This is utterly incomprehensible.
YOGI
YOU SEEM TO LIVE EXCLUSIVELY IN THE
"AFTERMATH" DIMENSION.SAD REALLY... AND PATHETICALLY
UNORIGINAL AND UNCREATIVE.USE YOUR "BIG BRAIN" TO EXPLAIN
911... YOU AMERICAN IMBECILE.ALAN
One noteworthy thing about it: I haven't modified the formatting at all. It actually was sent to me in giant blue all-caps Comic Sans.
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Somebody needs to get back on their medication.
No, really.
So…what is the frequency, Kenneth?
Cheers,
b&
--
EAC Memographer
BAAWA Knight of Blasphemy
``All but God can prove this sentence true.''
Explain 911? Well that's simple! There was a secret government plot by the Bush administration to crash a 747 into the North Tower. Meanwhile, in an entirely unrelated plot, Islamic fundamentalists coincidentally decided to crash a 747 into the South Tower.
Duh.
911 is the number you dial on this device called a "telephone" to summon help.
You see, Alan, 911 works by dialing it on any phone in case of an emergency...
Hey sure Yogi, don't help us by giving us tips to fight this evil dimension! Jerk!
It does kind of make sense that kiddy cartoon characters would address each other in comic sans using coloured crayons. The only slightly odd thing is that BooBoo has signed himself off as Alan.
Is he calling you Yogi Bear?
YOGI-
YOU SEEM TO LIVE EXCLUSIVELY IN THE "PICK-A-NIC BASKET" DIMENSION...
Yogi? Well, at least you're smarter than your average "AMERICAN IMBECILE", right?
Who ever wrote that doesn't seem to be smarter than the average conspiracy nut.
Damn you, Alverant.
re #3:
They weren't 747's
You see, Alan, 911 works by dialing it on any phone in case of an emergency...
what is this "dialing" of which you speak?
Maybe he meant it to go to Yogi Berra - but he had you in mind ("How can you think and hit at the same time?" or "He hits from both sides of the plate. He's amphibious.") & got (even more) confused.
You know, with my big brain, I can't understand 911 either. I mean, how arbitrary was its choice as the emergency number?
That is what he means, right? Because September 11 is a pretty simple to explain event, and any moron can understand it...
Is the Aftermath Dimension like the Twilight Zone? Does it only apply to Yogis?
Hey, Otrame: that's between me and my psychiatrist, so lay off.
But what about the Gumby?
Ancient "Maw Bell" secret. Only those of a certain maturity in on it...
How funny about the formatting.
OK, I confess. I added Mr Gumby.
A truther would never use correct grammar, as it is a plot by the government to make us all think and speak alike.
@Vanharris-
"If you don't know where you're going, you're going to wind up somewhere else." - Yogi Berra
Actually, sounds like it might be a "phishing" thing. Incomprehensible message gets a "huh?" response and thus verifies that there really is a person on the other end of that email address who will be "reading" the SPAM forthcoming.
I get stuff like this all the time through my own domain and I'm not nearly as controversial as PZ. *smile*
I love comic sans.
I think designers need to put a zap mechanism on the caps lock. Four consecutive letters using caps and the person gets a light shock; eight, enough to cause pain; twelve, well I wanna hear screaming.
I find the use of comic sans inspirational, why did we ever stop using that font for everyting? it gives those machine-cold emails such a nice warm human touch!
WTF???
No, wait, let me read that again...
Nope, I was right. WTF???
Save for the signed name, I would swear you had mail from my brother. Shades of Ted Kazinski...
JC
That's what They want you to think.
They may have looked like 767s, but actually this was a hologram facilitated by a covert CIA operation, projected over the hull of a 747. Inside the 747s were holograms of cruise missiles, just to throw suckers like you off the trail.
Wake up, sheeple!
Nerd @19
Funny isn't it how we get stuck with words like that which no longer actually describe what's going on. Phones don't have dials any more, but we still "dial" numbers. Which reminds me of a similar subject. We've practically gotten rid of floppy disks, but we still click on a picture of one when we want to save our work. I wonder how many other artifacts like that are out there.
"USE YOUR "BIG BRAIN" TO EXPLAIN 911... "
PZ, perhaps he wanted you to extol the virtues of the flat-six boxer engine.
So, 911 is an emergency number and a famous TV show, and also is a date for the biggest terrorist attack...and that means...?
Actually not arbitrary at all and strongly relates to the act of dialing, as in before the introduction of "Touch-Tone" phones. And also how switchboards worked before electronic switching networks, back when relays were used. I think "9" was the first digit because there were no area codes starting with 9, then 11 because they are the fastest to dial.
Know why the area code for NJ is 201? It is the lowest possible area code allowed by the system (at the time) and ATT is headquartered in NJ.
I wish it to be known that I am not the ALAN in the original post.
Thank you.
If PZ is Yogi, who is BooBoo?
@Vanharris-
It would probably make all kind of sense to Yogi Berra. Two weird minds coming together.
"The Aftermath dimension"? Is that the one that's rule by Eminem?
Actually, we have several, now. But it used to be 201 for the whole state.
Known as Bell Labs at the time. Half my graduating class had parents that worked there.
Who is Yogi? AND HOW DOES HE KNOW ABOUT 911?
Meh.
WTF.
At least they didn't go on and on and on.
I think designers need to put a zap mechanism on the caps lock.
Actually, I think keyboards should completely eliminate the CAPSLOCK key altogether. It serves no useful function and just serves to get accidentally activated just before typing in passwords.
The "zap mechanism" you described should be for the whole keyboard. 4 caps in a row, next key you touch: ZAP!
Guide to dimensions:
1st, 2nd, 3rd: physical space
4th: time
5th: sang "Aquarius"
6-11: string theory
>11: aftermath
I think designers need to put a zap mechanism on the caps lock. Four consecutive letters using caps and the person gets a light shock; eight, enough to cause pain; twelve, well I wanna hear screaming.
But us techno-geeks get the secret code to turn it off, right? I regularly have to type strings like UMTS and UTRAN....
Of course that means I know how 911 works, too ;-). And I own a rotary phone. Which is plugged in, and still works ;-).
One of the more amusing scenes in "In and Out" really... at least for those of us of that certain maturity.
JC
Gym is the after math dimension. At least it was in my high school.
This reads almost exactly like a head-scratchingly incoherent comment I rejected over at Atheist Experience. I wonder, do we have another Markuze on our hands, trolling the godless blogosphere with his lunatic babble?
The other day I told my daughter I wanted to stop by the record department at B&N. She looked at me in exasperation, rolled her eyes, and said "Mom, they call them CDs."
I wish I could post in big blue Comic Sans.
Well Booboo, the world aftermath is much better than the world before.
Yet another conspiracy 'theorist' is it? We should just call them 'conspiretards' since their assumptions are so lame they shouldn't even be called a theory.
@Eamon: Bah, I lost my rotary phone over 20 years ago. I still test the networks though to see if they respond to a pulse dialer - you know the old trick, dialing by punching the receiver hook. It's still a good trick at parties if you're in a part of the world where the network still supports pulse dialers.
#38:
Yet. You think someone like this will stop at one email?
#40:
Also, season 1 of The Twilight Zone: it didn't become a dimension of mind until season 2.
True story. The CTO at my company told a story where a friend of his daughter's needed to call her home from his. Being a bit of a phone phreak, he still had dial phones at his house at the time. The girl went to the phone to make the call and started trying to press the numbers in the holes of the dial as if they were buttons. Needless to say, she required a quick lesson on the use of the phone.
Yogi and Boo Boo sees a DO NOT FEED THE BEARS sign at Jellystone Park:
Boo Boo: What's the sign say Yogi?
Yogi: Barbeque and Pic A Nic tonight!
You can read anything into this "Aftermath" dimension you wish. Yogi lives there, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmOHx5Ftez8#t=1m23s
I would put a tax on all people who stand in water.
wow, it almost sounds like TimeCube!
Well, that's only because he ran out of crayons.N.
momkat:
Ah, yes. My wife sometimes corrects me when I say I'm going to "tape" something with our DVR.
KOPD: I wonder how many other artifacts like that are out there.
I guess you never got the email relating the dimensions of the space shuttle to Roman chariot widths?
Everything is a debased metaphor -- haven't you read your Derrida?
And it's true for biology as well -- this is what evolutionary constraints mean. A piece of "code" is reused in a new context -- a metaphor and an artifact. Any new "code" must be at least partly consistent with the old code, which was determined by ancient metaphors that long ago were torn out of their context.
Maybe there's a job in DNA deconstruction?
In Australia our emergency number was/is 000, I will assume it is still the same. I could never understand why they chose these numbers because it took the longest to dial on an old rotary pulse phone. I think that there may have been a conspiracy between b-grade horror movie makers and the telecommunications company so that suspense could be build during scenes containing a knife wielding psycho, nubile co-ed and pulse dialing phone.
Simple: terrorists attacked the Twin Towers. And WTC 7 came down because Rudy Giuliani, in his infinite egotism, decided that he needed an emergency "bunker" several floors above the ground, with a large stash of fuel just in case. In case of what, we never did find out.
"Wherever you go, there you are."
You guys and your "telephone number" baloney.
*OBVIOUSLY* it's a German plot to hide the truth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_911
Ah, yes. My wife sometimes corrects me when I say I'm going to "tape" something with our DVR.
My wife can't help calling DVD's "tapes".
And even though we now use a satellite TV provider, we still call it "cable".
And maybe not any more, but I recall CD-R's of handpicked songs called "mix-tapes".
Steve @ #39
What do you have against
FORTR (ouch) AN ?
or
BASIC (ouch)
or
NAACP (ouch)
or
UNICE (ouch) F ?
frog, Inc.
Good point. I still have to remind myself sometimes that my hand is just modified fin. I wonder what fins came from.
I guess you never got the email relating the dimensions of the space shuttle to Roman chariot widths?
which is actually somewhat of a myth http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
EXPLAIN 911... Yeah, indeed. It's just not been the same car since they went water-cooled.
He must know you well enough to be aware that you're a big, cuddly teddy bear in real life. Why else would he call you Yogi [bear]?
911 is a prime number between 910 & 912. What's to know?
Aftermath is a Rolling Stones album. I mean record. I mean CD. I wonder how long before no one knows what a CD is anymore?
Wait - what??? What does that even mean??
In case of what, we never did find out.
Knowing Rudy and his pals, "in case" the wife found out...again.
Magnets.
Sounds like he made a right Boo Boo
I'm not sure I believe this. The giveaway is that the person actually knows how to spell imbecile.
Alan's message reads like something from Found Magazine, like a post-it note you find in a library book...in this case scrawled with a big blue marker.
@KOPD: I think he meant 9/11... Unless I'm missing a big conspiracy about 911...
Wait... TERROR TRAX MAYBE? (Look it up. XD )
When I first met my wife, she didn't have a DVD player. One night, after watching some rental at my place, she asked if I needed to rewind it before sending it back.
I now occasionaly ask her to rewind DVDs for me just to see what she does. (She's very Tech-minus.)
I LIKE BIG LETTERS, THEY ARE GOOD, THEY MAKE MY STATEMENTS SEEM MORE IMPORTANT AND I FEEL LIKE THE GUY THAT SHOUTS EVERY THINGS HE SAYS IN THE DILBERT COMIC. HURRAH FOR MEE!!!11!
Ya gotta love the 'all-caps' crowd...they are amusing.
while i luvs my intertubes, it has made me more aware of how much crazy is out there.
it makes me sad for the human race really. so very sad.
i think that if aliens came here and said we're going to kill all the humans unless you give us a good reason not too. i'd just say, "i got nothing - go for it. leave the other animals alone though".
Note: in my version of the alien story, they do not sodomize me first and they have a universal translator.
I wonder what Alan finds sad, as well as pathetically unoriginal and uncreative, about the "'aftermath' dimension."
That's what they want you to think.
900 + 10 + 1 = 911.
Now, was that so difficult?
Wow. The crazy is strong in this one...
Could the 'aftermath dimension' be some kind of obscure sci fi/fantasy/pop culture reference? I have never heard of it, but I thought that maybe one of my fellow Pharyngulites might have.
Or it could just be you standard meaningless word salad from a 9/11 conspiracy nut. He will probably tell us that fasci-commie martians and/or a secret US shadow government did it, and the reason he wears the tinfoil hat is to stop their mind control rays.
My typing instructor told us to use CAPS LOCK instead of SHIFT whenever we were typing two or more capital letters in a row because it was faster, and damned if she wasn't right.
Maybe he's right. When those planes hit, they sucked the entire universe in behind them and flipped it inside out.
"You have now entered, the aftermath dimension."
Regarding 911, I had heard that it was chosen because on a dial (and a touch-tone phone, for that matter) the 9 and the 1 are as far apart as two numbers on a telephone dial can be, so it would be less likely for people to dial it accidentally.
1000 - 89 therefore PYGMIES+DWARFS!
Well.
The genetics is strong in this one.
Wouldn't that have to be gene transfer?
Records is still correct as far as I'm concerned. CDs contain recordings of music. To refer specifically to the vinyl thing with grooves, I use "LP" or "vinyl".
" have a suggestion for the next iteration: maybe they should replace the "floppy disk" icon with a tiny image of a seven-track tape drive. And then they could add a chartreuse menu item labelled "Advanced Features" that lets you sign in octal."
Ah. HA!
Regarding some of the emails you get PZ, I keep thinking, "So many people.... so little access to medication".
Same in Denmark, but we switched to 112 what must now be decades ago to come into line with the rest of Europe. Except Britain, of course.
I do not know why the rest of Europe (supposedly) used 112.
Silly Pharyngulites - "911" means "teh 'rents r coming GTG reely fast".
4th Google hit for "aftermath dimension":
Labanz on MySpace Music - Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music ...
Timo Hautamäki - Vocals and Keys (Aftermath, Dimension 34, Fucklord of Doom, Lapis Lazuli, BloodKunt Kaznieu, Lindez and Satan Svensson) ...
All the others are references back to here.
"Fucklord of Doom" must be related though
@15
Arbitrariness: It was meant to be unlikely to dial accidentally, and obviously not as part of any normal exchange number. The 999 used in other parts of the world was deemed to be too likely for playing children, fat-fingering, or a butt-dialing-type of accident to cause inappropriate calls.
Just one more reason I advocate the death of Comic Sans.
911
= sqrt(829921), The middle 4 digits of which are 2992, which is a numerical palendrome. Obviously, palendromes are not natural. If they weren't imagined, we wouldn't have a word for them. Obviously a devine intelligence was involved in its invention, 'cause we're not nearly smart enough to come up with that shit on our own.
Translated into letters of the alphabet, it reads "Iaa", the sound of someone screaming.
In the European calendar, 9 11 is November the 9th, the day Albert Einstein was awarded his nobel prize in physics, and also the day NORAD though the USSR had launched a nuclear attack against the US. In the US calendar, it is September 11th, known best for the 1697 Battle of Zenta.
Obviously it's a communist conspiracy to use our love for Jebus to take away our guns.
I heard (I forget where) that the reason for 999 being the emergency number in the UK was because "0" used to be the number you dialled for an operator, so public telephones allowed the caller to dial 0 without putting a coin in - it was relatively simple, therefore, to modify the phone mechanism to allow 9s to be dialled without a coin as well, and also because no customer numbers started with 9. I also heard that 111 was rejected because it was possible for faulty or touching wires, blown by a strong wind, to tap out the single pulses required to dial "1" on the old pulse dialling system, so could have led to endless "phantom" calls to the emergency number. I don't know how true either of these claims are.
I'm impressed by this gentleman's use of large blue comic sans, but his punctuation is flawed. The final period should be placed after the word "American."
Perhaps he meant Pinochet's coup d'état of 1973? Not that it'd make any more sense of course, but the terrorist attacks of 11/9/2001 aren't the only bad things associated with that particular date.
"AFTERMATH" is to mathematics as "POSTMODERNISM" is to philosophy... I think Froggy was on the right track.
I know what he meant. And the answer is: Magnets.
(Am I the only one here who likes SG-1?)
WHAT HTML CODE YOU HAVE TO USE TO CHANGE THE FONT COLOR AND SIZE ON THIS COMMENT SECTION?
Fortknox
TRY LOOKING AT THE PAGE SOURCE FOR IDEAS.
I believe, and I could be mistaken, that those numbers were originally used to reduce the chance of a mis-dial, but also for speed. Think about a rotary phone: The numbers 9 and 1 are on opposite sides of the dial (to reduce unintentional dialing), but once you've dialed the 9, it's two short 1's.
I could be way off base, but that's what someone somewhere told me. Probably in kindergarten...
Young person checking in here. It's still perfectly legit to use the word "album."
Carry on.
Do you have to yell?
I thought only a small number of people knew about that nick-name of yours.
I raise you a gumby.
<blockquote style="background:url(http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/tiny_gumby_trans.gif) no-repeat; font-family:Comic Sans MS; color:blue; font-size: 24px; padding-left:52px;">I wish I could post in big blue Comic Sans.</blockquote>
I also heard that 111 was rejected because it was possible for faulty or touching wires, blown by a strong wind, to tap out the single pulses required to dial "1" on the old pulse dialling system, so ...
I don't think so. No telephone number was allowed to start with a 1 (that's why the lowest area code is 201). 1 did come to be used to indicate a long distance call when local exchanges had to start using the same numbers as area codes. So 111 was "illegal" (unable to be processed by the relay based switching systems).
COME TO THE "ALL CAPS" DIMENSION...
(/It's loud, but the hearing impaired, at least, feel especially welcome.)
clearly, atheists are responsible for 9-11. in a secret attempt to make organized religion look crazy, a bunch of heathen scientists devised a way to grow fundamentalists in a lab and programmed them to fly airplanes into buildings.
testing font style and color
Ah, fortunately my computer has been purged of any trace of Comic Sans.
The Stonecutters among us know the real number is 912.
Needs this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2009/06/pzmyers.png
Boo Boo frantically dials Yogi's number and gets voice mail.
Boo Boo: "Yogi! Yogi! Pick up, please!" Realizing that's old tech: "Don't listen to him, Yogi! Don't listen! There is a subliminal in the message, Yogi! It's from Ranger SMIIiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!" . . . gurgle . . . gasp . . . "Oh, Yogi."
Alternatively, what about the "BEFOREMATH" dimension?
Can you even have dimensions before math?
Or, I suppose you could have them, but would the concept of dimension have meaning before math?
I think that's the topic that has ALAN so ... what is he exactly ... upset.
I prefer it written 'e-mail'. Makes more sense for a compound noun made of an initial plus a full word.
Perhaps I will divide the English speaking world in two, one half for 'e-mail' users and another for 'email' users.
I have to confess. When I first discovered Comic Sans back when I was running Windows 95 I rather liked it. The casual, handwritten look reminded me of Dad's hand. He learned drafting early and his printing was the most legible hand I've ever encountered. It wasn't Comic Sans but the font was evocative of Dad's straightforward and legible style. I still emulate it.
I used Comic Sans profligately in letters to my mother, my daughters and even to my Dad.
Now I'll have to compose explanatory letters to all in Times Roman. They'll think they are reading a newspaper, or a cheap novel!
Oh! The embarrassment! All are offended. All die. Except Dad. He already did. (If he reads this, Dad will laugh out loud. Metaphorically, of course.)
translation
YOGI individual religious(non) instructor
you seem to live exclusively in the aftermath dimension refers to the fact that you appear to have a normal life and refuse to cower under the strong arm of government security apparatus and laugh at their stupid asses
sad really and pathetically unoriginal and uncreative
because you refuse to understand that muslims want to kill us all and the christian forces of good need to mobilize and you laugh at their stupid asses
use your big brain to explain 911 you american imbecile he wants you to see what happened as a large canvass of a war of good and evil instead of a bunch of stupid fucks with a inferiority complex that need to be laughed at
alan he is french
Looks like the email was deliberately incomprehensible to troll you, PZ. Using large blue comic sans font seems like a huge tip off that it was done on purpose. Also suspect are the phrases "explain 911" and "American imbecile."
Colors #118 is your real name capitano evidente?
Re: Origin of 911 - What I heard (and is therefore true): 999 already existed in Europe, AT&T had 211 for time and weather, 411 for directory information, and 611 for repairs. Take the first 9 from 999 and add the 11 from the other services.
Another what I heard: when it first came out, it was advertised as "nine-eleven", but they changed it to "nine-one-one" because people couldn't find the eleven on their phone. I don't believe it either.
I just had one of those moments where my kids are staring at me wanting to know why I'm laughing...
@tsg: I don't know about the other stuff, but as you may already know, the "999" number was originally chosen because it is the fastest 3-digit number to dial on a rotary phone, because you don't have to wait for the dial to rotate for as long as any other number.
These days, it has the unfortunate property that it's very easy to dial on a touchtone phone even by somebody with no fine motor skills and no understanding of what a phone is. In the UK, emergency services are routinely called by dogs and cats. My son, when a toddler (ie a looong time ago) managed to call it one time by picking up the receiver and banging it repeatedly on the phone. We got a call from the police wanting to know if everything was ok...
You do realize you can just hold down the Shift key, instead of pressing it each time you want to type a new capital letter. It's just about as efficient as caps lock.
Stogoe, no, it's not if you're a touch-typist.
What John said in #123. You can't hit keys with the same finger that's holding down a shift key. If all the keys I need to type are in reach of one hand, then sure I'll hold the shift key down with the other. But if there's much crossover (and for me that's usually the case), then caps lock is occasionally useful.
re 121:
I think it has been too long since you've used a rotary phone. 9 is the second slowest number to dial (next to 0)
Would have been more fitting if signed like this:
"Dr. Gene Ray, Professor of Cubic Cubology
Wisest Human^3"
As SteveM has noted, as did the sudden earworm of an old Three Dog Night song, "1's not the slowliest number."
oof. not sorry.
Explain 9/11?
As a civil engineer, I find the lack of a single structural or civil engineer on the list of "experts" who claim the building was brought down, at the very least, not by the impact of the plane and the fire, somewhat conspicuous. I'd have thought if anyone was an expert in such a field, they would be.
Now something to bring you nightmares:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/04/glenn-palin-the-monster-t_n_56…
Yogi...
PZ, are you a bear?
Do I need to protect my pic-a-nic baskets from you?
My initial impression on seeing this, before noticing the "Alan" sign-off, was that it was the dadaist outcome of some postmodern questionnaire. Somebody totally needs to create a quiz around this.
@Eamon Knight
@Stogoe
I also work in mobile telephony and have to type all those wonderful and numerous acronyms like UMTS, SMS, CDMA, 3GPP, USSD, PDU, PDP, APN, and many more, and I never really thought about how I typed them, but I have never used the caps lock key to type in an acronym, nor thought to.
I always hold down the right shift key with my pinky and then touch-type the acronym using the other 9 fingers. On a QWERTY keyboard, the right-most columns are all punctuation so it's not a big deal to reach all the letters, and ends up faster, since I'd otherwise have to toggle the caps lock on and then off, which is two extra keystrokes.
Besides, the real old-school geeks think that the Control key should be to the left of the A key and not below. I say map them both to Control and be done with it. :-)
More phone trivia: "112" works as an emergency phone number on all GSM cell phones world-wide, in addition to the emergency phone numbers defined on the SIM card and any numbers recognized by the phone itself as emergency numbers.
As for 911, the number, it's extremely easy to accidentally dial it on an office phone system that uses 9 + the number to dial an outside line. That's why almost all office PBX's have switched to using 8, or 7, or 3, or some other number as the outside line prefix.
jake,
I guess I must be prehistoric — I learnt to touch-type on a manual typewriter.
No such thing as a Control key; only shift keys and a Caps-lock key.
Explain ninehundred and eleven...what? 911 emails?
John Morales- Do you remember when the "caps lock" key worked mechanically? The key worked a lever like all the other keys, but it had a notch in it that would capture a projection on the "caps" key's lever. The typewriter in my parent's house when I was growing up was a real antique, even in the 1950's.
I'll confess, on my job as a night-shift computer operator, I once "dialed" 9 to get an outside line, 1 to get long distance, and my finger slipped to get the second 1. I saw it had dialed 911, hung up immediately and redialed the number, which was the number for tech support. I sat on hold for two hours, and was interrupted by my supervisor and a squad of police knocking on the door to investigate the 911 hangup. They return such hangup calls to check, and since I was on hold my number was busy, they could not reach me, so they brought the riot squad.
(signed) JBH
To be fair, some people are less sensitive to correct capitalisation for fair reasons. For example, Hebrew has only one case. I can imagine that it's difficult enough Israelites to get accustomed to a different alphabet in such a way that the finesse of capitalisation itself is, to them, of marginal importance compared to getting the message across.
As a side note I do wonder why Bible translations generally put the word LORD in capitals - this distinction could have been made in the New Testament (Greek) but not in the Old Testament (Hebrew). Emphasis added by the translator?
But whenever I see capitalisation I'm remembered of a Greek customer of ours who exclusively wrote his E-mail messages in capitals. When he was visited by one of our employees we found out he had a very old keyboard with Greek characters only, but that a special key combination allowed him to force the Latin alphabet out of it - in capitals only. So whenever I see messages in uppercase I'm just thinking "Oh look, they've got an Ancient Greek keyboard".
The distinction could have been made in an original manuscript by means of changing ink colours (eg red instead of black) or making the characters extra bold (eg slightly larger / taller than surrounding ones or widened by repeated strokes).
#138 Duckbilled Platypus
Quack!
There is a reason for the choice. The explanation below comes from Wiki "Authorized King James Version", Section on Literary Attributes - Translation only because it is the easiest place to find it. The explanation is widely (universally?) accepted:
Don't be fooled, mate. Them girls know what's cookin'! We blokes don't!!
Alan B - Thanks. So it is, in fact, a case of "emphasis added". :)
Would that be why religious kooks love to use capitalisation in their messages? Because it strikes a "divine" note by their targeted readers? The powerless man's call to authority, so to speak. "It's in capitals, so it must be true".
Which leads to another nasty revelation (sic): maybe the abnormal use of capitalisation in communication today is simply a cultural meme introduced by Bible translators...
Worth a repeat of PZ's comment on an email from an earlier loon
I think the reason why we in the UK use 999 is to do with blind people / making calls when you cannot see the dial. The original emergency number was 0. i.e. you called the operator and asked to be connected, as you did with any other connection that you wanted. That was in the early days when all the phones had rotary dials and the 0 was easy to find if you could not see the numbers. It's the one next to the stop.
As the technology developed and people could dial numbers directly, a new emergency number was needed to distinguish emergencies from people trying to use an operator service.
999 was chosen as 0 was still reserved for operator services and 9 is still easy to find, put your middle finger in the hole next to the stop and dial with your index finger.
I presume 3 x 9 was used to stop reduce acidental dialings.
@Duckbilled Platypus #142 it might be just a case of old fartism. Military reports, police reports, early data processing was all caps for clarity. Some people may still use it that way.
Depending on the circumstances I 1) pry the damn thing off with a screwdriver, or 2) wedge a piece of foam under it so it doesn't move, or works only if you push hard. Don't get me started on the fscking windows key...
I'm sorry, I can't let that one pass. I used to think the Windows key was superfluous, and its only purpose was to get you killed when you were playing a game and hit it by mistake, losing focus. But after I discovered you can use it to minimize and restore windows, lock the computer, open up explorer, search, system properties, etc., run commands, and so on, I got used to them and using a keyboard without one in Windows now feels almost like I'm missing a thumb.
The first thing I do with the Windows key is turn it into a Compose key in Linux.
jake.hamby @ #133:
Done that, many moons ago. Tried dialling a long distance number and tripped with the grace of a gooney bird's landing all over the keyboard. Pressed 9 for the outside line (twice), 1 for Long Distance (twice)... and realized the damned thing was ringing. "Police, fire, ambulance?" "OhmygodaveIgotawrongnumber!" (Laughter from 911 operator)
Nothing says "I am superior" better than quotation marks.
I think of VT52 terminals (but I'm an old DEC guy)
I don't know about police reports and the military, but early data processing was not for clarity as much as for "bit space". That is, With only one case and a few punctuation, only 5 bits are required to encode each character. And back when it was too expensive to store years as 4 digits, programs were stored as holes in paper, and baud rates were well below 100, that was significant.
And this is what the Caps Lock was really for. In mechanical typewriters it required significant force to shift the entire mechanism to upper-case making it difficult to just hold down with a pinky while still typing with your other 9 fingers.
And speaking of anachronisms, I suppose everyone is aware of the derivation of the terms "upper case" and "lower case"? From days of mechanical type-setting where letters were stored in drawers called "cases"; the uncapitalized characters were literally stored in the lower part of the case (because they are more common) and the capitals in the upper part case.
Please, no. At my job I have to type in radio station call letters all day long.
Srsly.
@KOPD #98
No.
When 911 was introduced, I recall two reasons being given for the choice: A reason for not using the European 999 was a concern that people who who were stressed or panicking would loose track of how many 9's they had dialled (and dialled is the right word, as when 911 was introduced (mid/late-1960's) pushbutton phones were uncommon).
The other reason I now recall for 911 is that it's fairly easy to dial 911 on a dial-phone, which is an advantage in the dark (this may also be true-ish for non-illuminated keypads).
And as others have pointed out, there were technical reasons for an N11 number (for 2 ≤ N ≤ 9).
Holding down shift and typing 2 letters takes 3 keystrokes. Pressing caps-lock on and off and typing 2 letters takes 4.
So you need to type a minimum of 4 letters to save any time. And even then, only if your hand is accustomed enough to hitting caps lock that you don't have to slow down or think to do it.
Yes, you're right. Wishful thinking on my side. I prefer clear-cut total evils over somewhat-lesser-evils and not-really-evil-at-all evils.
I wonder if dictionary compression would have been more useful there. Maybe it wasn't invented yet. When was this?
"Amen!"
@78
"Aftermath" could be a reference to Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus. It's the fifth state, before it was renamed International Relations. The first four stages are, if memory serves, Chaos, Confusion Discord and Bureaucracy.
Of course, it doesn't really explain what the hell the guy was talking about, other than possibly accusing PZ of being an agent of aneristic forces.