On Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:08:47 -0500, Doug Ewell <dewell@...> wrote:

> 1. Maybe it's the fact that ASCII doesn't support subscripts and
> superscripts, that typewriters "supported" them only at full character
> size and only with manual frobbing of the platen, and that not everyone
> writes in HTML.

All so true. With plain text, I can understand; however, on a Web page,
HTML is all-but universal (FTP directories and such might be exceptions),
and subs and sups are quite easy to do.

> 2. Do science and mathematics actually suffer from "disrepute"?

Well, close. Consider the proportion of kids who choose those fields for
serious study, or for careers. They are misleadingly called "hard"; they
need not be, especially when well taught -- but there's a real shortage of
qualified teachers. The social climate in the USA certainly seems to have
a strong anti-intellectual element, and prejudice against science and
math, along with those who know a lot about them is part of it. The lot of
a school youngster with a genuine interest in matters of the mind is, most
unfortunately, typically not an easy one.

> 3. It's not as though "H2O" without the subscript has a different
> meaning. Everyone knows what is being talked about, and nobody ever
> says "H-sub-two-O" in speech anyway; it's always "H-two-O."

Of course. However, what's on the page (as Qalamites know especially well)
doesn't correspond exactly to ordinary speech (other than IPA
transcriptions, that is...)

> And most people who call it "H-two-O" are not chemists or particularly
> knowledgeable about chemistry; they are just using a trendy slang term
> for "water."

Indeed. (You remind me of the spoofs about dihydrogen monoxide, btw.)

There was, and probably still is, a carbon-dioxide delivery truck in
Boston with "Co₂" prominently displayed -- "dicobalt", a nonexistent
substance, afaik. In turn, that reminds me of the Monroe Community College
(Rochester, NY), where students painstakingly made a huge wall chart of
the periodic table of the elements. (This was no later than about 1964;
the chart seemed to be some years old.) With great care, they had
hand-lettered all the two-letter chemical element symbols with the second
letter as a small capital.

> 4. Where did you see "1012" for ten to the 12th power? Who in his
> right mind would expect that to be legible?

Nobody. I have seen that form quite a few times on Web pages; many seemed
to be the results of automatic or semi-automatic text format conversion.
Most were scientific or technical papers. The authors and/or editors
apparently didn't have a look at what was ultimately published on the Web.

> 5. Unicode makes all this easy: H₂O, 10¹².

Ahh, lovely! Of course. Utf-8 to the rescue!

Thanks, Doug; good thoughts!

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
Science education in Kansas: The water in
the oceans does not fall off the edges of the
Earth because it is God's will that it not do so.