3003: Sandwich Helix

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Sandwich Helix

Title text: The number one rule of string manipulation is that you’ve got to specify your encodings.

Explanation

This comic details an important issue in communication: even if the content of your message goes through, there might be important context that is necessary to correctly interpret it.

Communication is a way to convey ideas, and Cueball is explaining a concept of communication he calls a "Sandwich Helix". However, when pressed on what that is, he says nobody knows — indicating that, over the years, communication has failed to retain the meaning of this supposedly very important concept. The humor is that if this truly was the #1 rule of communication, communication should have been able to retain its meaning. On the basis that the number #1 rule about communication would probably be the most important rule, it might even be construed to be the rule about properly communicating all context (by some apparent analogy), which would be irony — but only if anyone still understood it.

The comic also displays the difference between meaning and message. Cueball is parroting a message (possibly a cliche repeated by self-help authors and influencers), even though the meaning is lost.

The fictitious "Sandwich Helix" plays on another concept in communication, the "Compliment Sandwich" (a.k.a. "Shit Sandwich"), wherein a statement of criticism is sandwiched between two complimentary statements in order to make the negative statement easier to accept. The difference is that the Compliment Sandwich is a communication technique which is well known and whose meaning has not been lost (though it is currently disputed whether the technique is effective or whether it even might accomplish the inverse of its goals). A possible inspiration for the "helix" part is the Helical Model of Communication. The creator of the model, Frank Dance, emphasised the role of communication problems. He shows communication as a dynamic and non-linear process.

The title text contains several odd-looking characters that seem random (but are actually meaningful, to those familiar with them) where an apostrophe should be, as an example of a string that did NOT have its encoding handled properly. It is an example of Mojibake. Some special characters and symbols require a special encoding (such as UTF-8, Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, etc) in order to be stored and displayed properly, and are encoded using the equivalent of multiple characters. If the code to display the text doesn't understand what encoding was used and assumes a different/lesser level of encoding, you can get "garbage" similar to what is in the title text. In this case, the original character was probably ’, which when encoded in UTF-8 and decoded in Windows-1252 becomes ’. Similar garbage is seen in the title text of 1683: Digital Data.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Cueball, with his palm out, is standing in front of a class and facing Ponytail and Hairy, who are sitting at their classroom desks.]

Cueball: Always remember the #1 rule of communication:

Cueball: Sandwich Helix.

Ponytail: What does that mean?

Cueball: Unfortunately, the context has been lost.

Cueball: But we know the message, and that's the important part.

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Discussion

Sandwich presumably refers to compliment sandwich, but I don’t know what the helix is. --Galaktos (talk) 14:03, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

I think sandwich refers to the context itself, as in, the context of something is both what is before that and what is after. 172.71.222.236 15:19, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

Maybe Models of communication#Dance? --Galaktos (talk) 14:12, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

The word "Helix" may be a reference to the previous comic. CategoryGeneral (talk) 14:36, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

The moral of this story is "People will try to find meaning in anything, even things that are directly stated to be meaningless."172.70.176.43 23:01, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

That title text makes me reasonably upset. What nitwit decided "smart quotes" AND incompatible default encodings was a good idea? 172.70.174.203 16:45, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm inclined to blame Apple because Mac OS Roman (1989) postdates Windows 1252 (1987). Both of these extended ISO 8859-1 with curly quotes but chose different code points. Davidhbrown (talk) 03:26, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi, Davidhbrown. Speaking of curls, note the difference between "Mac OS Roman" and "Mac OS Roman". And come into the edit to see how neater the source is! (Even compared to [[]]s marked to go to "wikipedia:..."). HTH, HAND. 172.68.205.151 11:33, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

It seems that something like this could happen over time naturally if it's a saying that "everyone knows" so that real meaning stops being said, and then eventually that bit of information disappears. For instance KISS "Keep it simple, stupid" has a negative connotation, but the idea is very sound. So people keep saying the abbreviation but stop saying the full version, and new people hearing it the first time might get the basic idea without knowing why. Eventually even the meaning could be lost, and it could just become something that people say without knowing why. Maybe the assume the ancient designers and engineers liked to make out when they saw complex things. Andyd273 (talk) 17:58, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Frums - Options 162.158.91.14 04:18, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

KISS Keep it simple, stupid was originally keep it stupid simple. An emphasis, not an insult. --PRR (talk) 05:12, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

"Keep it stupid, simple" still sounds like an insult. These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 03:07, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle#Origin --PRR (talk) 18:31, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Note for recent editors... You can use that link as {{w|KISS principle#Origin|~insert some link text here~}} to get it to look like ~insert some link text here~. I think we're getting some new users who seem not to be aware of this handy template, and/or being lazy about it. (I also indented your comment, for the circumstances.) 162.158.74.118 19:01, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

maybe keep it stupidly simple? 172.69.34.176 (talk) 04:56, 27 October 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Nope. That's a sweet thought, but comes from the US Navy in 1960, and indeed started as "Keep it simple, stupid!". 172.68.71.159 15:52, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Infodump: To my knowledge the only five encodings resulting in "’" for utf-8 encoded "’" are Windows-125X where X is an even decimal digit. 162.158.154.78 (talk) 15:25, 27 October 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

This is similar to the number 42 in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, in that the answer is known, but the exact question (=the context) has been lost. See HHGG Fandom wiki --Cavac (talk) 09:33, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Minor grammatical point; please feel free to skip this. I just tweaked "a communication technique [...] which meaning has not been lost." to "a communication technique [...] whose meaning has not been lost.". "Of which the meaning" or "whose meaning" both work, but the latter is less contrived. People keep forgetting that "whose" can refer to objects, as well as to people. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whose#Determiner>

The first rule of communication is "Always talk about communication." RegularSizedGuy (talk) 15:36, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the first rule is "Context Matters" and "Helix Sandwich" conveys that by the lack of it.172.70.126.228 20:28, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Possibly the best real-world example of this is the Biblical Book of Revelation. It's an example of apocalyptic writing, which means 'writing in code', not necessarily 'talking about the end of the world' (although it does also do that, which is where the confusion has arisen). And that's sort of the point - most of the context which would enable us to understand the book properly has been lost. For example, scholars generally accept that the 'beast' whose number is 666 is a reference to a real historical person, and that the number 666 is supposed to tell the reader that person's identity... but there's no consensus on who that person is. The fact that there is evidence to suggest that the number was altered (from 616) by later editors doesn't help. 172.70.90.109 05:47, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think the "helix" refers to software development. It could be about the helical model of communication, which conveys communication as a non-linear process.

This is perhaps a joke with these simplistic "rules" of communication (like the compliment sandwich), which portray communication as something much simpler.

If we assume that communication is complex and non-linear (as the helical model of communication portrays), we might conclude that there is no such thing as "#1 rule of communication"; something that could be observed by the misuse of the "compliment sandwich". 172.70.47.87 (talk) 15:38+, 25 October 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~) (Assuming all the above is the same IP editor, tweaking their comment.)

Ah, thank you. I added the Spiral (for development) because I couldn't find the Helix one (for communication), and I thought this was the best linkable item out there. Now I know it's Helical, I've found it and I can put a link on your addendum and perhaps remove my original 'placeholder'. That's collaborative communication! ;) 172.70.91.77 15:56, 25 October 2024 (UTC) (PS, please sign Talk contributions, and wikilinks are a good idea if you can add them. ;p )

I took the opposite point from that in the explanation so far, especially with the title text: Even if the encoding is wrongly specified, it's possible to figure out what was meant by some sequence of bytes. I imagine the teacher using a different nonce every time to make the point about the #1 rule of communication: Words don't have inherent meaning, it is acquired through use. (Though if I'm the only one with this interpretation it kind of sinks my idea I guess). Hcs (talk) 10:18, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

Is it not true that Cueball could basically be demonstrating the #1 rule, i.e. context is important, and that sometimes language is self-repairing? 172.69.214.109 14:42, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

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Helix sandwich. That did not render well.- TenGolf 172.69.58.19 18:20, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

Like it now? (There are better ways, but is the simplest.)172.68.205.134 18:28, 27 October 2024 (UTC)

I think that people are missing that the Sandwich Helix is the DNA molecule where nucleic base pairs are stacked like the layers in one of Dagwood's sandwiches. This molecule "communicates" a lot of information but we don't know how to interpret a lot of it (much of the non-translated regions). This notwithstanding, we can list consensus sequences for many organisms. I.e. we have the message but not the encoding (for all of it). 172.71.182.126 00:32, 25 November 2024 (UTC)