Paragraphs, please!

Paragraph, a simple concept has become a giant issue all over the Internet. Why was it such a difficult concept to understand? <p> was — and still is today — the HTML tag to indicate that a new regular text paragraph was starting. Initially, it wasn’t necessary to indicate the end of the paragraph with </p>. The beginning of the next one with <p> was enough.

However, all of that has remained in the past, because Microsoft® decided to ignore it. Then people started writing their e-mails with double enters. Today, believe it or not, Microsoft® has changed the way their programs work: they all generate an automatic empty paragraph with just one enter. That is, internally, they’re generating one simple <p> tag.

Too late! The incredible generalized public ignorance about the concept of paragraph has driven more than one code programmer crazy. Just take a look at the blogger.com site. The regular HTML language would simply ignore empty space. In other words, if you typed inside an HTML page two or three or four empty lines, they would all be ignored. If you wanted an empty line, you needed to write <br> — which later on became <br /> — and then you would get one empty line, even if you were within a <p> paragraph. That makes a lot of sense!

Back to blogger.com… Today, if you write inside the HTML section, and you enter empty space, the most horrible thing happens: it prints the empty space! That’s what I would call a total aberration! I would like to punish whoever made that decision.

Also, if you type from the rich edit editor, instead of generating <p> tagged paragraphs after an Enter, you generate empty lines! The aberration completed and rounded up.

It all comes from the error that Microsoft® started several decades ago. And they have corrected the mistake, but now others are actively resuscitating it, making of it even a more aberrant issue. Back to blogger.com, the aberration goes as far as forcing the HTML page to behave — and for this they must do something special — in such a way that you need to write without empty spaces!

What a way to rewrite the world upside-down!

It’s time for us to ask them to get their act together. All rich text editors should generate simple HTML formatting text, so that a style sheet can easily define the personality of the <p> paragraph, the <li> personality, and other very simple and useful stuff.

Thinking In Written Words

Thinking, An Exercise

If you want your muscles to get strong, you need to exercise them. That's a fact. Writing is an activity performed by your brain, an organ that needs to be treated like a muscle, and more. If you don't use your brain, it will lose its capacity to do quickly and efficiently that which it's designed to do: think, invent, imagine, create, solve, decide, write, speak, dream, and similar things. Those are actions. They're all performed by our brains. When you say I, what do you imagine you're referring to? Your brain! Of course, what else?

For some people it's simply impossible to accept the fact that our brains are the organs in our bodies that execute our actions of thinking. All of our memories exist within our brains. Nothing that we imagine, that we decide, think, dream or feel has its origins in any other part of our bodies, but our brains.

What a fantastic piece of design our brains are! They are so incredibly fantastic that we reject to believe that when we say "I", it's our brain the one that's speaking, thinking, deciding, remembering and making choices. We have not been able to design any machine even close in power, to our biological brains. Computers, and the network of them have an incredibly efficient memory system at the service of millions of brains. But they are way less powerful than one single human brain.

We've been able to teach our computers to make decisions. If they're capable of moving robots and robotic arms and robotic storage houses, then they're close, but not quite that close to mirroring what our brains do. Our brains make decisions considering a literal myriad of factors simultaneously. Computers are capable of reasoning down a gigantic hierarchy of if-then-else's at lightning speeds — probably much faster than our brains — but we don't seem to have been able to make any computer consider, simultaneously, variables chosen by the computer itself, in order to end up with a refined decision. Our brains do that all the time, and we don't even know they're doing it!

Also, the most powerful computers — as far as I know, maybe some of you know better — are ordered to consider a preset collection of conditions, including any conditions that might derive from the initial tree node, but not any conditions outside the initial node of reasoning — which is really that hierarchy of if-then-else statements.

The closer we push computers to do what our brains do, the more energy they need to fulfill their tasks. That should give us an idea of the efficiency with which our brains are capable of using energy. The energy we provide to our brains is fed into our system via the carbohydrates of the food we eat. That's all our brains need to function. The modern and most integral dietitians recommend that our calories should come from protein, fats and carbohydrates. We need only 5% of our calories to come from proteins, which leaves 95% to come from carbohydrates and fats. The myth of "high protein diets" for muscle building has been busted. (Please, investigate the details by yourself and let me know what you found out.)

This Was All About Thinking

That's it! We said that at the beginning, and there isn't a good reason — at least, one we could think of right now — to change our minds: this was supposed to have been a thinking exercise. As such, we are free to consider it concluded anytime we feel our muscle — our brain — has worked enough.

And it has! Just as I sat to write this, it occurred to me that, after all, it's our brains the ones that have generated every single piece of culture that exists today or has ever existed on the surface of our planet, The Earth.

And I have questions that were the result of this exercise, and I asked you, the readers, to proceed to finding answers to those questions. Are we getting closer, with computers, to the way our brains work? Have we chosen — randomly, of course — a line of development that will force the increments of technology in our computers to follow a line different from the line our brains followed during evolution?

Losing Work

Probably one of the most hateful experiences has to do with losing minutes or hours of writing work. I love my iPad — combined with the Apple external Bluetooth keyboard — as the perfect tool for writing my articles and blogs. You can’t beat the tool for that kind of work. It’s kind with the environment — burns very little electricity — and it’s extremely easy to take wherever you go.

The problem has to do with applications to create content. Of course, your iPad comes with the Notebook, a great application. It’s always in control of the spellchecking system and never loses a single character. It’s an extremely trustworthy application. However, it doesn’t help at all when you like to write using commands to generate rich text.

Pages is out of the question. It has become an extremely slow application — in my iPad1— and it isn’t flexible at all concerning output in different formats. If you write articles for Blogs, forget it! I like to generate html code, and Pages doesn’t understand or care about that possible need.

One excellent application used to be — and still is — Blogsy. It was specifically created to make the life of bloggers a lot easier when they write using their iPads — not iPhones. The only drawback with Blogsy has to do with a rather constant problem with all iPad writing applications: you need to touch the screen with your fingers in order to generate rich text words, titles, lists, etc. If you’re a touch typist, you simply don’t want to separate your fingers from the keyboard.

That’s where Markdown — and all the applications that take advantage of it — comes into play. Using the MarkDown system, the writer can type and generate rich text without ever taking her fingers away from the keyboard. Phraseology is just one more application that takes advantage of the MarkDown system. It’s incredibly simple, but this isn’t the right place to get an explanation about it.

As I’m typing — using my iPad — I suddenly notice that the program isn’t underlying the misspelled words anymore. That is, it had been doing it, but then, suddenly, it simply stopped doing it. When this happens, it’s a real hassle; you can’t know right away if your text is coming out all right. It seems to be all right, but since the spellchecker is resting — or whatever, Apple People could give us a hint, because the fault is in all applications, except the native ones — but it might not be OK. One can’t know, unless one types a crazy combination — a sure misspelled word — like kisharma — whoa! it’s working, so far — and as it appears underlined with the red little dots, you know you’ve made a mistake.

Phraseology is a rather decent application. So far, I haven’t lost an article. However, if I need to paste the html code in Blogsy, I need to make it in 2 steps: 1) I need to copy and paste into yet another application — Textastic — and then, 2) from there I obtain the html code, that I will be able to paste into Blogsy or directly into the Blog Web Editor — they all accept html.

When I leave my city to stay at a far away place to write my book — and screenplay — I will want to take with me nothing but my iPad, and of course, the aluminum Apple bluetooth keyboard. I just hope all of these applications will have already been perfected to the point of Zero Faults. Something tells me that I will leave for my trip before the Zero Faults condition is met.

I spent most of my active life using Windows® PCs, until the iPhone appeared. I was unable to resist the iPad. I haven’t tested any other tablets out there. However, let me tell you that if the Mother Of All Tablets has all of these faults, flaws and drawbacks — applications crash or slow down — then the world is still rather far from overcoming the PC.

Did I mention that the most expensive keyboard in the world — the Apple Aluminum Bluetooth — doesn’t have an On/Off switch? Do they have a special commission from the battery companies? I know, it’s extremely economical as far as using batteries is concerned — a set of two, lasts for about 3 months, using it 3 hours daily — but, why the lack of switch? I take out the batteries when I won’t be using it for a while; and I need to do it during transportation, or else the keyboard is “live”, looking for matching equipment — and wastefully burning batteries!