MSGID: 1:153/716.0 14d33402
REPLY: 2:221/6.0 610bbd62
CHRS: IBMPC 2
Hi, Anton!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

AS>  Remember the book about witchcraft that the doctor shows 
AS>  to the heroine in Suspiria? It has that double spacing 
AS>  between sentences, and it looks good!


          No, I don't.  But I see my copy of the KJV of the Bible, published
in 1950, also uses it.  AFAIC the traditional method of typesetting... which
folks later duplicated as best they could on the typewriter... is pleasing to
the eye while enabling the reader to slow down & think about the content. 
I'll stop to admire a nice turn of phrase in whatever I happen to be reading,
and the KJV of the Bible is my "go-to" version unless I need a bit more
clarification....  :-)



AS>  Life was slower in the past, 


          Indeed.  A century or two ago the paterfamilias... if he could
afford it... would buy a book he liked, then read it aloud to his wife &
children.  In such situations the extra spacing printers used after various
punctuation marks probably made the task easier.  But by the time I was about
to enter university condensed books & speed reading appeared to be more
important to other folks.

          Nowadays I often notice people on the street with a coffee cup in
one hand & a cell phone in the other, some of them so engaged in what they're
doing with their phone they can't take their eyes off it long enough to pay
attention to their surroundings even if they're crossing a busy street.  Such
things tend to happen gradually until people like you & me wonder how we got
there....  :-)



AS>  and many technical innovations were gained not so
AS>  much by disciplined engineering and research, but 
AS>  by hard and painful trial and error, like groping 
AS>  in the dark, through several generations of masters 
AS>  and craftsmen.


          Uh-huh.  I learned to make compost... AKA "black gold" among
overaged hippies like me... from my father.  If e.g. kitchen waste, grass
clippings, and fallen leaves can produce good fertilizer at no cost except for
a bit of effort or if the indigenous peoples learned to plant corn with beans,
why don't others pay more attention?  I guess they're looking for quicker &
easier methods.  The City of Vancouver will now accept whatever organic
material we put in the Green Bin, but we put the really good stuff in our
compost box.  Meanwhile others buy heavily advertised synthetics guaranteed to
keep the economy rolling... (sigh).



AS>  Thomas Eddison wrote about his method that failure 
AS>  is the discovery another of way that does not work. 
AS>  This approach is not always inferrior in that in can 
AS>  lead to inventions that modern engineers, going by 
AS>  the more direct route, overlook.


          As a student, I noticed many paper aeroplanes outside the
engineering building at a certain time of year... and I noticed they all
looked exactly the same.  Yes, these things fly very well.  In theory, or so I
am told, bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly... although they do.  I imagine
Mother Nature had some ideas yet to be discovered by people like Thomas Edison.

          Our daughter has a book called MISTAKES THAT WORKED which
illustrates this principle.  Allededly tea was discovered about 4700 years ago
by a Chinese emperor, e.g., who was boiling a pot of water outdoors when a few
leaves from a nearby shrub fell into it.  He enjoyed the aroma, and tasted the
water....  :-)
--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
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