[ih] On queueing from len

[John Linn]

I recall the ad for a stenography or shorthand school that ran in the NY subway ca. 1970: if u cn rd this msg, u cn gt a gd jb wth hi py. I may not have that exactly, but you get the idea. Might work well for a texting school today, were there to be such a thing.

--Sent from JL's mobile

> On Oct 5, 2022, at 16:22, Steve Crocker via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Miaouing, a variant of meowing, has similar structure.
> 
> Several decades ago, Vint and I playfully created a small algorithm for
> compressing English words in a way that approximated actual abbreviations.
> The rules were:
> 
>   - Always retain first and last letter
>   - Delete a, e, i, o and u except if they're in the first or last position
>   - Delete r and n if they're preceded by a vowel and followed by a
>   consonant
> 
> The above text becomes
> 
> Svrl dcds ago, Vt ad I plyflly crtd a smll algrithm fr cmprssg Eglsh wds.
> The rls wre:
> 
>   - Alwys rtn fst ad lst lttr
>   - Dlte a, e, i, o ad u excpt if thy're in the frst or lst pstn
>   - Dlte r ad n if thy're prcdd by a vwl ad fllwd by a csnt
> 
> It was natural to ask which words compressed the most.  The metric we used
> was (l+1)/(L+1), where l is the length after compression and L is the
> length before compression.  The "+1" counted the space after a word.
> 
> "Queueing" came immediately to mind.  My girlfriend's mother quickly
> supplied "miaouing."
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 5, 2022 at 4:01 PM Bill Ricker via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>>> Some of these guys have happily adopted my “unusual” spelling of
>> “queueing”
>>> with the extra “e” since I loved the idea of it being the only word in
>>> english with 5 vowels in a row (if you spell it the British way, which is
>>> why I chose the British spelling).
>>> 
>> 
>> I am unreasonably pleased that this was intentional Britishism for this
>> especially nerdy purpose !
>> (Among my harmless sins is using 'perl' extended regular expressions to
>> cheat at word puzzles.)
>> 
>> I suspect my mentor MAP having been a STEM-humanities-STEM
>> double-cross-over would have appreciated also.
>> 
>> So I guess they read my book
>>> 
>> 
>> I for one did.
>> 
>> At my first full-time job, we had a weekly brown-bag seminar working
>> through the LK QT 2-volume "book".
>> (The proofs felt like probability/statistics proofs to me. That's not a bad
>> thing, that's more "flavor".)
>> 
>> Our purposes were more for Simulations and Mathematical Modeling of
>> physical/social systems than for [IH]-topical reasons; while we were just
>> down the street from Project Mac and MIT LCS,  we at DOT TSC† were
>> un-networked. I had to walk over to MIT to use an ITS Guest Account to read
>> SF-Lovers and the like. (Sneakernet!) We didn't even have local email on
>> the TSC PDP-10 running stock DECsystem 10 then.
>> (It may have been an option that Systems group hadn't installed? Or not
>> shared with the great unwashed of applications programmers?)
>> (Hence i hacked up a text-skeuomorphic messaging system using System 1022
>> DBMS.)
>> 
>> The networks (in the more general sense of the word) that we were
>> interested in better simulating were mostly automotive commuter traffic
>> jams.
>> (And potentially airport takeoff and landing queues and rail etc., but the
>> roadways were more likely to exhibit the most surprising, seemingly
>> paradoxical theorems on networks, e.g. Braess's Paradox
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Braess%27s_Paradox&redirect=no
>>> 
>> [1] , mechanically simulated by Steve Mould
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg73j3QYRJc> [2] .)
>> 
>> † (now Volpe Center; i was with SDC A Burroughs Co, onsite contract staff,
>> 1980-81; yes that SDC)
>> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
>> [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg73j3QYRJc
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>> 
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history