Jedi Logic

This morning I was re-reading parts of Donald Davie's "Articulate Energy" on syntax in poetry.

I couldn't help but remember what I had heard on hulu.com as an advert during an episode of "The Daily Show".
Toyota was telling us that they are building cars for us LIKE they always have.  Wrong.  Bad idea.  Don't even start to make a comparison.  Perhaps the writer's thought was to plant the idea of preference, as in, "we do like Toyotas". Why are they not trying to tell us that they will be building cars for us just AS they have always intended and just AS they have so often done in the past?

In conversational English, a medical researcher in a CNN interview says that the treatment results in LESS visits to the emergency room.  He did not say FEWER nor did he mean "FEWER expensive visits."  But he is merely speaking, even if he is speaking as a medical expert.

Now a news report on healthcare legislation before the US House: the journalist tells us that the Democrats have been told "to try and secure passage" of a bill.  A reader conversant in German would not be surprised to write two infinitives - the double infinitive - as many textbooks have been written to try to teach you this curiosity.  We can avoid the construction with "in an effort to teach" or some such.  Maybe they were told to try to secure passage of the bill, but the report sounds like gossip fed to a reporter.

So how does "to try and secure" end up on the internet in a published CNN news report?  I have an idea: the likes of gmail and blog software miss this sort of error.  There is no editor reading the submission from the "contributor" - it simply passes muster as would most any comment from a reader which might be appended to the article.

At what point will internet news be reduced to the accumulating tweets of a Rick Sanchez?  I will try and tell you.  My blog entries are written spontaneously and with minimal edits and corrections - or they do not serve my various purposes.  I post them freely, less as I see fit and often as not as if in a fit.  Some are more fit than others.

Cool Curl 'live' code widget

Over at eclectic-pencil I have a post on a very cool Curl widget that rivals almost anything I have ever seen expand and collapse on a web page.

What I neglect to mention is that in the example, the only code to create the XMl tree is this:

   let xmldoc:XDMDocument =
{build-xml preserve-whitespace? = false, loc}
|| ...
{XDMTreeControl open? = true, xmldoc.root}

Which you would be hard-pressed to beat in Seaside for Smalltalk or in Groovy. Concise.

TiScript also has an alternative DOM and some nice features as a JavaScript alternative, but Curl 5.0 is a mature, full RIA product with 'live' code for inspection and a focus on the client-side. It is almost Smalltalk but it was also built for the web (in fairness, Curl goes about as far back as Smalltalk VisualWave.)

The only cool but alive technologies as neglected as Curl 5.0 must be Gemstone/S and Rebol 2.6.3 ... and the latter is soon to be 2.7.x with 3.0 in the wings ...

Watch for a Seaside for Gemstone/S beta in the news soon ...

PS For people living on AIR and FLASH, Rebol/FLASH went 2.0 today ...

Curl and Perl regexp

One of the nice thinga about Curl, the web content langauge, is that when you use {regexp-match ... you will be using the regexp flags that you know from Perl.

I will put a page on Curl regexp over at eclectic-pencil under the Curl/Surge RTE pages and {import * from CURL.LANGUAGE.REGEXP }

My document links for Curl are also kept there.

http://www.eclectic-pencil.com

technorati is having problems with the frames in http://www.eclectic-pencil/ so this blog may run from a new home ... and as this was the home of my logiquewerks blog ...