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[06:59] SCUBA is for losers
Date: 6/7/05 at 2:59PM
It seems that an Israeli inventor has come up with something akin to those little tubes the Jedi had in Star Wars I & III, a portable device to obtain breathable air from water! It works by spinning water in a centrifuge until the pressure is low enough to allow the gas to part ways with the liquid - as per Henrys Law (the mass of a gas that dissolves in a definite volume of liquid is directly proportional to the pressure of the gas). The original story is on Isracast but there is also some interesting information on www.technovelgy.com on this and other Sci-Fi inspired inventions.
[01:54] Toolset - the word that never was
Date: 6/7/05 at 9:54AM
I've been reading/proofing a lot of doco over the last couple of days and, amongst other bizzare things, I've come across the word "toolset" spelled tool-set. I was going to correct it and then I thought, "Hey, I don't know which is correct!" so I checked a dictionary search engine. I was a little suprised that there was no entry anywhere for toolset. I looked for tool-set instead...no entry!
I'm sure that anyone in the IT industry will have run across this word many times as it is oft used to describe the functions provided by a particular program or subset thereof. A search of the web for toolset on any engine you care to name returns a large number of hits so the word is certainly in use, it just hasn't made it to the dictionaries yet. Now that I come to think about it, I don't know if it really should either. Writing "toolset" delivers no more to the reader than writing "tool set". However, as I read out on t'internet:
In English, words, particularly adjectives and nouns, are combined into compound structures in a variety of ways. And once they are formed, they sometimes metamorphose over time. A common pattern is that two words — fire fly, say — will be joined by a hyphen for a time — fire-fly — and then be joined into one word — firefly. There is only one sure way to know how to spell compounds in English: use an authoritative dictionary.
So, let us sit back and watch etymology in action!
UPDATE: It seems that toolset IS known, to something called the Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.6). I haven't been able to track down any info on this publication so far but they define "toolset" as:
Main Entry: toolkit
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: a set of software applications that aid a task; also written tool kit, also called toolset
Usage: computing
So there you go! The copyright date on the definition is 2003-2005.
On a seperate note, did you know that the hyphen is actually only one of the horizontal line based punctuation symbols? There are actually three of them. The hyphen, the en dash and the em dash! Read more here.