One punctuation mark in particular is having a moment… a not-altogether-welcome one…
Of the many tips and tricks people are coming up with to determine whether a piece of writing has been written with a little help from AI, the world seems to have homed in on the use of one particular punctuation mark: the em dash.
Though some writers have rushed in to defend the dash — the overuse of which sits alongside pizza glue and bluebberrygate in the pantheon of things people laugh at AI about — perhaps a key reason the prevalence of the punctuation mark seems so bot-like to readers is that, as writers, Americans hardly use it.
Indeed, per a recent YouGov survey, dashes are some of the least used pieces of punctuation in Americans’ arsenals, ranking just ahead of colons and semicolons, per the poll.
As you might imagine, the survey revealed that American adults who describe themselves as “good” or “very good” writers are more likely to use the rarer forms of punctuation on the list. However, for the majority of Americans, marks like the semicolon and the em dash remain mostly reserved for esteemed authors and English teachers… or those who aren’t above enlisting a chatbot for a little help to jazz up their communications.
Interestingly, the vast majority of Americans said they do little writing outside of sending texts and emails, with journaling, nonfiction and fiction writing, and other forms of creative or academic writing all falling by the wayside in 2025, according to YouGov’s research…
As we muse on marks, we might that it was on this date in 1956 that Fortran was introduced to the world. A third-generation, compiled, imperative computer programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Developed by an IBM team led by John Backus, it became the go-to language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.
In a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, Backus explained Fortran’s origin: “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”
To the item at the top, it’s worth noting that Fortran is a language with four uses for the dash– subtraction operator, negative sign, line continuation symbol, and range separator (in data processing)– but no em dash.
For a piece of Fortran’s pre-history, see here; and for an important extension, see here.
MLB broadcaster Vin Scully’s career lasted 67 seasons, during which he called a game managed by Connie Mack (born in 1862) and one Julio Urías (born in 1996) played in.
As we live and learn, we might spare a thought for Grace Brewster Murray Hopper; she died on this date in 1992. A seminal computer scientist and Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, “Amazing Grace” (as she was known to many in her field) was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer (in 1944), invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and was one of the leaders in popularizing the concept of machine-independent programming languages– which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.
Hopper also (inadvertently) contributed one of the most ubiquitous metaphors in computer science: she found and documented the first computer “bug” (in 1947).
She has both a ship (the guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper) and a super-computer (the Cray XE6 “Hopper” at NERSC) named in her honor.
Here’s a curious thought experiment. Imagine a cloud of quantum particles that are entangled—in other words, they share the same quantum existence. The behavior of these particles is chaotic. The goal of this experiment is to send a quantum message across this set of particles. So the message has to be sent into one side of the cloud and then extracted from the other.
The first step, then, is to divide the cloud down the middle so that the particles on the left can be controlled separately from those on the right. The next step is to inject the message into the left-hand part of the cloud, where the chaotic behavior of the particles quickly scrambles it.
Can such a message ever be unscrambled?
Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Adam Brown at Google in California and a number of colleagues, including Leonard Susskind at Stanford University, the “father of string theory.” This team shows exactly how such a message can be made to surprisingly reappear.
“The surprise is what happens next,” they say. After a period in which the message seems thoroughly scrambled, it abruptly unscrambles and recoheres at a point far away from where it was originally inserted. “The signal has unexpectedly refocused, without it being at all obvious what it was that acted as the lens,” they say.
But their really extraordinary claim is that such an experiment throws light on one of the deepest mysteries of the universe: the quantum nature of gravity and spacetime…
[The arXiv paper on which this article reports, “Quantum Gravity in the Lab: Teleportation by Size and Traversable Wormholes,” is here.]
* John Lennon
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As we contemplate connection, we might spare a thought for George Boole; the philosopher and mathematician died on this date in 1864. Boole helped establish modern symbolic logic– he created symbols to stand for logical operations– and an algebra of logic (that is now called “Boolean algebra”). Boole made important contributions to the study of differential equations and other aspects of math; his algebra has found important applications in topology, measure theory, probability, and statistics. But it’s for the foundational contribution that his symbolic logic has made to computer science– from circuit design to programming– that he’s probably best remembered.
“A Cellar Dive in the Bend,” c.1895, by Richard Hoe Lawrence and Henry G. Piffard
All photography requires light, but the light used in flash photography is unique — shocking, intrusive and abrupt. It’s quite unlike the light that comes from the sun, or even from ambient illumination. It explodes, suddenly, into darkness.
The history of flash goes right back to the challenges faced by early photographers who wanted to use their cameras in places where there was insufficient light — indoors, at night, in caves. The first flash photograph was probably a daguerreotype of a fossil, taken in 1839 by burning limelight…
In its early days, a sense of quasi-divine revelation was invoked by some flash photographers, especially when documenting deplorable social conditions. Jacob Riis, for example, working in New York in the late 1880s, used transcendental language to help underscore flash’s significance as an instrument of intervention and purgation. But it’s in relation to documentary photography that we encounter most starkly flash’s singular, and contradictory, aspects. It makes visible that which would otherwise remain in darkness; but it is often associated with unwelcome intrusion, a rupturing of private lives and interiors.
Yet flash brings a form of democracy to the material world. Many details take on unplanned prominence, as we see in the work of those Farm Security Administration photographers who used flash in the 1930s and laid bare the reality of poverty during the Depression. A sudden flare of light reveals each dent on a kitchen utensil and the label on each carefully stored can; each photograph on the mantel; each cherished ornament; each little heap of waste paper or discarded rag; each piece of polished furniture or stained floor or accumulation of dust; each wrinkle. Flash can make plain, bring out of obscurity, the appearance of things that may never before have been seen with such clarity…
As we glory in the glare, we might send elegantly-calculated birthday greetings to Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron); she was born on this date in 1815. The daughter of the poet Lord Byron, she was the author of what can reasonably be considered the first “computer program”– so one of the “parents” of the modern computer. Her work was in collaboration with her long-time friend and thought partner Charles Babbage (known as “the father of computers”), in particular, in conjunction with Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine.
Photographer Dominic Episcopo is a man of ecumenical enthusiasms– fashion, reportage and editorial, portraiture… and food. Not content with simple still life, “The United Steaks of America” makes his meat do double duty…
As we proclaim “well done,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 that the first test program in FORTRAN ran. FORTRAN (The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) was the first successful general purpose programming language, the first real alternative to assembly language. It reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20, so quickly gained acceptance. It’s still in use, especially in high-performance computing.
Your correspondent is headed to parts distant, where connectivity is likely to be an issue. So these missives won’t resume, at least at anything like their normal rhythm, for a week or so…
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