Monday, March 25, 2019
It took thirty-odd years for web browsers to get automatic hypenation and almost a decade for me to notice
Automatic hyphenation on the web has been possible since 2011 and is now broadly supported. Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer 9 upwards support automatic hyphenation, as does Chrome on Android and MacOS (but not yet on Windows or Linux).
Via inks, All you need to know about hypenation in CSS | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
I had no idea that hyphenation has been supported for eight years now. And
adding support was easy enough—I already mark the blog as being English so
the only remaining bit was adding the bit of CSS to enable it. I've been manually (for various values of
“manual”) hyphenation hints with the use of ­, such as
when I mention FaceGoogleLinkedMyBookPlusInSpace or when I do my XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX censor bars.
Now, it looks like I don't have to do that anymore. Sweet!
“Woe unto all who reveal the Secrets contained herein for they shall be Hunted unto the Ends of the Universe”
This is a document I wrote in early 1984 at the behest of the System Development Foundation as part of Xanadu’s quest for funding. It is a detailed explanation of the Xanadu architecture, its core data structures, and the theory that underlies those data structures, along with a (really quite laughable) project plan for completing the system.
At the time, we regarded all the internal details of how Xanadu worked as deep and dark trade secrets, mostly because in that pre- open source era we were stupid about intellectual property. As a consequence of this foolish secretive stance, it was never widely circulated and subsequently disappeared into the archives, apparently lost for all time. Until today!
Via Lobsters, Habitat Chronicles: A Lost Treasure of Xanadu
It is the Xanadu concept
of tumblers that is core to how
mod_blog works, although
more in idea than in actual implementation detail. And the web in general has
a limited form of transclusion which
is pretty much just images (still and moving) and sound. A general version of transclusion would probably be
very difficult (if not outright impossible) to implement. But there are still
concepts that Xanadu has that are still hard to understand, and I'm hoping
the document mentioned above is enough to shed some light on some of the more
esoteric concepts of Xanadu. I don't think we'll ever see a fully blown
Xanadu system ever, but there are still ideas lurking in it that deserve some
investigation.
A lesson in economics
Bunny received the following in email and couldn't wrap her brain around it. Neither could her brother, nor the person who sent it to her:
It's a slow day in the small town of Pumphandle, Saskatchewan, and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everyone is living on credit.
A tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100.00 bill on the desk, saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to choose one for the night.
As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100.00 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the $100.00 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Co-op.
The guy at the Co-op takes the $100.00 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.
The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the Hotel Owner.
The hotel proprietor then places the $100.00 back on the counter so the traveler will not suspect anything.
At that moment, the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves.
No one produced anything, no one earned anything.
However, the whole town now thinks that they are out of debt and there is a false atmosphere of optimism and glee.
And that, my friends, is how a “government stimulus package” works.
Bunny then sent it to me, asking if I could wrap my brain around it. And upon first reading, yeah, it's hard to grok what exactly happened and how it happened. But I think I can pull this apart.
First off, one way to look at money is as a means of exchange of goods and services. Farmer Bob raises cows but wants some poultry to eat for a change. Farmer Chuck has the chickens and wouldn't mind some beef. I've just checked the current spot prices for beef and chicken:
| animal | weight in pounds | cost per pound |
|---|---|---|
| cow | 1,400 | $4.25 |
| chicken | 4 | $2.00 |
That's nearly 350 chickens per cow. I'm sure that Farmers Bob and Chuck could come to some agreement, like a chicken for a pound of beef. This is easy, because Farmer Bob has something that Farmer Chuck wants, and Farmer Chuck has something that Farmer Bob wants—there's a direct exchange. This can even be extended to “debt”—Farmer Chuck could give a chicken to Farmer Bob for later payment in beef. But it gets tiresome working out the “price of chickens” in asparagus or the “price of beef” in potatoes. Thus some commodity that everyone agrees upon to exchange for goods and services—in our case today, United States dollars (I realize the dollar isn't a commodity like pork bellies or gold and is in fact, a fiat currency, but I don't want to bog this down any more than necessary).
Now to our particular example. There is a circle of debt between the proprietor, butcher, pig farmer, co-op, hooker and back to the proprietor. It's a larger circle of debt than between our example of Farmers Bob and Chuck, but it is there, it just took a bit for it to manifest itself. And no one had the entire picture—the proprietor was in debt to the butcher, but was a creditor to the hooker; the pig farmer was in debt to the co-op, but a creditor to the butcher. This mutual debt wasn't broken until the introduction of money from the tourist to unravel the debt ring. Remove the hooker from our little story, and the proprietor would be on the hook for $100 to the tourist, or his debt to the butcher would still exist, and so on down the line to the co-op.
In addition, the story also hinges on the mutual debt all being the same amount. But say the debt had been $50 between the proprietor and butcher but $100 for everyone else and the debt doesn't vanish at all—it just kind of moves about a bit. So I don't think the story is that good of an example of a “government stimulus package” at all—not everyone's debt is the same, nor is all debt in the United States local to the United States. Someone is going to end up holding onto some debt.
