The Newsletter of the Society has always focused on the news and on the lighter side of our specialty. There was indeed a time (around the mid seventies) when under the editorship of the missed, but not forgotten, Lalit Bahl (then of IBM Research at Yorktown Heights) its coverage of the lighter side knew no limits. While perusing old copies of the Newsletter (how do I have time to do this?), I came across numerous specimens of hilarious items which I thought might interest our readers today.
Of course, publishing again items that appeared in the newsletter before would constitute unhealthy recycling and, perhaps, the ultimate form of feedback. But, on the other hand, careful and selective sampling with appropriate commentary would seem to be a legitimate form of nostalgic rumination. So, here it goes.
Under the rubric of competitions among the readers, the editor at the time was solicited humorous and/or preposterous entries that centered on the richness of the vocabulary that Information Theory employs. Borrowing terms from everyday's and everybody's English, a technical field offers the possibility for numerous "doubles-entendres" which exploit the technical meaning of common words that is ingrained in the minds of scientists and engineers. Thus, words like "process", "field", "source", "bound", etc., can become playful and whimsical tools in the hands of some of our imaginative colleagues. Lalit engaged heavily in this game with results that enchanted and entertained. So, without much further ado, let me quote a few.
In the very first "competition", Lalit asked the readers to invent fanciful definitions of technical terms, thereby providing the suggestive guidelines for the competitions that followed through most of his term. Here are some of the entries elicited by that call:
* Ensemble Average: mediocre singing group * Product Code: Department of Commerce regulation * Expectation: a real number that upperbounds performance * Lim Sup: a stew of appendages * Union Bound: engaged couple * Transversal Equalizer: gay affirmative action * etc., etc.
Of course, credit must be given to the inventors; to motivate the readers to do some guesswork (or research) on the matter, let me only reveal that the above-quoted definitions came from very distinguished members of our Society in California.
In a subsequent competition, Lalit sought titles for books that weren't likely to be hits in the market. Here is some of what he received from the readers:
- Minimum Likelihood Decoding of Convolutional Codes - Backward Error Control - Crime-Detection Algorithms - Priors in Non-Bayesian Estimation - Almost Sure Prediction of Wiener Processes - Forging Markov Chains - Entropy, Black Holes, and Atheism: A Reply to Information, Photosynthesis, and Religion - etc., etc.
Come to think of it, the last entry might actually be quite a hit today. Not too long ago I came across an actual book written by the architect/inventor of the "Arcosanti" Community north of Phoenix, Arizona that was titled: "The $\Omega$-principle; an Eschatological Hypothesis". My honest review of that book would simply be: hundreds of pages of incomprehensible "gibberish"! By the way, the contributors of the above entries were also noted and famous (but different from those of the previous group).
There were many other competitions with similar flavor that eventually exhausted the interest (and the patience) of the readers. From time to time I may revisit them in the future and choose a few to quote in this space to tease you and entertain you. I am willing to bet, however, that almost every reader secretly created his/her own little entries without ever revealing them (pretty much like the natural urge to -- squeeze the Charmin!).
But Lalit was also in search of hilarious items of other forms. Under the title of "Marginalia" he was discovering and presenting oddities and funny misunderstandings of technical terms from general press stories. Here is an example, excerpted from the Electronic Engineering Times of September 4, 1978:
"To improve the data, convolutional coding is performed on board the spacecraft and sequential decoding is performed at ground station locations. A 24-bit code, explains Lokerson, generates a parody that depends on the previous 24-bits of data. A data error in the register is influenced by the next 24-bits not being received. Decoding algorithms will detect the bad bit and make corrections".
In addition to the "voodoo" level of technical depth, this excerpt is a monument to the awful use of the language by some of our colleagues.
And talking about use of language here is another "marginalia" sample (reprinted from the September 1976 issue of the {\em Capital Letter}, published by the Society for Technical Communication) that parodies the rules of correct language usage; it's funny, but also very instructive.
1. Each pronoun agrees with their antecedant. 2. Just between you and I, case is important. 3. Verbs has to agree with their subjects. 4. Watch out for irregular verbs which has crope into our language. 5. Don't use no double negatives. 6. A writer mustn't shift your point of view. 7. When dangling, don't use participles. 8. Join classes good, like a conjunction should 9. Don't write a run-on sentence you got to punctuate it. 10. About sentence fragments. 11. In letters themes reports articles and stuff like that we use commas to keep a string of items apart. 12. Don't use commas, which aren't necessary. 13. Its important to use apostrophe's right. 14. Don't abbrev. 15. Check to see if you any words out. 16. In my opinion I think that an author when he is writing shouldn't get into the habit of making use of too many unnecessary words that he doesn't really need. 17. Last but not least, lay off cliches.
And with that I leave you until next time.