h a l f b a k e r yThe mutter of invention.
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My father once came home from work and announced that
the computer (presumably a '70s mainframe or mini) had
broken down because it had attempted to subtract a
double-barrelled surname.
Although I'm not sure this is true, this kind of thing can be
done. Just as hexadecimal consists of the
digits 0 to 9
along with A to F, base 36 could be 0 to 9 along with A to
Z. This means that a word such as "bad" would have a
value of 14629. Therefore a word such as "half-baked"
would then be the numbers 20451 and 28869. Subtract the
second from the first and you have the "word" "-6hu",
which is shorter when written but not said. On the other
hand, if the first word in a hyphenated term is longer, the
result will be positive, an example being "mid-80s", whose
result is "ehl", which can basically be pronounced.
Therefore, my proposal is quite simple: shorten texts by
using lots of hyphenated words and saying the result of the
second subtracted from the first. It will be hard to
pronounce and often lengthen words in speech, but
otherwise it's fine.
[link]
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Yes, but what if "bad-ass" comes out the same as
"half-baked"? |
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This is sort of like saying "add all the words together
and express the answer as modulo 1", only not quite
as much. |
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Incidentally, your father's story is not quite so far
fetched. The IBM machines that were used in the
Manhattan project were required to be modified such
that, if a particular combination of numbers was fed
to them, small gunpowder (or maybe it was
guncotton) charges in the programming switches and
card stacks would be ignited by little coils. This was
to ensure that the machines could be decomissioned
in an emergency if there was any risk of them being
captured, leaving no clue as to the calculations they
had been doing. Some of the later German Enigma
machines had something similar. |
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I feel your account could be interpreted as a pun
[MB], but I would like it to be true so I choose to
believe that it's so. According to my trusty Jupiter
Ace, bad-ass,
or rather 36 BASE C! BAD ASS - . , comes out as "hl",
so it's OK for that, though I take your point. |
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Also, maximum could be interpreted as (ma) multiplied by (imum). And similarly, either/or could be (either) divided by (or). And, pushing it a little, you could consider t to be similar to +, and so a word such as motor-car could be constructed as (mo)+(or)-(car). |
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//According to my trusty Jupiter Ace// |
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Wowww. I have to say, I am impressed. You program
it in Forth? |
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//-6hu...shorter when written but not said//
Not necessarily. I presume you are pronouncing 6hu as six-aytch-yoo. However, if you put on your fake Japanese accent and pronounce it 'sixhoo', all is resolved. |
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Why are you bothering with numerics ? just use the letters for base 26. |
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"hi there", being an addition, would be "thfcn". |
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"e-mail" would be "-maig". |
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I do program it in FORTH, yes. It's fairly typical of me to back the loser
but it was the first item I ever bought with money I earnt myself. It
was just simpler than trying to work it out on the Windows calculator.
Regarding the number base, I didn't think of that but I did think of
using 1 and 0 as letter substitutes to reduce the size of the numbers
and so also the calculations involved. [Zen_tom], I'll get back to you. |
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OK, [zen_tom], is that not a function rather than a value? I
may have misunderstood, but I have the impression you're
describing something which can be plotted as a series of
connected diagonal line segments in three dimensional
space. Have I got it right? |
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If we follow this usage of punctuation as a
mathematical operator, some of the results would be
enormous! |
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0. 1. There, I've said it all. Anything else is simply redundant. |
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I think you need something like a chaos plot. It
works very nicely for DNA sequences (four letters),
but I don't know if there's any reason it wouldn't work
for a larger alphabet. |
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//0. 1. There, I've said it all. Anything else is simply redundant. |
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Hmm, by removing the zeroes in this fashion, with 1=0, 11=1 and so on, you could save 50% of the bandwidth. |
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I have this nasty feeling that might just work with enough checksums, and a deity with a strange sense of humour. |
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I am afraid zen-toms scheme glimmers with manic madness to me and I had to stop reading it. |
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But I like nineteethly's idea fine. A problem I have is that is hard to go back: there is a loss of value in subtraction and multiple possible word partners could have the same result. |
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I propose instead that the entire word without hyphen be converted to a number, and that number reduced to its cube root. Big languages like German could use the 4th or 5th root. Halfbakery or 2045128869 becomes 1269.33 or abfi.cc. The decimal point is pronounced as a cough. If you want the original back, easy - just cube it and there you go. Of course what comes back has no hyphen but they are pretentious anyway. |
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// no hyphen but they are pretentious anyway. |
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I would quibble with that but I have to - |
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//I build it myself and they see it working// |
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Absolutely, [zen_tom]. Skunkworks. Ask forgiveness, not permission. Or go to work with more intelligent people, if you can find them. |
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//This means that a word such as "bad" would have a
value of 14629. Therefore a word such as "half-baked"
would then be the numbers 20451 and 28869.// |
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How do you figure? I get 806883 - 18968773, or "-at9sy".
Negative at ninesy. |
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BTW, the Ruby programming language can do math like
this very easily. When you convert a string to an
integer or vice versa, you can specify a base between 2
and 36. So the statement ( "half".to_i(36) -
"baked".to_i(36) ).to_s(36) will perform this half-baked
arithmetic. |
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FORTH does it that way too. It has an 8-bit variable called BASE. I may
be wrong. Basically, I didn't go to the extra effort of writing a double-
length integer printing word, which would've been easy. |
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FORTH brings back memories - I never got the hang of FORTH but on the other hand, I loved programming in LISP. Different people's minds work in different ways, I guess. This was all around the time I was being employed as a part-time Pascal/VMS programmer (it seems weird now to think that people actually paid me to do programming - I am not a very good programmer...). |
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That's pretty common for modern programming
languages, especially (so-called) scripting languages
like Python and Ruby. Ruby's version is even terser:
a & b — intersection
a | b — union
a - b — difference
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Also, realize that what you think of as being
“embedded” within a programming language really
means it's just part of the standard library. You can
very easily add that functionality to most programming
languages by either creating a custom array object or
modifying the built-in array. You could also technically
remove it from the language, but there's really no
reason to do so. |
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what is not equal to factorial? |
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