And now back to your regularly scheduled broadcast....
| Microsoft Privacy | Joker | Violins | A Little Man |
| Pneumonic Passwords | Hum Ho! | Bios Gates | A Spoonerism Beyond Belief |
| What in Teh World is This? | Quite Disparate | Context Insensitive Ads |
From CNN Interactive News for March 4, 1999, we get the following story,
Mar. 4, 1999 >> 11:15 pm MST Internet:Privacy
Microsoft Sues 20 American Firms for Privacy
Xinhua
04-MAR-99
LOS ANGELES (March 3) XINHUA - Microsoft Corp. has
filed lawsuits against 20 U.S. companies for selling counterfeit
Windows software to consumers and businesses, according to
reports from the software giant Wednesday.
The Redmond, Washington-based software-maker has filed
lawsuits against 10 Southern California companies that allegedly
offered counterfeit copies of Windows NT and other Microsoft
products over the Internet, a growing problem area for software
piracy.
The lawsuits come after law enforcement officials shut down a
major counterfeiting operation in Southern California last month
and seized pirated Microsoft software worth some 30 million
dollars.
Microsoft has also filed lawsuits against another 10 companies in
Chicago, Illinois. Eight of the companies are accused of
distributing counterfeit copies of software, including Windows
95, Windows 98 and Windows NT. Two of the companies are
accused of installing pirated software in computers and selling
them to customers.
Microsoft, seeking an injunction to stop the alleged practice as
well as damages, has filed hundreds of similar lawsuits against
companies in other states in recent years.
Industry sources say that while Microsoft itself has expanded
efforts to sell legitimate copies of its software over the Internet,
the network also makes distribution of illegal versions easier to
do and harder to detect.
I was first attracted to this story by the rather obvious privacy/piracy confusion. But then, after reading it all of the way through, it occurred to me to wonder
why Xinhua News Agency is credited with the story. The suits which are the subject of the story were apparently all filed in the US against US companies, and
China has no apparent connection with it. The careful identification of Chicago, Illinois suggests that perhaps this story was intended for internal publication and
somehow leaked out into international distribution. A couple of days later, we find the following story, also on CNN Interactive News, but now from Reuters:
Microsoft Wins First China
Copyright Cases
Reuters
06-MAR-99
BEIJING, March 7 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp has won its first
two Chinese court cases against software pirates, the China Daily
Business Weekly reported on Sunday.
A Chinese court ordered two domestic software companies to
pay 800,000 yuan ($96,600) in compensation to Microsoft for
infringing its copyright, the newspaper said.
"The verdict in the case fully demonstrates China's efforts to
strengthen protection of intellectual property rights," the
newspaper quoted Tom Robertson, attorney for Microsoft, as
saying.
[ ... ]
This story may be related, but if it is really about the same suits, those were certainly very speedily adjudicated software suits. It seems more likely that the
Xinhua News Agency story was garbled either in reportage or in translation, or that it was intended as a prelude to the above. Xinhua is the official news agency
of the People's Republic of China, and is headquartered in Beijing. It can be reached on the web at www.xinhua.org (Chinese version ) or
http://202.84.17.11/en/index.htm (English version). Be careful visiting these sites, though... both are highly graphic and very slow to load. The English text
version is also just about at the pirate/private level of translation.
And here is an amusing Microsoft tidbit of which I was not aware even though it apparently happened a year or more ago:
UPI
29-MAR-99
"Deja vu: It's nearly time for Spring COMDEX at McCormick
Place and Bill Gates is expected to use the forum to introduce
his Windows 2000 operating system. When he demonstrated
Windows 98 at the confab, his system crashed."
Then, more than a year later, and also in the online NY Times, we find a story beginning with the
paragraph
May 20, 2000
Microsoft Piracy Losses in Mexico
By REUTERS
MEXICO CITY -- Software giant Microsoft Corp.
loses $300 million a year in sales in Mexico
because of rampant software privacy, local newspapers
reported Friday.
It seems very unlikely to me that these occurences are independent since the privacy/piracy substitution is not one which would happen easily either as a keyboard typographical error or as a conceptual confusion. I can think of three likely common causes:
Here is another odd story drawn from CNN Online and the PR Newswire. Some press agent is trying to earn his creativity bonus.
PRNewswire
14-APR-99
PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico, April 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Joke of the Day( http://www.joker.org ) today announced its intention to buy up all outstanding
shares of every publicly traded Internet company. If it succeeds, it will own controlling interest in almost every major company in this red-hot sector, effectively
running the entire Internet from a small home office in the basement. The extraordinary claim came as shares in the Internet sector soared to an all time high. "I'm
not just talking about buying a few shares of Yahoo!" said The Joker, the notoriously private CEO of The Original Joke of the Day in a telephone interview from
a beach in Mexico. "I actually want to own the Internet!" In a twenty-two page letter of intent, the maverick Internet company identified no less than 157
Internet properties that it would like to own by the end of the year. The wish list, which includes a number of privately held companies, contains all the major
Internet players such as Yahoo!, eBay, Lycos, Geocities, Excite, AOL/Netscape, @Home, Xoom, Infoseek, Verio, Geocities, Infospace, iVillage, Marketwatch,
and even Microsoft and Disney. After compiling the list, the Joker went to Mexico to relax. To fund this ambitious program of acquisitions, the Joke of the
Day intends to introduce a voluntary charge for the jokes that it delivers by email to over 174,000 subscribers every day. The jokes are currently a free service,
but The Joker is expected to slap a controversial "Laugh Tax" on its subscribers. Under the new scheme, every subscriber who actually laughs at one of the jokes
will be required to remit $1,000,000 to the newly constituted IRS (Involuntary Raillery-induced Spasm) Fund.
The Joke of the Day delivers 4.5 million humorous email messages per month. "Even if only 10% of our subscribers voluntarily remit the Laugh Tax each time
they giggle, chortle, chuckle, guffaw, titter, or snicker, that will be a cash injection of $450,000,000,000 per month. That's a nice chunk-o-change." About Joke
of the Day
Joke of the Day is run by MeMail.com, the wacky Canadian email publishing
company. MeMail.com delivers over 11.25 million email messages per month,
reaching over 475,000 people in 112 countries daily. MeMail.com is a market
leader with 37 content-rich eMagazines in its portfolio. The same organic
marketing techniques that propelled companies like Hotmail, Xoom, Geocities
and Talk City into number one positions in their sectors also are used by
MeMail.com to grow its subscriber base. 97% of new subscribers come from
direct referrals, as subscribers pass along news stories and entertainment
features to colleagues and friends. http://www.joker.org and http://www.memail.com.
And here is a headline from the NY Times for Oct. 25, 1999:
Averting Violence With Computers
Violence with computers? Has that too become a problem in our sick society? But not to worry,
the lead sentence of the story makes it all clear:
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
In an effort to prevent another deadly
rampage like the one at Columbine High
School in April, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms is working with a private
company to develop a computer program to help
school administrators spot students who might be on
the brink of violence.
Note also that the headline, besides being ambiguous, is in fact wrong even if interpreted correctly. The computers are to be used for the prediction of violent
behavior, not directly to avert such behavior. Counseling and other interventions will be used to prevent the behavior.
Averting Violins With Computers
And then a few days later, we find the following in the film reviews section of the NY Times :
FILM REVIEWS
'Music of the Heart': Triumph of Talent Over Tenure
As a director best known for his horror films, Wes Craven has
long been associated with violence. Now he has made a film
about violins. This may appear to be a fabulous typographical error, if
not such a hot movie idea.
"How common a pun is this?", I wondered. The violence/violins conceptual contrast combined with the phonetic similarity make this an almost ideal pun, and therefore one which I thought might be fairly common, especially given the well-known words involved. I did an advanced search on AltaVista with the target "violins NEAR violence" and got 114 hits, far more than I wanted to read in detail. Inspection of a few of the hits, including some at the very end of the list, verified that they were on point. My favorite was a quote of Dennis Marcellino, a Jazz saxophonist : "If you're tired of all of the Sex and Violence, try the beauty of Sax and Violins".
So this does seem to be a cliched pun which I have just not happened to encounter before. Ah the wonders of the information age!
In an article on cosmology in the December 1, 1999 New York Times Online, but with the dateline 30 Nov 1999,
we find the following:
But not even Dr. Weinberg seems convinced that this solution is the right one. In a paper on the topic, he included a poem by Hughes Mearns that captures the endless frustration that physicists have faced in calculating the weight of emptiness:
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.
The attribution and detailed structure of this verse surprised me since I am familiar with it in the form
I saw a man upon the stair,
A little man who was not there.
He was not there again today.
Gee, I wish he'd go away!
This appeared in the science fiction story "The Yehudi Principle" by Fredric Brown, which is in the anthology "Angels and Spaceships", published by E.P. Dutton in 1954. The story itself is cited in the anthology as being published in either Astounding Science Fiction or Unknown Worlds in 1944. No citation or copyright acknowledgement for the poem was given. ( A strange coincidence here is that the "Yehudi" referenced in the title, although actually the name of the "little man", is confused by one of the characters in the story with Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist. So here we are back to violins again! )
In the summer 1999 (Web Issue 3) edition of FlashPoint , a web journal which describes itself as "A multidisciplinary
journal in the arts and politics", there is an essay entitled "From Petit to Langpo: A history of solipsism and
experience in american poetics since the rise of creative writing"by one Gabriel Gudding. This essay defines fairly well who Hughes Mearns was , even
while wandering about the literary landscape much as its title does. A brief quote will suffice:
The first to teach [ creative writing ] by name was William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965). Creative writing's goal, as understood by Mearns and the entire generation of progressivist educators he influenced, was more "self-realization" or "creative growth" than the crafting of a fine poem or short story. Mearns' interest was with "self-expression as a means of growth, and not of poetry....
More Information concerning Mearns and his work can be gotten from an online review of "A History of Holistic
Literacy":
A History of Holistic Literacy
Five Major Educators
By M. P. Cavanaugh
Praeger Publishers. Westport, Conn. 1994. 176 pages
LC 93-50067. ISBN 0-275-94789-0. C4789 $57.95
Available (Status Information Updated 12/2/1999)
** Description **
As one of the few books on the history and philosophy of American elementary school education, Cavanaugh's work
examines the pioneering careers of Francis Wayland Parker, John Dewey, Rudolph Steiner, Hughes Mearns, and Laura Zirbes. Finding the basic framework for
current fashionable trends in education like the Whole Language and Process Writing Movement, Cavanaugh shows how educators came to these ideas over
100 years ago. After presenting the five biographies, Cavanaugh goes on to explain how children learn to read and write; what kinds of schools foster this
learning; the roles of teachers, students, and parents; and the important tools of grading, evaluation, and assessment. In all these areas there are important lessons
to learn from the past.
This book was originally M. P. Cavanaugh's PhD thesis at Michigan State University, in 1990, although in that incarnation it was titled "The Holistic Teaching
Methods of Francis Parker, John Dewey, Rudolf Steiner, Hughes
Mearns, and Laura Zirbes: Literacy via the Whole Child."
The table of contents of Worlds in Small, as given in the online Locus Index to Science Fiction, includes the poem "Antigonish" by Hughes Mearns (1899). Other web pages indicate that the poem named "Antigonish" is the one about the indeterminate man upon the stair.
The bibliographic data for Worlds in Small given there is: ed. John Robert Colombo Cacanadadada Press 0-921870-14-0, Jun '92, $12.95, 96pp, tp, cover by Alvin Jang, an anthology of 104 minimalist excerpts, stories, and poems (most under 100 words, many under 20) including many by sf writers including Bradbury, Clarke, and Heinlein. Order from Cacanadadada Press, 3350 W. 21st Ave., Vancouver BC V6S 1G7, Canada; (604) 738-1195,
For example , with a slight misquote,
As I was walking down the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh I wish he'd go away!
"Antigonish" by Hughes Mearns
But we also have citations such as
As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.
--Hughes Mearns (from "The Psychoed")
In a review of "The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse" edited by Neil Phillip, the poem is quoted in what appears to be its authentic original form but it is cited as ''Hughes Mearns's "The Little Man" ''. This is passing strange since the poem in the form attributed to Mearns has no mention at all of the size of the man.
And another variant but without source citation:
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Oh how I wish he'd go away.
Hughes Mearns
Variants abound, usually in personal collections of quotes which are probably reproduced from memory and thus
inaccurately phrased. Many presentations of this verse also cite it as being named "The Psychoed" rather than as being from that source, which is identified in
other places as the publication in which it appeared.
In one source , it is cited as
Hughes Mearns
"The Psychoed"
while in the same source an unrelated citation is
C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters
whether this minor format difference is an artifact of compilation or indicates an actual difference in source
type is not obvious. Literary citation conventions are not a subject in which I am well versed, so to speak.
The obviously related but less often quoted verse
As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew the legs just weren't there;
Nor seat nor back,
But still I sat,
Ignoring little things like that.
is cited as "Hughes Mearns (The Perfect Reactionary) (written as I remember it)". No other title or source information is given. Again, variants abound, but in this case there is nothing other than this defective citation and the similarity of style, to indicate that this verse actually was written by Mearns. The variant
As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew it had no bottom there,
Nor legs, or back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that.
is used without attribution in a creationist essay as a metaphor applied to the evidence for evolution. This is also quoted in exactly those words and similar context in another creationist web essay . A collection of similar imitations woven into a theme are to be found in the writings of Marysia Kolodziej . Most charitably considered, the intent here was most probably to ring changes on the concept so simply expressed by Mearns.
This combination of the little man and the missing chair occurs in a web collection of children's verse:
As I was sitting in my chair
I noticed that I wasn't there
I do hope that I come back soon
I'm going out this afternoon
which is apparently original and does capture some of the simple charm of the little man.
In searching Altavista for Antigonish AND Mearns, the only hits concerned St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, at which one Newton Mearns is associated with the Celtic studies department. In searching the online Encyclopedia Britannica for "Hughes Mearns", "William Hughes Mearns", "Antigonish", or "The Psychoed", the only hit was for Antigonish, NS. Searching the Library of Congress subject catalog for "Antigonish" yields a few books on the history of the Antigonish movement . The Antigonish movement is basically the application of extension education programs in undeveloped areas, originally for laborers, but later extending to the management level. It originated at St. Francis Xavier University and draws its name from that institution's location. Besides being an educational program which was contemporaneous ( 1920's) with his heyday, it has no apparent connection with Hughes Mearns.
In the Library of Congress catalog we find these books by Hughes Mearns:
"I Ride in My Coach" by Hughes Mearns
illustrated by W.T. Schwarz. 1923
"Lions in the Way" by Hughes Mearns. 1927
"Richard Richard" by Hughes Mearns
illustrated by Ralph L. Boyer. 1916
"Vinegar Saint" by Hughes Mearns.
Illustrated by Ralph L. Boyer. 1919
I can easily imagine all of these are children's books. Under the same author entry, we find the books "Creative Adult", "Creative Power", and "Creative Youth", which are alluded to in the Flashpoint essay. These serve I believe to identify the educator with the author of the childrens books. This leaves the title "The Perfect Reactionary" mentioned above, which I have seen nowhere else, does not appear either as a book or serial title in the Library of Congress , and which does not fit well with either of the other categories of Mearns writings.
If one searches the web for the target "Lions in the Way", in addition to the above, one finds
Obviously, the next step would be to look into Mearns' own books and the books about him, but this would require actually visiting a library, which I am not liable to do for this project. If anyone out there happens to have any further information about this subject, I would be happy to receive it.
One tiny coincidence remains: a week or so ago on the TV quiz program "Win Ben Stein's Money", a question was what
TANSTAAFL stood for. The answer the judges wanted was , as any good Heinlein student knows, "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch". Ben
however believed that this acronym was originated by Milton Friedman, and maintained on that basis that it must be TINSTAAFL ( "I" for "is" ) since
Friedman would never use "ain't".
Pneumonic Passwords
In a description of their BioPassword® product which applies keystroke biometrics to password entry,
NetNanny includes the following material:
Passwords are difficult to remember. Any hacker knows that the majority of users will implement a password that is pneumonic or easy-to-remember, and therefore easy to break. BioPassword® changes the equation. A common password like "password" becomes difficult to break - even when it is correctly guessed! A hacker may guess the password, but they cannot duplicate another user's typing rhythm.
It seems to me that a hacker would be more likely to be pneumonic than would a password.
Hum Ho!
Following are excerpts from a story in the New York Times Online for 9Jan2000:
GM Debuts Rugged Hummer Concept
January 9, 2000
Filed at 5:10 p.m. ET
By ReutersDETROIT (Reuters) - The Hummer, the brute sport-ute, has a new little brother, nearly as tough looking and intimidating as its elder sibling but
with a friendlier interior. [ ... ] The Hummer H2, a smaller and refined version of the tank-like Hummer, ditches many of the exposed fasteners and
rivets to give it a sleeker appearance, but keeps many other features which give the all-terrain vehicle its militaristic character. [ ... ] Like the Hummer,
the H2 has an integrated winch and brushbar, and two hooks protruding from the hood, used to lift the military vehicles out of helicopters and onto battlefields.
Also at each side of the hood is an exposed canister air filter, set high to keep dry when foraging small streams. [ ... ]
Since the writer so skillfully anthropomorphized the H2 in the initial paragraphs, the typo suggests to me a vision of it trolling a small stream for submerged edibles with its snout (radiator) down, but with its jaunty canister air filter safely above water.
Bios Gates
The following story appeared in the NY Times for April 4, 2000. My immediate reaction was to wonder how in the world the Microsoft antitrust trial had anything to do with the BIOS. Further on in the article, they described Bill Gates' BIOS. I can think of no appropriate comment.
Bios of Key Microsoft Trial Figures
April 4, 2000
Filed at 12:26 a.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
Three key figures in the Microsoft antitrust trial:
--U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, 62, former Navy officer and now a weekend sailor with a 33-foot sloop he owns with two others. Lives in Georgetown and sometimes walks the 20 blocks to the courthouse. Republican appointed in 1982 by President Reagan......
A quote from a story in the Jan 26, 2001 New York Times:
' "We wanted to help the Chinese understand more clearly that the missile-defense train has already left the station,"
said Bates Gill, an arms expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who was part of the visiting American group. '
This is the most extraordinary naturally occuring spoonerism I have ever encountered.
From the New York Times Technology section of 31 May 2001:
Microsoft to Introduce
New Version of Office
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, May 30 --
Discounting an imminent federal court ruling that could limit the company's
march toward dominating the commercial Internet, Microsoft plans to introduce
on Thursday a new version of its Office program that is the most Internet-connected
product yet from the company. Office XP, which will sell for $499 and be available in
15 countries, is the sixth version of the program,which was first introduced in 1991.
The Office suite of productivity applications, which includes the Word word-processing
program, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation manager, Outlook schedule and
e-mail program and other modules, is often referred to as Microsoft's other monopoly.
[...]
Mr. Gates reserved most of his enthusiasm for new features that will weld Office XP to
the Internet, both for interactive information retrieval and for collaborative activities.
The new version of Word includes a feature called smart tags, which will allow
word-processing documents to be connected automatically to vast databases on the
Internet. Mr. Gates described the ability of the new version of Word to recognize an
address, or a United Parcel Service shipping number, or even a United Airlines flight
number and perform a function like looking upshipping or flight information.
All of which will be an unbearable annoyance to someone who just wants to write a manuscript. And I shudder to think what all of this "intelligence" will make of technical terms such as chemical names.
[...]
He also acknowledged that in the past the company's software had been so "smart"
that it had frustrated some of its users, including his father. Mr. Gates's father complained
to his son after he was flummoxed by an auto-correction feature in Word 2000.
For example, the current version of Word automatically converts the world "teh"
to "the" because it is a common typing error.
Obviously, the author turned his spelling checker off....
"Eighty percent of the time we've been right," Mr. Gates said, adding that the new version
will let users more easily override a decision by Office that might be wrong.
[...]
How is it that Microsoft product announcements are so susceptible to this kind of gaffe? Is it perhaps that they are so foolish as to use their own software?? By the way, 80% right means 20% wrong, which means that 20% of the time proper spellings as typed by the user were corrupted by the program which thought it knew better than the user what was intended.
From the New York Times Technology section of 23 Nov 2003:
You can think of the software as a kind of audio font: musical notation and lyrics can be translated into the chosen voice, then saved for replay, just as a word processor might translate a text into Helvetica or Times New Roman and print it out as many times as you like.
These fonts are made up of a database of phonemes, the basic sounds that make up any language. To create the database, technicians record a singer performing as many as 60 pages of scripted articulations (like "epp, pep, lep"). Assorted pitches and techniques like glissandos and legatos are also thrown in the mix; with all the combinations, the process takes a week of five-hour singing days. The resultant font is "reminiscent" of the singer's voice, says Ed Stratton, the managing director of Zero-G Limited, a London-based company that has licensed the Vocaloid technology.
Zero-G is using Vocaloid to create the first of these fonts: Leon, described as a
"Virtual Soul Vocalist," and Lola, his female counterpart. The digitized duo will
make their debut in January at the International Music Products Association
conference in Anaheim, Calif.
Vocaloid's next application will be Miriam, a third font that Zero-G expects to release later in 2004. (A Japanese company, Crypton, expects to release its own font "Japanese Pops" a bubbly female voice in March.) Miriam is based on recordings of Miriam Stockley, a singer for the new age group Adiemus, which has worldwide album sales in excess of several million. "At first I was quiet horrified by the idea," Ms. Stockley said. "People tend to pay a lot of money to get my sound, and here I am putting it on a font."
She changed her mind, she said, because "you can't fight progress, no matter how strange it sounds."