A Little Dotty? * is an Artifact The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 22 Dec 1999 https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2053 Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. ============================================================================== Talarican — 22 Dec 1999, 21:29 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ mark millman — 23 Dec 1999, 09:47 follows, by subject match Talarican > At 9:29 pm Wednesday 22 December 1999, "Talarican" > wrote: > 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. I just got back from a business trip to England, where I saw people use a dot, not at half-height in the line, but at the bot- tom of the line (just like a punctuation period), to indicate mul- tiplication. Whether this is also customary in France, or among Francophone mathematicians, I can't say, but it seems possible. Mark Millman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------