I’m not sure what else you would search for, honestly. If not vanilla pizza, then perhaps a sicilian, or montanara, a deep-dish, slices of neapolitan, whole-wheat thin-crust, or stuffed crust?

Well now you can search for pizza to your heart’s content on the NewsBlur Android app. Good luck with your tomato pie.

Sometimes words just have to be spelled for others. I’ve been on phone conversations where the person on the other end is spelling for me and it’s painful. “Was that a ‘b’ or a ‘p’?” Sometimes they’ll try on the fly to use words with the beginning letter trying to convey the letter: “B as in boy”. Then they’ll get stumped mumbling while they think desperately for ‘k’ words… ‘ketchup’. Okay, but is that really ketchup or catsup? Now think how much easier spelling is on a phone than over a poor quality radio channel. What we say, and how we say it is the key to our brain’s ability to error correct human speech. It’s a solved problem that was built into radio etiquette long ago.

The Sam Houston National Forest is miles away from the repeater we use for communication during the local IronMan and other public service events. With spotty cell coverage our radios are the only viable tool. But it’s really amazing how much RF a pine forest can absorb. With these events near the limits of repeater coverage it can be a challenge finding a spot that isn’t in a ‘hole’, even using my 50 watt mobile rig.

Event participants sometimes need assistance so we call in a support vehicle to pick them up. We’ll give out their bib number and gender, “Rider is female, foxtrot, with bib number, figures, 1234”, for a female with bib 1234. A male is a ‘mike’. We use letters selected from a standard phonetic, or spelling, alphabet so nobody fumbles for words.

Name the Police Officer

Spelling alphabets came about because early users of radios, like police departments, had similar problems with weak or uncertain signals. An officer calling in a license plate needs to be accurate. Unfortunately, English letters are easily confused. Did the officer, or ham during an event, say “P” or “B”?

The police started using a phonetic alphabet where the first letter of a word is the letter being transmitted. So in my case my plate is Kilo Five Romeo Uniform Delta, using the current NATO phonetic alphabet. But it took us awhile to get this far. An early alphabet used by the Los Angeles Police Department was based on people’s names:

Adam Boy Charles David Edward Frank George Henry Ida John King Lincoln 
Mary Nora Ocean Paul Queen Robert Sam Tom Union Victor William Xray 
Yellow Zebra

The New York City PD alphabet used a few different names: Charlie Peter Young. In 1948 the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) adopted the words in the NYPD alphabet with the substitution of Baker Lewis Nancy Otto Susan Thomas Zebra.

One motivation for changing the words in an alphabet is to improve comprehension. A local police department’s officers would understand the local accents of other officers so comprehension is high. It is more difficult to understand some words when two hams with different US regional accents are communicating. Accents helped drive the changes to the ARRL alphabet.

As implied in its name, a primary role for the ARRL in early days was relaying messages across the US and internationally. This was in the days when long distance telephone calls were so expensive an individual used them only for emergencies. A friendly local ham could insert a message into the ARRL’s National Traffic System and it would speed its way to the recipient. Unfortunately, that system doesn’t work quite as well today.

Adoption of NATO Phonetic Alphabet

The aviation industry and the military faced the same comprehension problem working across national boundaries. This led to the development of the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet also known as the NATO or International Civil Aviation Organization alphabets. It’s widely used by other organizations. The ARRL and hams fall under the jurisdiction of International Telecommunication Union which specifies the use of this alphabet, so it replaced the 1948 alphabet. The goal of these alphabets is to allow transmission of messages regardless of the speaker’s native language, signal interference or noise, and, as mentioned, weak signal strength.

There was still a problem. The various language users didn’t pronounce the words in the same way, at least following the English spelling of the word. That required pronunciation guides for different speakers. The chart shown is for English speakers. One for a French speaker would be different.

Spitting out Digits and Avoiding Deltas

The transmission of digits is equally important. Distinguishing flight 123, a 767, from flight 456, a 737, on an airport landing approach is rather critical. In a related aviation issue, the word “Delta” is not used for “D” at airports, like Atlanta’s Hatfield-Jackson Airport, where Delta Airlines has a major presence. To avoid confusion, “Data”, “Dixie” or “David” are used.

To address the digit issue, a pronunciation guide is supplied for the digits, also. It sounds a little strange to our inner ears when we read the list. It sounds a lot better in reality, although typically hams just use our day-to-day pronunciations.

Message handling itself requires some adaptations. When a tricky word is being passed in a message, the sender should spell it for the recipient. For example, “This article was edited by Szczys, I spell, Sierra Zulu Charlie Zulu Yankee Sierra.” Similarly, numerics are passed as, “Hopefully this article will reach, figures, Wun Zee-ro Zee-ro Zee-ro Zee-ro page hits.” Another related technique is passing characters themselves when they are not a word. This might be for acronyms like ARRL or an airport designator like IAH – for Intercontinental Airport Houston. You’d say, “I am a member of, initials, Alph Romeo Romeo Lima”.

I memorized the NATO alphabet for use in ham radio. But there are times, like spelling my name for someone on the phone, where it’s come in handy having it on the tip of my tongue. A negative reaction I’ve seen is someone seeing the use of the alphabet is pretentious, as if hams are setting themselves as superior. Of course, it isn’t. It’s just training.

Last night I posted a tweet: "Next time you want to post an essay to Medium, do the open web a favor and post it elsewhere. Anywhere. Tumblr. WordPress.com." 

If I had more space I would have added Pastebin or Blogger. Really anywhere but Medium. 

I didn't have room to explain, but people asked, so here's where that tweet came from.

Over on Facebook, Steven Max Patterson wrote a long well-thought-out comment about Trump, jobs and how he's not wrong about the policies he's advocating. He also went out of his way to say he doesn't support Trump. 

It was so well written, it seemed a waste to bury it in a comment on Facebook, where almost no one would see it. You can't publish pointers to Facebook posts or comments, because you never know who might not be able to see it. I've never been able to fully figure out how this works. So I suggested he post the comment to a blog so I could give it greater circulation by pushing it through my network.

In the back of my mind I thought though that he'll probably put it on Medium. But I didn't want to say anything up front. Who knows, he might put it somewhere else. 

Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment saying that I was worried he'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium. I asked if he'd consider putting it somewhere else. He asked where else. Hence the tweet. 

Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web. if you're not sure you're going to be blogging regularly, the default place to put your writing is Medium, rather than starting a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com, for example. I guess the thought is that it's wasteful to start a blog if you're not sure you're going to post that often. It's something of a paradox, because blogs are not large things on the storage devices of the hosting companies. If they're doing it right, a blog is smaller than the PNG image in the right margin of this post. They're tiny little things in a world filled with videos and podcasts and even humble images. Text is very very very small in comparison.

People also post to Medium to get more flow. But at what cost? Which pieces get flow? Ones that are critical of Medium? I doubt it. Or offend the politics of the founder? I don't know. I don't see a statement of principles, tech startups usually don't have them. They're here to dominate and make money off the dominance. I'm very familiar with the thinking, having been immersed in it for decades. 

Because I cross-post my stories to Medium through RSS, you will be able to read this there. there. I guess they won't recommend it. It probably won't appear on the front page of Medium. See there's the other problem with ceding a whole content type to a single company. Since you're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold criticism. To try to guess what they like, and parrot it. If Medium becomes much stronger, this will be what SEO becomes. We saw that happen before on Twitter, when they gave huge flow to people they liked, and not to people they don't. Now they're being more open about it. Why not? It didn't appear to cost them anything the last time around.

If Medium were more humble, or if they had competition, I would relax about it. But I remember how much RSS suffered for being dominated by Google. And Google was a huge company and could have afforded to run Google Reader forever at a loss. Medium is a startup, a well-funded one for sure, but they could easily pivot and leave all the stories poorly served, or not served at all. I'm sure their user license doesn't require them to store your writing perpetually, or even until next week.

I only want to point to things that I think have a chance at existing years from now. And things that are reasonably unconflicted, where I feel I understand where the author is coming from. Neither of those criteria are met by posts on Medium. I also want to preserve the ability of developers to innovate in this area. If Medium sews up this media type, if they own it for all practical purposes, as Google owned RSS (until they dropped it), then you can't move until they do. And companies with monopolies have no incentive to move forward, and therefore rarely do. Look at how slowly Twitter has improved their platform, and all the new features are for advertisers, not for writers. I suspect Medium will go down a similar path. 

We can avoid this, it's not too late. You have a choice. Post your writing to places other than Medium. And when you see something that's interesting and not on Medium, give it some extra love. Push it to your friends. Like it on Facebook, RT it on Twitter. Give people more reasons to promote diversity on the web, not just in who we read, but who controls what we read. 

We all point to tweets, me too, because it's too late for competition. And YouTube videos. SoundCloud MP3s. Do we really want to bury something as small and inexpensive as a web page? Is it necessary that a Silicon Valley tech company own every media type? Can we reserve competition in the middle of the web, so we get a chance for some of the power of an open platform for the most basic type of creativity -- writing? 

When you give in to the default, and just go ahead and post to Medium, you're stifling the open web. Not giving it a chance to work its magic, which depends on diversity, not monoculture. 

Anyway, the story had a happy ending. Patterson posted his story on WordPress.com. I circulated a link to it via my linkblog, so he got far more exposure than he would have gotten on Medium, and the open web got a little more of a future as a result.