From: "Talarican" <chemmie@mindspring.com>
Subject: (urth) A Little Dotty? * is an Artifact
Date: Wed, 22 Dec 1999 21:29:03 

Dan,
" Hmmm, I always assumed the plate read: M . Million

Sometimes a dot is used to indicate multiplication.  "Monsieur" is
often abbreviated to "M." "

You're right, of course. I would actually have preferred to more correctly
use a "bullet" dot floating at mid-line height for this, but of course the
email character set wouldn't support it, so far as I know.

But that's how _I_ envisioned  what Number Five sees. His hungover
revelation comes when he realizes that the dot is not a period but a dot at
half-height in the line of text.

I tried to approximate it with an asterisk, which of course is also used as
a multiplication sign, esp. in most programming languages.

BTW I apologize to all for my mishap last couple of posts; I didn't realize
my new email software defaulted to HTML.


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/