Despite my vast (nay, encyclopedic) knowledge and understanding of all aspects of the Internet, one thing puzzles me. That is how I can send a message to a group and have it appear literally within seconds, and then send another which will take more than 24 hours to appear. Puzzled Los Gatos Sciolist -- Ah. I'm happy to report that you have come to the right place for the answer to this deep question. Before I reveal the cause of the common phenomenon you're wondering about, though, I'd like to point out some other quirky behaviors that you may have noticed. .. Some days your car starts on the first turn of the starter. Some days it doesn't start at all. .. Some recent nights have been brilliantly lighted by the full moon. Tonight I've waited and waited, but all I got was wet. These have nothing to do with why one message is transmitted immediately while another takes 24 hours. The reason is complex, and we technologists don't often expect even to hear such sophisticated questions from those outside the inner circle (HAHAHAHAHAH WE KNOW EVERYTHING), and many of us are loathe to reveal the hidden cause. But you seem trustworthy, so... Look at your keyboard. Notice how the keys are all out of order? You'd think they'd be in alphabetical order, wouldn't you? But no, they are arranged in an odd pattern called QWERTY, originally devised by a typewriter manufaturer to slow typists down to the point where his machines wouldn't jam. Imagine, now, when you send a message down the wires, how differently the many routers and interfaces that the message goes through are affected by different juxtapositions of letters in your message. Just as a modest change in the original position of a chess problem has a dramatic effect on the time required to solve it, the tiniest change in the arrangement of letters in your message - often not even noticeable to any but the expert eye, and even then only with complex measurement equipment - can wreak havoc with every interface the message must pass through. Imagine you had a car wider than the normal freeway lane. Going through interchanges would be a particular trial; how quickly you could pass through would depend on the amount of other traffic, the number of odd-shaped oncoming cars, and many other factors -- much too complex to summarize quickly. But I'm sure you get the idea. And just as if you drove through many interchanges in your odd-shaped car you could be delayed dramatically, changes in the letter composition of your message slow it down every time it goes through a router, the internet's interchange. The letters W and M are particularly noxious in this way. If they happen to fall within the same word, as in women, or if multiples of them fall within a word, as in mammal, or wow, their retardant effect is in fact squared; this was first proved by Von Neumann in 1944, although certain notes of Ada Lovelace in 1861 indicate that she, too, had the basic idea. The vowels, on the other hand, particularly I and O, are quite slippery and can speed up the trip of your message through a router; in fact, an I almost cancels an M, and words with many Is and Os, such as oil, lion, noise, and onion, can have a remarkable accelerating effect. These are only the extreme cases. Each letter, and in fact each key, has its own lexical friction coefficient (LFC), which often depends on the relationship of the letter to other letters in the word and to other words in the message. LFC tables were originally compiled by Hollerith in 1901, for use in his famous Census-tabulating work, but were not made available to the general public until IBM brought out the 407 tabulating machine in the mid-thirties, and published a full set of lexical friction data in the documentation that was issued with the machine. Later, in 1962, when IBM first produced the selectric typewriter, new LFC tables had to be constructed; these were made available in technical libraries. Depending on the net lexical friction of a message, the transit time of a message through a router can differ by as much as a factor of fifty. This in itself is hardly sufficient to explain the difference between instant delivery and 24-hour delivery, however. The biggest part of the effect is a second-order result of high-LFC messages passing through routers. Just as when a stream slows down it deposits much more silt and other sediment on its bed, a high-lfc message, traveling slowly through a router, leaves what amounts to arterial plaque in the routers optical fiber connections. Optical fiber builds up LFC-related plaque anyway, but normally so slowly that fibers don't have to be cleaned or changed for years. However, a chance confluence of many high-LFC message can deposit so much LFC plaque in the fiber connections of a router that the router can be totally disabled. Even if the router is not put completely out of service by fiber plaque, it can transmit mesages so slowly that many recipient protocol managers conclude correctly that their correspondents have failed, and request retransmission. Thus high-LFC messages not only move more slowly through the internet, but actually raise the internet's traffic load while they do so. This issue has been studied in great detail by my erstwhile employer, whose interest in fiber plaque, LFC aggregation, and the resulting internet congestion is so high that it has formed a special task force to study the matter and recommend solutions within a year. I fully expect, however, that since the matter is dependent on keyboard design originally, these studies will probably result in little improvement, and once again we will be left anxiously awaiting the next-faster generation of optics, routers, and computers, meanwhile helplessly floundering in a stew of such technical complexity that only the few can comprehend it. I would suggest that to improve your transmission times you should begin by tabulating the letter counts in your messages, and correlate them with message delivery delays. This technique is crude, but should give you a rough idea of what to expect. If your needs go beyond manual counting, you can find any number of lexical friction coefficient analysis programs in the commercial world, replete with graphic interfaces and LCF-optimization capabilities. I'm glad to have been of service in this matter, and will make myself available for further questions as they occur to you.

-- laugh (-ing@the.funny.yoke), November 13, 1999

Answers

I really have no idea what it was you just tried to say.

Could you run down to Sears and pick up a bucket of carriage returns and try again? Remember, the paragraph is your friend.

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), November 13, 1999.

:::Laughing heartily::: "Remember, the paragraph is your friend." Ron, that's a gem! Sometimes you guys pop off things that really make me laugh.

-- (resigned@this.point), November 13, 1999.