Expressions and their orders

We have a world made up of strings of characters and the and the purpose of this post is to define expressions, and a partial order on them, which will be needed in posts to come. The second post of the series started at reference 1.

Let our characters be the letters, upper and lower case, the numerals (plus period to allow real numbers, plus hyphen to allow negative numbers), underscore (to allow strings to be segmented) and four punctuation characters (open and close round brackets, equals sign and space). For completeness, one might add single quotes, which can be used to bracket otherwise non-conformant strings, but we do not bother with that here.

Let our tokens be composed of letters, numerals and underscore, with the rule that a token which is not a number must start with a letter, must not contain punctuation characters, must not contain period or hyphen and must not end with an underscore. So ‘AbcDE12’ and ‘cat_123’ are tokens while ‘Abc=def’ and ‘123cat’ are not. Space is our main separator.

Then our expressions are things which look like ‘sat(cat on=mat with=mouse123)’. In this, neither the head word (in this case, sat) nor labels (in this case, on and with) may be numbers. But expressions may be nested as in ‘sat(cat_blue on=mat with=mouse(colour=white reference=123))’.

The elements of the expression governed by the head word are called its phrases. The elements together are called its body.

We do not expect, but do not forbid, a label to be used more than once at any one level.

The order of phrases which are labelled is not significant, the order of those which are not, is. So we treat ‘sat(cat on=mat with=mouse123)’ as the same as ‘sat(cat with=mouse123 on=mat)’. We can put it more formally, putting an equivalence relation on the set of expressions, but things are usually clear enough without going to those lengths.

Such expressions might be regarded as formalised containers for natural language, certainly by those IT people holding out for a universal language, and are quite like expressions in html, the lingua franca of the internet.

We define a simple version of a relation which we call instantiation. It is possible to define much more complicated versions of this relation, versions which do a great deal of work, which might, for example, make use of some or all of the logical connectors, but we do not expect to need such here.

Roughly speaking, one expression A is an instance of another expression B, if B can be obtained from A by deleting suitable elements, by which we mean deleting phrases, deleting labels, deleting bodies or deleting trailing elements of segmented tokens. Intuitively, but inaccurately:

• A is more detailed than B
• B describes a larger class of objects than A
• A describes a member of the set B.

Instantiation is transitive, that is to say, if A is an instance of B and B is an instance of C, then A is an instance of C. Which brings us to orders.

Orders

We like to order things and ordering seems to be built into our natures – with some evidence for this being the way that quite small children can come to like to count things. For older people who want to play more complicated games, alphabetic ordering has a lot going for it, not least that one can order any pair of strings (of characters). One string always comes before or after the other. The ordering usually used in dictionaries and encyclopedias. But such orders can be a bit destructive, they have no regard to any inner structure that the strings in question might have. One only has to think of the way that an alphabetic ordering treats strings like ‘rat-123’, ‘rat-1’ and ‘rat-23’, which do not come out in the order one wants at all, and to get it right one has to go to the bother of adding prefixing & padding zeroes to give ‘rat-123’, ‘rat-001’ and ‘rat-023’

In the present case, we can use the relation of instance developed above to generate a less destructive order, albeit a weaker order, in that it is only a partial order (for which click on illustration). Given two expressions, under this order, one cannot always say that one expression comes before or after another. Sometimes there is nothing to be said on the matter.

But what you are buying is that when two expressions are related by the order, that this expression is an instance of that expression, then they are indeed related. They have stuff in common.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/from-grids-to-objects.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_set. For the illustration.

Group search key: sra.

Cranes

I notice cranes from time to time, particularly when they are particularly large, but today the interest is different.

One sometimes comes across expressions, idioms, which translate. So honeymoon means roughly the same in French as it does in English, despite their words for both honey and moon being quite different from ours.

Then today, browsing in my Larousse from Tooting, I thought I had come across another example, the crane, being both a sort of tall bird and a contraption used for lifting things, perhaps on a dockside or on a building site, with the French word 'grue' having the same pair of meanings. But checking in OED, I find that both cranes and grues come from a northern European word sometimes spelled 'krano', so not like honeymoon at all. With some languages taking the 'kr' to 'tr', while others take it to the French 'gr'. And while we go for 'cr'.

PS: I learn in the margins, that in this country, cranes were considered good eating and so eaten out of existence, while they are still common on the mainland.

Compensation culture

I was irritated to read in Saturday's DT this morning that one of our ministers is pressing for Volkswagen to pay compensation to people who bought one of their diesel cars under false pretenses, as it were. All to do with Volkswagen cooking the emissions books.

But it is not clear to me that any great damage has been done to these people. They presumably bought diesel because they get to spend less on fuel that way, an objective which they have presumably met. Saving the planet was, in the great majority of cases, entirely secondary.

So our minister is just encouraging us to think that when anything goes wrong, reach for the lawyers and claim some dosh, preferably on a no-win no-fee basis. A disease which is quite well enough entrenched in our culture as it is.

My own view is that the lawyers also have done quite well enough out of this one already, and a better approach going forward would be for the countries concerned to whack Volkswagen with suitable fines and for the proceeds to be paid into central funds. Much better use of Volkswagen's money. Or better still, for them to volunteer suitable sums, to do a bit of public penance, perhaps in sackcloth and ashes, in the old style, and for us all to do without any more lawyering. This golden goose has already been plucked.

PS: hopefully Volkswagen can lay their hands on some suitable people to do penance, with the image above turned up by google, from I know not where. Readers may be interested to know that the tunic illustrated there is called a cutty sark (as in the famous clipper), and used to be used, in the olden days, for the ritual humiliation of lady offenders in the low churches of Scotland. The priests, needless to say, were all men. And, coming forward a few years, not so unlike the gowns they like to dress you up in in hospitals. See OED for some of this.

Big pharma

I noticed the unfortunate side effects of the massive promotion of OxyContin at reference 1. While the sort of stuff you often get in very small print inside your pill boxes is to be found at reference 2.

As it happens the Murdoch press - the people who do the Sun - published a story in the TLS in December which goes over similar ground, but this time the drug in question is called Ritalin from CIBA. Similar ground in that a drug invented for perfectly respectable, even noble motives, can have unexpected side effects. Side effects which can be amplified by the commercial interests involved. A story which was ostensibly a review of a book by one Alan Schwartz about the whole sorry business.

It seems that Ritalin and its relatives became the drug of choice for a children's complaint called ADHD, a complaint which has been around for a long time. Both Rousseau and Tolstoy appear to have had it, leading to an unfortunate association between ADHD and literary creativity, just as there has long been an unfortunate association between excessive consumption of booze and creativity generally.

But what we have now is a veritable pandemic, driven by drug companies playing on the fears of parents for their children, with one in seven children in the US being diagnosed with ADHD and a good proportion of those winding up on Ritalin. The drug company help things along by paying lots of medical people to puff the drug for them on the quiet, rather in the way that lots of articles in women's magazines are actually placed there by advertisers, rather than being written, as it would seem, by more or less even handed reporters. To be fair, they do now have to own up if they do this, but it is easy to miss the small print in which the owning up is done.

The image above, turned up by google, suggests that Ritalin is also being peddled as a cure for miscellaneous depression and fatigue.

PS: I believe the US is one of the few countries in the world where drug companies are allowed to advertise directly to potential customers. Maybe we have the right idea with NICE after all, even if they do make mistakes from time to time. See reference 3. Let's hope that they are not on Hunt's hit list, along with the rest of the NHS.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/somewhat-depressing.html.

Reference 2: http://app.purduepharma.com/xmlpublishing/pi.aspx?id=o.

Reference 3: https://www.nice.org.uk/.

Happy New Year!

I am happy to be able to report that the aloe did indeed make it into flower for the New Year, at least in the sense that the bottom three florets - of the couple of dozen or so - have opened up, revealing orange tipped stamens but what looks like a yellow interior. So I win the bet.

Current thinking is that the florets are not going to open up in the way, for example, of the buttercup used in school biology classes. More like, albeit much smaller than, the florets of foxglove.

The dud leaves, one of which is visible top left, with another smaller one at the bottom of the snap, are scattered along the entire length of the flower stem. It is not clear whether they are floret buds which did not make it or what.

We may bet on the maximum number of florets up and running at any one time.

Group search key: tfa.

Trolley 63

Trolley 63 was captured in the hedge, in Kiln Lane itself, on the way back to Sainsbury's with trolley 62. Well out of range of any security camera, so a full score. I left the sign in the hedge.

This trolley duly returned, I came across the second of the two trolleys I had marked down for collection after returning trolley 61b (reference 1) down the alley, being returned to Sainsbury's by someone else. A short someone else, accompanied by a rather ugly dog, possibly some sort of attack dog, not the sort of person whom one would usually associate with trolley collection duties. But I thought it best not to inquire where he got the trolley from.

PS: the first trolley marked down having been trolley 62.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/trolley-61b.html.

Trolley 62

Spotted the day before, outside the flats at the junction of Blenheim and Longmead Roads. I think the trolley has been away from Sainsbury's for some time, with someone having seen fit to tape up the handle. Furthermore, one of the sturdy mauve, handle holding clips was cracked, suggesting rough usage.

Will Sainsbury's weed it out of the line to which I returned it and scrap it?