Number 77
You know how in Beetle Bailey, sometimes General Halftrack appears in the last panel walking by some absurd scene that had a pseudo-logical build-up that he didn't witness and can't make sense of, and he says, "Now what?" I feel like that a lot. I know I've just missed a lot of things in this world. Maybe that's what happened tonight on The Daily Show; I missed something just before former President Clinton remarked at the unveiling of portraits of him and his wife, "I feel like a pickle stepping into history."
During one of Ronald Reagan's many funerals, a reporter commented that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was "almost a dirge-like rendition" as it was being played. Strictly speaking, that song is, well, a battle hymn, which is not a dirge, or funeral song. But I would stretch the definition of "dirge" to mean a song that is played mournfully at a funeral. "Happy Days Are Here Again" has been played to sound something like a dirge.
While promoting his book on TV, David Brooks, author of On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense, said "Price Mart is like Wal-Mart on acid." (Or it could have been PriceSmart.) I mentioned the mushrooming (heh) "on acid" metaphor in PO 28. Whatever Price Mart (or PriceSmart) may be, I guarantee you it can't be like Wal-Mart on acid. It might be really big and really cheap, bigger and cheaper than Wal-Mart, but that doesn't make it weirder than Wal-Mart.
Back to the home decor shows. A decorator admired the old silverware that was "holding up the window treatment." You know what a window treatment is: anything that you put on or around your window. A curtain is a curtain. A curtain plus old, ornamental silverware becomes a window treatment. (In case you're interested, old spoons and forks are bent into hooks with the ornamental handle facing outward, and the business end of the spoon or fork is nailed to a board that hangs over the window. Curtain tabs loop over the hooks. Very cute.)
Quite a long time ago, friend Yvonne sent an article about a book that was to be published in 2003, Who Owns the Internet? You and i Do, by John Schwartz. Here's part of the New York Times article she sent on the book:
Something will be missing when Joseph Turow's book about families and the Internet is published by M.I.T. Press next spring: The capital I that usually begins the word "Internet.""Mr. Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how people use online technology and how that affects their lives. He has begun a small crusade to de-capitalize Internet ~ and, by extension, to acknowledge a deep shift in the way that we think about the online world.
"I think what it means is it's part of the everyday universe," he said. Capitalization irked him because, he said, it seemed to imply that reaching into the vast, interconnected ether was a brand-name experience. "The capitalization of things seems to place an inordinate, almost private emphasis on something," he said, turning it into a Kleenex or a Frigidaire. "The Internet, at least philosophically, should not be owned by anyone," he said, calling it "part of the neural universe of life."
I don't quite agree, even though I often rail against excessive capitalization. Capitalization does not imply only brand naming; it is properly applied to a proper noun, which means, as I learned in grade school, the name of a particular person, place, or thing, or as dict.org says, a name belonging to an individual, by which it is distinguished from others of the same class. Of course, there is no other Internet, no competing brand. My knowledge of the history of the Internet is so superficial as to be about one molecule deep, but there were the ARPANET, USENET, CSNET, HEPNET, MFENET, BITNET, JANET, NSFNET, DECNET ~ luckily we're not stuck with all caps in Internet, but you see that it is specific enough to merit its own personal name with a capital I. The Internet may seem as generic as a telephone to people who've grown up with it, as Schwartz says, but it's not. Something different may follow the Internet, and we'll want to remember it with awe and gratitude and capitalization.
Finally, I don't like thinking of the 'Net as part of the neural universe of life. It's not a brain, it's not human, it's a machine and a tool, HAL notwithstanding. (Go to the attached HAL .wav file, from http://www.moviesounds.com/2001.html.)
Dave DaBee replied to the PO 76 bit about file size with this (and more):
. . . For instance, in Word, you have a Format / Paragraph menu, and you can also do Format / Bullets and Numbering. All such stuff takes up space on disk ~ and sometimes that's true even if you're not using a feature.So, for instance, I just took a random document with 136 paragraphs, and with Find/Replace, I turned each one into two returns. (In other words, I added 136 empty paragraphs.) The file grew in size by about 3500 bytes. So we could guess that each paragraph takes up 250-300 bytes, before you even type anything into it.
. . . you can italicize in the middle of a paragraph, and that takes up space too. I took the same document and removed all formatting (turning it all into the Normal style), and it shrank by 2k.
And there's stuff for the document itself. You think an empty document is empty? Try saving a new document before you enter a keystroke, and see how big it is.
When you shrank it to 2 point (9 pages) it may not have immediately ditched the no-longer-necessary page info. Did you do Save As after changing to 2 point? Save As often reduces file size, by getting rid of "helpful" stuff that Word lugs around. (You DO have "fast saves" turned off, don't you? That nasty feature tries to NOT store your document in its actual sequence . . . I'll rant about that later if you want.)
Finally (and I suspect this is the source of your 72-point result), to speed up scrolling, Word inserts certain stuff at the page boundaries. (Otherwise, every time you scroll back through a file, it would theoretically have to go all the way back to the beginning of the file and "count forward" again, to make sure it knows everything that should be in effect.) So when you added 3,457 page breaks, I'm not surprised that the file size grew by 80k. That's really only about 25 bytes per page break.
The only case where font size directly affects file size is if you're storing the page image as a bitmap, because with bitmaps, the file size is largely determined by the number of square inches, no matter how many characters of text happen to make up the page image. (That's a simplification but I think it accurately addresses your point of curiosity.)
So there.
p.s. You're a typographic cretin if you'd foist 104 pages of Arial onto your reader(s). :-) That is NOT a nice typeface for vast quantities of reading. Remind me to tell you sometime about Eric Gill, the stonecutter who designed the world's most legible typefaces, and his 21st-century analogs, Bigelow & Holmes (Chuck and Chris, respectively), creators of the aptly named Lucida family.
I accidentally bit Chris's hair once, while hugging her hello. But that too is a long story.
Just for that, I'm sending out this PO in Lucida Sans Unicode, making the text one page longer at 12 points.
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