Ctrl+k Ctrl+f】 to set the format of the counter.