December, 2007

How many people think Michael should remember to log off of blogs.msdn.com from machines he lets his good friends use, even if they are running PantherLeopard  and have no access to secret Microsoft information? :-)

Assuming he keeps his word and doesn't check the blog this weekend, it will be days before he notices I even did this.

Shhhhhh! Don't anyone tell on me!

After having been stuck at home all exacerbated for much of my end of the year vacation , I feel like I deserve a little time off.

So I am going to take it. :-)

I'll be visiting with an old friend and I'll be back in time for work next week.

I will not sit in front of any computer whatsoever, so if you don't have an account then our comments won't get through until I get back. Sorry 'bout that.

I put off the posts that were scheduled so you can all take a vacation from me, too.

Everyone have a very happy new year....

Regular readers may have noticed that I have often used the CJK Radicals and the KangXi Radicals as sponsors to various blogs.

The other day, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven and John H. Jenkins were talking about the radicals (well, Jeroen was explaining his assumptions about what seemed to be going on with them and John was clarifying the actual information about them), best summed up in the most recent post in the conversation:

Jeroen: What I understand is that the Kangxi radicals are the base 214 radicals as they appeared in the Zihui and Kangxi dictionaries.

    Nowadays, due to simplifications and other changes, various additional radicals got introduced in order to make look ups easier/more consistent/whatever. For this we encoded the CJK Radicals Supplement.

John: Actually, no. The encoded radicals have nothing really to do with lookup (in the computer sense).  They're mostly derived from the custom in dictionaries in their radical tables to include the multiple shapes a radical may take.  We used to do the same in our radical stroke charts but stopped with the chart in TUS 5.0 to save space.

    You really, really, really should think of the encoded radicals as dingbats.  They're only there so that people can print radical charts.  (Well, that and compatibility with CNS 11643, which was the original motive for the 212 radicals they include.)

    As such, minor differences between the shapes can be significant. These are dingbats, after all.

Jeroen: U+2e95 and U+2f39 - radical snout (two) (a bit dubious one, since the latter seems to have the bottom stroke drawn past the standing stroke)

John: That's the extent of it.

Jeroen: U+2ed1 and U+2fa7 - radical long (one) (no apparent difference)

John: I'll have to check if this was deliberate (I doubt it) and file a glyph erratum.

Jeroen: U+2ee3 and U+2fbb - radical bone (no apparent difference)

John: U+2EE3 is the Simplified Chinese version (box on the left inside the top).  U+2FBB is the form everybody else uses.

Jeroen: U+2ee4 and U+2fc1 - radical ghost (no apparent difference)

John: As before, I should double-check this.

    Basically, since these are dingbats, you may adapt their shapes slightly as needed. For example, I would expect that U+2ED1 and U+2EE4 would be drawn with one fewer stroke.

    On the whole, you will almost never need to use *all* of the encoded radicals, because not all of them will be relevant to your locale and use.  Use the ones you need and ignore the others.

Jeroen: Since I am going to use radicals for an application I am developing I want to be sure I am not misunderstanding anything. If the above are indeed not different would I just have to make sure I use the Kangxi radical over the CJK Supplemental one?

John: Again, if you *need* to express a difference, then it's possible. You should never feel obligated to use any of these beasts, let alone all of them. They are dingbats. They don't really *mean* anything.

Now admittedly the only reason I tend to be attracted to them as sponsors is that their names (you can see them here and here in nice lists with images care of fileformat.info), and the fact that the names often have some relation to the particular blog and I was simply not feeling like using some of my more subtle sponsorships since I get the feeling that most people don't get them because I have gone past allusion and directly into associative linkage that people would probably only glean if they were in a position to ask me....

But I did find it a tad ironic (in the Katie sense) that my exclusive use of them has been when I feel they would help provide explicit meaning to their sponsorship roles when John would go to some effort to point out that thy should really be thought of as dingbats that have no meaning.

I think that gives my usage of these two blocks a decidedly ironic edge that I use them for their explicit meaning when they are best thought of as meaningless!

This post brought to you by ䷼ (U+4dfc, aka HEXAGRAM FOR INNER TRUTH)

Developer Amy asked:

Hi

I need to display number with the setting in Regional Options on Digital grouping symbol and Digital grouping

I tried using VarBstrFromR8 and passing LOCALE_NOUSEROVERRIDE  to dwFlags but it doesn’t seem to do the trick.

Any hint?

Thanks
Amy

This question was really interesting to me since Amy was actually wanting to pick up the user's settings from Regional and Language Options yet was passing the LOCALE_NOUSEROVERRIDE flag, which is documented as:

Uses the system default locale settings, rather than custom locale settings.

So clearly that would not be something to pass....

But she implied in the message that she had actually both passing and not passing the flags, do I quickly moved in from there. :-)

It does appear that VarBstrFromR8 does not do as good of a job as GetNumberFormat and GetNumberFormatEx do for all of the various locale-specific and user-overridden grouping information that it might, and I definitely would recommend using GetNumberFormat or GetNumberFormatEx directly in order to assure the right results.

COM and OLE automation just have too many strange and intricate compatibility behaviors, which made me stop trusting those results to be internationally correct year ago....

This post brought to you by ໜ (U+0edc, aka LAO HO NO)

One of the interesting consequences I have noted when it comes to dealing with having a Blog with >2200 blogs in it, such as what happens when somebody comes across the Blog as it is and start randomly reading posts from it.

When combined with the fact that I no longer tend to shut down comments in damn near any of them, another interesting consequence emerges: some people will start randomly commenting in posts, treating the ones from three years ago no differently than the ones written three days ago. :-)

One such person is Tanveer Badar, who has been commenting in many different posts recently....

Though one fact became obvious -- no response was usually expected, since when a response was desired, the question shows up in the Suggestion Box:

You wrote ages ago (in August 2005)

New in Vista Beta 1: Updated OS casing tables

This mentions of $UpCase, the file containing upper case conversion table(s).

Now consider, I have Windows XP installed on an NTFS partition. Then, I install Windows Vista. Will $upcase on Windows XP partition be upgraded too or I have to reformat a volume from Windows Vista to upgrade $upcase?

If it does get upgraded, are there any problems associated with it? If not upgraded, why not?

A very good question, that!

Thankfully, the answers are:

• No, the table is not automatically updated on the XP partition;
• No you do not have to reformat the drive;
• No, by and large there are very few problems you will hit, whether you upgrade the table or not!

It is something I covered a little bit recently in In Case you have problems that you might think are ǸȦȘȚȲ, where admittedly the issue is smaller since a jump drive is a bit easier to deal with than a full partition, especially the main partition of the Windows install potentially being upgraded. :-)

Basically, since case is preserved but not changed, the definition of case changing is not an issue as long as you always ask for items using the proper case, or if nothing else you are willing to live with the file you get when you have more than one available and you don't ask for the right case potentially getting the "wrong" item back....

Just like I showed in the ǸȦȘȚȲ post. :-)

Now with that said, there is an interesting side effect that is covered in the following article from the MS knowledge base:

940830: Error message when you run Chkdsk.exe on a Windows XP-based or on a Windows Server 2003-based computer: “Correcting errors in the uppercase file”

Basically, if you dual boot between an XP and a Vista partition you will occasionally see chkdsk being run at boot time (you can also request this be done if you request that chkdsk be run and it cannot when you ask due to the drive being locked).

During that run, you will get the message Correcting errors in the uppercase file when that run happens on XP at boot time, even if you do not pass the /F flag to "fix" errors. If you do pass the /F flag then the drive will be "fixed" by which I mean the UpCase table in the drive will be updated (or in this case downdated) to the XP table, though there is no problem with files on the drive violating those rules as long as functions dealing with the files preserve case (and you don't try to move or copy files that would conflict on the tables update/downdated!)....

The error does not happen when you run in Vista since the updated chkdsk does not treat the situation as an error and thus does not report it as such. There was originally going to be an update to the older versions of chkdsk,exe but that update was not triaged as being important enough (since other than the possibly mildly unclear error message there is really no error here).

So in the end whether to do the update is up to you and there is no need to reformat or even change anything....

This post brought to you by ഗ (U+0d17, aka MALAYALAM LETTER GA)

If you have never seen The O.C. then this post will be entirely useless to you....

So yesterday was one of those weird days, when SoapNet decided to show the series finale of The O.C. (The End's Not Near, It's Here) at 3pm and the series pilot at 4pm.

It is hard to get over the contrast.

The O.C. was a very strange experience for me, going from a wonderful show in its Golden age (the first season) to a good show with a strong flavor of its former glory in its Silver age (the second season) to an okay show with an occasional glimpse of what was in its Bronze age (the third season) to an Are Ya Kidding Me? what-the-hell clusterfuck of craziness that was simply never going to recover in its final season.

Somehow it is stranger when it is two episodes a day, perhaps proof that shows with just four seasons to draw on would not be on twice a day, even on SoapNet.

But I haven't really been following the reruns in this last run so watching the series finale was kind of a culture shock for me, because I kind of realized something.

It is not that the last season was bad compared to what is on television in general; it is just bad compared to itself, or more accurately what it once was.

And then compared to the first show, with Marissa Cooper's Who are you? and Ryan's answer around his just-lit cigarette Whoever you want me to be, I suddenly realized that if not for the contrast I could probably have gotten the hang of all the weirdnesses, from Ryan beating people up and getting beaten up gratis to Summer not caring about personal hygiene to Julie's tilt-a-whirl Dr. Roberts/Frank/Bullit merry-go-fun to Ryan sleeping with Seth's dysfunctional rejects (Taylor), and so on.

I could go on but between the spiritual exhaustion and the moral despair of comparing that to Luke's Welcome to The O.C., bitch! and Ryan's You know what I like about rich kids? {punch} Nothing! to Kirsten's shocker (after walking in on Ryan and Marissa making out) Sorry. It never happened with Seth to Summer's Chino? Ewww! to Marissa's You have no idea and so on and so on and I could go on way too long on this (and these ar all from memory!), and I realized there is if nothing else one very good thing about the way The O.C. died.

It was painful, sure. But it was mercifully quick.

It seemed like it took forever, sure. But compare that to multiple seasons of Dawson's Creek or Beverly Hills 90210 or Melrose Place that dragged on way past their usefulness -- not just most of a season but on and on for several years of that, with no one even really aware that there was a problem with the whole world they were in.

I miss The O.C., but you can't really go back, even in reruns. Not like you can when you accidentally flip the channel to some random episode of Star Trek, or to point put a more mediocre show like a random episode of Dallas.

You simply can't there from here.

Especially butted up against the series finale in the same day. That is as close to soap opera sacrilege as one can get....

This post brought to you by Ｏ (U+ff2f, aka FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O)

The question over on the OpenType list was:

Dear All,
 
I've been developing my first Opentype Font lately. It is an Arabic Naskh style font that is fully compliant with the rules of Naskh Calligraphy. So Far, things have been going quite well.
 
The only problem I have run into is that, when I ship the font out of VOLT, and then install it, regardless of whether I give it the TTF or OTF extension, Windows seems to insist on assigning it the TTF icon, rather than the OTF Icon.
 
In Adobe Acrobat, It appears as an opentype font.
 
Does anyone have any idea where I might be going wrong ?
Or is there some adjustment I need to make in the Font Design software, prior to loading it into VOLT ?

Many thanks Beforehand.

I'll provide a bit of art so you know what we're talking about:

The question itself was answered there by Chris Fynn....

Before I started quoting it here, I suddenly remembered he also answered this question on the Unicode List back in end of 2004. I dug up his response from my archives....

His previous answer covered quite a bit of ground, so I thought I'd just capture his words here:

The "O" icon simply indicates the font has been digitally signed. Though the digital signature field is defined in the OpenType specification the presence of a digital signature in a font does not necessarily indicate that the font has any other OpenType features. Many OpenType fonts with advanced features have not been digitally signed and consequently do not display the "O" icon in Windows.

OpenType is a superset of TrueType - so all Windows fonts which conform to the TrueType specification could also be called OpenType. If it says OpenType in the sample window it doesn't mean very much.

If you want to be able to find out more useful information about Windows fonts use Microsoft's Font Properties Extension:
<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/TrueTypeProperty21.mspx>
If the Font Properties Extension is installed you can then R-click on a font file in Windows Explorer and bring up a "Properties" dialog - in this dialog there is a "Features" panel which will tell you whether or not there are any OpenType GSUB and GPOS tables in the font.

When people ask whether your application supports OpenType fonts, what I expect they mean is "Does your application make use of the GSUB And GPOS lookups in OpenType fonts?". Supporting OT GSUB and GPOS lookups is *necessary* for proper display of Unicode data for complex scripts (Arabic, Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Tibetan, Khmer, Sinhala etc.)in Windows (and many Linux) applications.

If your application supports TrueType but does not support the OpenType lookups you will still see some glyphs using the OpenType font but these will probably not be the correct ones as your application won't be showing the correct contextual forms necessary for languages written in these scripts.

Large "Pan-Unicode" fonts like "Arial Unicode MS" usually do not contain proper OpenType tables and ligatures for *all* the scripts the font covers. For example "Arial Unicode MS" and "Code 2000" contain glyphs for Tibetan script but they *do not* contain the OpenType GSUB and GPOS lookups necessary to display Tibetan correctly.

If a Windows application needs to properly display Unicode text for languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Nepali, Sinhala, Arabic, Urdu and so on then it probably needs to support OpenType GSUB and GPOS lookups.

For Latin script, OpenType lookups are mainly used to place combining diacritics properly and for advanced typographic features such as true small saps, Swashes, automatic ligatures, old-style figures and do on.

The rules that Windows for determining which glyph to show here even today is obviously kind of arbitrary and not really the idel way to determining any of the real questions that a reasonable person might have about the underlying font.

But in fairness it is just an icon -- and icons really don't tend to capture a ton of information.

The source of the confusion here is that there are specific definitions that help determine what is an OpenType font, and generally speaking a customer will come in with some but not all of those questions (this is why the issues in Microsoft *does* support OpenType! are so easy to define yet ultimately unsatisfying.

Perhaps the answer would be to have a few different icons here -- maybe always the TrueType icon, but with some specific overlays for the key requirements from both the Microsoft and Adobe sides of the OpenType equation?

This post broght to you by ཝ (U+0f5d, aka TIBETAN LETTER WA)

WARNING: Be sure to read the disclaimer at the bottom of this blog before you take your eyes off the screen. 

In the movie Conspiracy Theory, Mel Gibson's character (Jerry) is programmed (Manchurian Candidate style) to buy a copy of J.D. Salinger's The Catch in the Rye any time he sees it. This allows him to be tracked by the people who are controlling his behavior....

Now I don't want to alarm anyone, but maybe the fact that for years I was buying a copy of v.1 of Developing International Software for Windows 95 and Windows NT every time I saw one available.

I swear to Bob here, people -- I have dozens of copies. I'll probably give copies to my mentees soon, I give them away all kinds of places (though I refuse to autograph them despite requests -- I had nothing to do with the first version of the book and the only way I have ever been willing to sign them is if I point out this fact in the note above my signature!).

Anyway, over the course of my life I have gone through tons of copies this way, I have dozens of them in my possession now, and in fact I just bought one of the copies that was listed on Amazon as I was writing this article.

I have no idea why I do this, and as far as I know I am not being controlled by some evil conspiracy to assassinate anyone.

But I wonder whether someone should warn Ms. Foster anyway, just in case I have been programmed to forget?

This of course leads to the bigger question of who would be using Developing International Software for Windows 95 and Windows NT v.1 to keep track of me, anyway.

I am of course not very effectively trained as a killer, with minimal verified or unverified slayings.

And the scooter would quite a sucky way to be discrete or subtle (plus the difficulty I have getting travel approved is almost certain to be a hindrance for targets outside of Western Washington!).

Not to mention it would be a tad shortsighted to pick an out-of-print book, isn't it?

If this a Microsoft employee, the poor staffing and planning factors of this operation should definitely be a point of conversation in the midyear.... :-)

This post brought to you by ॥ (U+0965, aka DEVANAGARI DOUBLE DANDA)

DISCLAIMER: This blog, like this Blog, is for entertainment purposes only, and I am in no way suggesting that anyone should seriously consider me a threat of any sort. Just like the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, I am truly Mostly Harmless, and in this context can be considered even safer than that....

If you are easily offended then please stop reading now....

I talk a lot.

And people who know me will verify this.

In fact, there are only four things I know of that will [ever] shut me up:

• When I am asleep (and then I might snore; luckily I don't tend to sleep much);
• When I am sick (like feverish sick -- this is also incredibly rare);
• When I am really, really uncomfortable in a situation;
• When someone says one of those rare things that stuns me, momentarily making me speechless;

And so it goes -- if I am very quiet, people assume I am sick, though usually it is just that I am uncomfortable.

Every once in a while one of those rare comments comes across that tends to delight friends, and they know they have left me with nothing to say.

And then yesterday someone managed to do it in the Suggestion Box!

You see, rita (and yes, her name linked to the same place in her comment) asked over in the Suggestion Box:

how do techniques like "alphabet soup" work for other scripts in unicode? have you ever done anything like it?

When I saw it, I was stunned. There were no words.

I realized that there was probably no way to explicitly cover it. Maybe the other Sorting It All Out might have been able to do it, but given where I am hosted and all it just seems inappropriate.

I mean, I have teenagers reading here, and have to be careful. Therefore, I will speak in euphemism and avoid contributing too heavily to the delinquency of readers like Dean....

Now the purpose of "alphabet soup" style techniques is to provide a methodlogy for focusing coverage to a small area (the area in which one could fit a letter) in a way that allows for variety. By "drawing" the alphabet, someone without a clear idea on the best way achieve adequate coverage (or the creativity to inspire variety) has an easy (for lack of a better term) "color by numbers" method to obtain both.

I know people who swear by it as a (for lack of a better term) "teaching technique".

There is also an interesting benefit that I will explain via a segue into a brief story, for which I will push the stack for a moment so as to not (for lack of a better term) lose our place (also an important technique!):

In my early 20's when I was living in Connecticut, I was driving home one night after the bar we were all hanging out (called The Penalty Box, as I have mentioned before). I was stopped at a checkpoint where they were literally stopping everyone and giving sobriety tests, as part of a crackdown on drunk drivers.

Two of the things the cop asked me to do were: (a) say the alphabet without singing the song, and (b) say the alphabet backwards. The former is (according to him) difficult to do when one is intoxicate, and the latter is (again according to him) always difficult to do but people who are intoxicated are the one most likely to try and to reveal intoxication behaviors while doing so.

As a side note, I passed the first test 100% but for the second test was able to say the alphabet backwards, very quickly. The stunned police officer was himself speechless but I explained that I was working with elementary school aged kids and tricks like that helped to fuel young imaginations. Quite amused, he let me go home shortly after finishing all the tests -- they had a bunch of other drivers to get through this checkpoint....

Popping the stack back to "alphabet soup" one of the biggest potential drawbacks to the basic technique is that most partners would not be happy to know what was actually behind this (for lack of a better term) "directed meandering" so it is (a) best to not be singing or humming the song while doing it and (b) best not to have them recognize the actual letters, unless one shifts the game to spell specific (for lack of a better word) "fun" words -- perhaps ones that repeat (for lack of a better word) "fun" letters like M, O, and Z? -- and not the plain old alphabet.

Though even while I say this, I have at least one friend who claims that she even hearing the song has an impact on her because of extended "alphabet soup" time and a (for lack of a better word) Pavlovian response, which I guess proves that every rule has its exceptions.

And now, finally, we get to rita and the original question regarding Unicode and how it might fit here...

Now the many characters of Unicode do not specifically help, since Unicode has no real information about drawing the various letters. And the whole point of "alphabet soup" is largely about (for lack of a better term) "drawing the letters".

Perhaps one could develop some skill at taking advantage of the letters in some scripts, but the (for lack of a better word) "fluid" nature of "alphabet soup" is really suggestive a more calligraphic type of skill with letter forms (for lack of a better term) flowing naturally. This is something that knowledge of Unicode would likely not be specifically helpful with, other than choosing individual letters and (if there is no other way) teaching oneself how to draw them. While this could work, in general one needs to be able to concentrate more on applying the knowledge of drawing the letters that one already has, which can tend the limit of trying to seek out new letters one does not know, such as random letters that sponsor random blogs here.

However, there are specific potential advantages to using other scripts if you do know how to draw the letters of another language, for two reasons:

• it lowers the risk of people being able to identify letters (which is usually a benefit)
• several scripts have letters that are more (for lack of a better word) "expressive"

If you ask, I will deny any personal knowledge of what I am about suggest, but if you are thinking in this direction and you know some Japanese then considering slow Hiragana eventually transitioning into slightly more rapid Katakana, in iroha order if you can manage it (again, without reciting the poem!) for reasons that are very complicated to get into but if you look at the orders you might have some hints, really can inspire miracles. Similar effects are possible with most "curvy" scripts (e.g. the handwritten form of Hebrew, Tamil, Telugu, Georgian) moving into less curvy ones (e.g. Armenian, Bengali, Devanagari); the Latin alphabet really seems less suited to the whole effect though if you know no other alphabets then lowercase to uppercase and maybe sans-serif to serif might have the (for lack of a better word) "appropriate" impact....

Now that I'm done, to misquote a conversation between Ross and Chandler or Friends for a moment, if you don't know which authors you are in the mood to read more of now -- D.H. Lawrence or Peter T. Daniels/William Bright -- then please stay the hell away from my bookshelf!

Okay, I think I managed to work through my discomfort here.

If you are shocked that I posted this then welcome to the club. I think we are going to get jackets. :-)

This post brought to you by ৡ and ৠ (U+09e1 and U+09e0, aka BENGALI LETTER VOCALIC LL and BENGALI LETTER VOCALIC RR)

(these two letters fought all odds to fly home from Grand Cayman when they heard rumor of this post. Because no one loves "alphabet soup" more than intricate letters!)

All of the other characters in Unicode have taken off for Grand Cayman for the Christmas holiday weekend
(they are staying at the Marriott Grand Cayman Beach Hotel in case you are there and are curious at all the characters hanging out by the pool!)

It wouldn't be Christmas without a Salt-N-Pepa reference, would it? This blog is not about sexual dysfunction as a symptom of multiple sclerosis, it is about the relationship between gender and incidence of MS...

It is widely reported (and has been almost since Charcot first described MS in for the medical world in the late 1800s) that as a disease it affects women more often than men.

The ratio varies depending on the study, but generally speaking it has been reported as being about a ratio of two females to one male (e.g. from the Wikipedia article):

As observed in many autoimmune disorders, MS is more common in females than males; the mean sex ratio is about two females for every male. In children (who rarely develop MS) the sex ratio may reach three females for each male. In people over age fifty, MS affects males and females equally. Onset of symptoms usually occurs between fifteen to forty years of age, rarely before age fifteen or after age sixty.

And there are some more bits which will contribute to my Christmas day blather:

The initial attacks are often transient, mild (or asymptomatic), and self-limited. They often do not prompt a health care visit and sometimes are only identified in retrospect once the diagnosis has been made based on further attacks. The most common initial symptoms reported are: changes in sensation in the arms, legs or face (33%), complete or partial vision loss (optic neuritis) (16%), weakness (13%), double vision (7%), unsteadiness when walking (5%), and balance problems (3%); but many rare initial symptoms have been reported such as aphasia or psychosis. Fifteen percent of individuals have multiple symptoms when they first seek medical attention. For some people the initial MS attack is preceded by infection, trauma, or strenuous physical effort.

...

Multiple sclerosis is difficult to diagnose in its early stages. In fact, a definite diagnosis cannot be made until other disease processes (differential diagnoses) have been ruled out and, in the case of relapsing-remitting MS, there is evidence of at least two anatomically separate demyelinating events separated by at least thirty days.

...

For identical twins, the likelihood that the second twin may develop MS if the first twin does is about 30%. For fraternal twins (who do not inherit an identical set of genes), the likelihood is closer to that for non-twin siblings, or about 4%. This pattern suggests that, while genetic factors clearly help determine the risk of MS, other factors such as environmental effects or random chance are also involved. The actual correlation may be somewhat higher than reported by these numbers as people with MS lesions remain essentially asymptomatic throughout their lives.

Let's take this in slowly.

What have we learned?

Well, for one we know that there are people who can have MS without realizing it -- in fact so many that the numbers for "silent MS" have been estimated at 25% (meaning for every four cases of MS diagnosis there is an additional silent case out there) or more.

For what it's worth, a great number of these silent cases are not found in twin studies with only one twin diagnosed; they are usually found at autopsy done for unrelated reasons. And the incidence of these cases varies though is perhaps about the same between men and women or possibly higher for men (usually discounted due to a larger number of such autopsies having to be done due to some of the questionable ways that men end up dying at times) -- though AFAIK no complete studies have been done to confirm that.

For another, we know that attacks are often transient with symptoms that are not always easy to describe or test for. And that symptoms often appear to vanish given the relapsing/remitting nature of the disease.

And we know that past 50 the sex ratio evens out.

So what do we know about men under 50 that makes them different from women, beyond the obvious?

Well, for one thing there is the likelihood that they will complain to a doctor or indeed anyone when something is wrong even if it is not hard to explain or describe, or even if it is. Men, who don't ask for directions and don't share their feelings and all of those other clichés, are simply less likely to go to a doctor for anything if they can avoid it, all things being equal.

In other words, the marked difference of MS incidence between the sexes based on initial report of symptoms has glaring similarities with the likelihood of members of the two sexes to actually make the initial report.

Back before the MRI, women used to pay a terrible price for their vigilence -- they were often given pyschiatric diagnoses for their trouble, which of course was helped by the tendency of men to assume that hysteria in women was a valid phenomenon....

Shocker. And holy self-fulfilling prophecy, Batman!

So perhaps the "higher incidence of MS in women" hypothesis treated so often as fact should be tested out in a way that will be able to negate the influence of the simple fact that women are more in touch with their bodies and less often willing to avoid seeking help when they perceive that something is wrong.

Please note that this hypothesis of mine is not proof that I am either a woman or gay (the latter being somethig some of the idlers speculate on). Point of fact, I refused to go to the doctor on the first day of clear symptoms that were happening in one leg; it was only on the next day when symptoms had spread to both legs and started in my hands and arms on the sane side as the initial leg symptoms that I was even willing to go to a doctor. Were I not married at the time I might have tried to wait it out, actually (she was more worried than I was since they were just sensory issues that I felt I could ignore).

Any neurologists or doctors or residents or interns or medical students reading here? :-)

All of the characters in Unicode have taken off for Grand Cayman for the Christmas holiday weekend
(they are staying at the Marriott Grand Cayman Beach Hotel in case you are there and are curious at all the characters hanging out by the pool!)

Regular readers might remember my whole Converting a project to Unicode series in nine parts: