Actually, what John Tranter is saying here is very interesting and
(perhaps for some) worth carrying a little further. (Okay, I may be
familiar with John's style of polemic and argument and consider it worth
following up, but even this would be to miss the point.)
This polemic cannot be approached front on or even back on, which would
be to accept a foreshadowing or back-shadowing narrative flow, a flow
which is laminar and as such multi-layered, smooth and offering the
least resistance and hence optimal and least disturbing, which is to say
tame, everyday and banal and not worthy of any thought other then a
banal repeated stupidity.
What is being objected to is a multiple redundancy of nine syllables and
adding the dot after what amounts to a ten syllable redundant speech.
One needs to go side ways on this to appreciate the force of the
critique being offered as if as a free gift opposing itself to the lack
of freedom being offered by a multiple which is redundant. Shannon
understood in information theory that what is redundancy is noise and
given that the address style of the internet is in keeping with the file
structures of the only operating system to date, that is, UNIX, what is
being said is that computer operating systems are noise against
information. But, is not this to at least brush against some of the most
essential elements of poetry? To go a little bit more along this twisted
deviating track, is it not to say that computer code, and lets be honest
here and admit that the dominant code is UNIX, despite the commercial
rip off provided by Microsoft and Apple's version of BSD UNIX, is still
UNIX and to add to this that UNIX itself is made up of multiple
redundancy which is to say that open source and GNU is also so and as
such a multiple lack of freedom (which RMS seems ignorant of, BTW)
So sideways we go to say that what stands in the way of poetic freedom
is word processor code. This may appear at first as a convoluted twisted
argument... but certainly not in jest, however, I will have to leave it
here as I really must cook myself a nutritious evening meal. However, it
is the turbulence of JT's transitional plane, creating turbulence
against flow, that needs attending. (And here we may find a triptych.)
On Mon, 2008-09-29 at 10:43 +0100, John Tranter wrote:
> What I object to is -- when you are talking to people -- the verbal
> representation of double-yew-double-yew-double-yew at the front of every web
> address. Why couldn't he have chosen "net" for example? One syllable instead
> of nine, multiplied one billion times.
>
> In a document I read (on the "net") years ago, Tim Berners-Lee admitted that
> he should have thought his way through that one, but he was a bit busy that
> day and didn't really have the time to think it through, so
> "double-yew-double-yew-double-yew" it has been ever since.
>
> PS: I think there's some good reason to use numeric codes for the
> non-breaking-space character: ampersand-hash-160-semi-colon ( ), though
> I can't remember exactly what it is.
>
> best
>
> John Tranter
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