Using the Online Edition
This page is deprecated in Elements of Arousal.
Note: This is a legacy edition, moved from
another site. Many of the statements on this page are no longer
true or represent plans that were never fully realized. This
edition will revert to being a static copy of the print edition of
Elements of Arousal which was the second edition of
Lavender Blue. This page does not correspond to
anything in the print edition, so this page will
disappear.
I do not collect any information about users of these pages. My
ISP uses Apache servers
which routinely collect and log some basic information such as the
identity of the browser you are using and the URI of the page that
referred you, if there is one, and some other information. Almost
all web servers have access to this information and log part of it.
An example of the kind of information web servers get can be found
here. Much of this
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example, the server must know your IP address in order to send your browser
the pages you ask for. You can avoid providing some of this
information by using a proxy server. I make no use of the server's
log information except to debug problems that sometimes arise in
serving my pages.
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privacy policies. When I put a link in my pages, it does not mean
that I have thoroughly investigated the site I have linked to. I
cannot be responsible for the actions and policies of sites other
than my own. Many links on my site lead to Amazon.com. I personally
believe Amazon.com to be reliable and trustworthy. If you do not
think so, don't follow those links. I am not responsible for
Amazon.com's privacy policies, but you can read about them here. You may see an
Amazon.com box on my site that has your name in it. That does not
mean that I know your name.
This page at Amazon.com explains how your name came to appear
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may reply with a form e-mail. I will not send you form e-mail
except in response to a particular question when the form e-mail is
pertinent to your inquiry.
If you want a reply from me, your return address must not be
spam-proofed or forged. I will not remove spam-proofing by hand. I
will hit the reply key in my mail reader, and if my reply bounces,
I won't try to figure out what went wrong. I will not reply to
e-mail with many Cc:'s.
If you send me a question of general interest, I may paraphrase
your question and provide an answer to it on my web page. I will
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ideas for literary works if you feel you have a proprietary
interest in the idea. I have ideas of my own, and I cannot be
responsible if your idea resembles something I may have been
working on. Moreover, I will not limit my future work to avoid some
area which you may think you have "dibs" on because you have
referred it in some general way. I do not pay for ideas. I will not
work on your idea for some future share of what you imagine the
profits might be. I do not steal ideas, but unfortunately many
beginners with a vague or general idea, such as "a murder mystery
involving a stabbing," will consider themselves ripped off by any
new murder mystery they see which involves a stabbing.
I cannot always be certain of the origin of e-mail I receive.
Someone may send me e-mail using your name and address, and in that
case I may not know the e-mail is not from you. I may respond to
such e-mail. If you believe this has happened, you may send me
e-mail and I will remove your address from my addressbook. Even if
you don't ask to be removed, I will not spam you, but I may
continue to send replies so long as I receive e-mail from the
person posing as you. If someone is posing as you and that person
has sent me e-mail, I may provide you with copies of the forged
e-mail to help you investigate the situation, but I will only do
this if I am able to verify that you are you and not another
forger.
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your ISP in order
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If you send me annoying e-mail, I may put you in my e-mail
filter and not read or reply to any future e-mail from you. Or I
may ask you to stop sending me e-mail. If you continue to sent me
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receive more e-mail from you. If you continue to send me e-mail, I
may provide copies of your e-mail to your ISP.
I have made every effort to avoid
using features in these pages that result in the necessity of a
"Best viewed with" statement. I aim to make these pages "Best
viewed with any browser." I use a recent version of lynx in composing and
editing these pages, and I check them with an SGML checker.
When major revisions have been made, I also check the pages and the stylesheets with an online
service. Nonetheless, so many browsers exist with so many possible
configurations that it is impossible for me to see what the pages
look like in all of them.
If you experience problems viewing these pages, one of these
suggestions may help:
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not use frames. If you are seeing these pages in frames, someone
has made unauthorized links to my pages, a thing often done so that
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nothing can be incorporated in the frames. You should be able to
dispose of the frames by connecting to the Online
Edition of Lavender Blue directly. If the previous link does
not dispose of the frames, you may have to enter it manually,
however you enter a URI to open a new document
in your browser:
<http://www.io.com/~eighner/books/lavender_blue/using.html>
should bring you to this page, from which you can use the
navigation links to reach the rest of the book frames-free.
- I do
not use pop-up windows. If you are seeing pop-up windows, the
problem and solution are similar to that of frames (See
above).
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do not give you cookies or read cookies you may have. If you follow
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color-coding when you turn off stylesheets, however where I use
color-coding there is always some other symbol indicating the
meaning (see Marks below).
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clear in a voice browser: I know. I am sorry. I am working
on it. This site, however, is almost entirely text, so if you skip
the weird parts, you should be able to follow most of the most
important parts. In general the tables are merely navigation
tables.
- Web crawler cannot
download the site: Various programs exist that sometimes
allow you to download entire sites. Most such software is not smart
enough to avoid certain links on my site that may lead to endless
loops. For that reason, I have banned some of those robots from my
site. This policy is unlikely to change. If, and when, this online
book reaches a stable form, I may (or may not) make zipped versions
available. In the meantime I strongly suggest you use these pages
online because they are likely to change significantly as revisions
are made. There are not too many pages in this online book to
download manually, and you may want to do that in case my site goes
down.
- Navigation
problems: Although I have sometimes provided [Return]
links, you may reach various parts of my pages in ways I have not
anticipated. Moreover, some of my [Next] and [Previous] links may
be broken. I suggest you bookmark the
index page and that you use the "back" feature of your browser,
when appropriate, to be certain that you go where you intend to
go.
- Javascript: My pages
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frames if there are any. If this causes problems in your browser,
turn off Javascript. None of the content of any of my pages depend
upon Javascript.
I use several marks in the text of this online book. Here are
the meanings of these marks:
- [!]This
is the mark for good examples. This may not be the only answer, but
it is an answer.
- [*]This is the
mark for bad examples. They may not be clearly wrong as a matter of
grammar or usage, but they are decided inferior (in my opinion) to
the good examples.
- [?]This is the mark for questionable or uncertain
examples or for examples that illustrate one of several alternative
and acceptable (if well executed) ways of doing things.
- [uk]This marks
examples of or remarks about usage in the United Kingdom or in
English-speaking countries other than the United States. In many
cases, the usage common in the United States is one of several
competing usages in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking
countries. The policies of publications in the United Kingdom and
especially in Canada tend to vary much more than the policies of
similar publications in the United States. I can only alert you to
the existence of the alternative usage. You must determine whether
it applies in your situation. Naturally I have not attempted to
sort out the differences in spelling or the many words which mean
different things in the different nations. This mark may also
indicate other information especially pertinent to writers in the
UK.
- [>]This mark is used in exercises and at other places
to indicate that I mean to give you the opportunity to form a
response, solution, or answer in your mind or on paper before
proceeding. Sometimes it indicates that a question I have posed is
not to be taken as entirely rhetorical.
Usage marks should be interpreted according to context. Styles,
for example, will vary according to the kind of publication and the
policies of the editors. Some points of style are purely arbitrary.
Style examples are marked according to the style I recommend for
general fiction. If you know you are writing for a publication with
different preferences, naturally you should ignore my advice to the
contrary. Since not everyone (and perhaps not anyone) has a perfect
mastery of English, there are times, as in dialogue or in passages
with certain kinds of narrators, one does not want perfect grammar
or usage. Yet there are still rules for how dialogue should appear
in print and how narration is constructed. You can ignore a red
flag on grammar in such situations, but you still should observe
the rules of presenting these kinds of material.
- <
Term > When some terms
are first introduced in the text (or are reintroduced much later)
this marking indicates that the term is defined in the glossary and
the term is linked to the appropriate place in the glossary.
- [^] This mark indicates a footnote. In hypertext,
footnotes do not need to be numbered since the ^ mark can be linked
to the appropriate note, which will usually be at the bottom of the
page. Beware of this if you convert a page to plain text or print a
page, since all of the notes will be indicated with ^. Footnotes
usually will contain some comments and may refer to several
authorities. Fans of html may notice that notes usually have names
such as "note1," "note2," and so forth. These names are arbitrary
and do not necessarily indicate the order of the notes on the
page.
- [Fowler]
Square brackets, when they do not contain some other symbol, may
contain a short form of a reference. References in square brackets
indicate sources containing material substantively related to the
subject being discussed. These references are not always the source
of my ideas on the subject, and in some cases they represent
opinions that differ from mine, although usually when there is a
great difference between authorities some discussion will appear in
a footnote (See above). When the source is
available on the web, the link in the square brackets may go to the
nearest available point on the web page. Otherwise, the link will
go to a full citation in my bibliography.
Square brackets are also used in their customary role of indicating
editorial changes or comments in quoted text.
- [+]This
mark indicates additional links. Sometimes terms or titles in the
text need more than one link. Additional links are indicated by and
are linked to [+] marks. When there are
several links associated with a title, the first substantive link
is linked to the words in the title, the link to Amazon, if there
is one, is linked to the mark [$],
and if there are additional links, they are linked to [+] marks.
- [$]This
mark indicates a link to Amazon.com. This link should provide you
with more information about a book mentioned in the text. The link
also will allow you to purchase the title (if it is available) from
Amazon.com if you have or choose to open an Amazon.com account. I
am compensated for sales of books that are in print when you use
one of these links to buy the book, but the book will not cost you
more than it would if you accessed Amazon.com directly. You are not
obligated to buy the book if you follow the link. When there are
several links associated with a title, the first substantive link
is linked to the words in the title, the link to Amazon is linked
to the mark [$], and if there are
additional links, they are linked to [+] marks.
- {10,000
Dreams} Curly braces enclose a short reference to the
source of the text in an example or exercise. The example or
exercise may or may not be an exact quotation, and the version I
judge inferior or questionable may or may not appear in the source.
Additional abbreviations may indicate the location of material in
such sources as Shakespeare or the Bible. The link in curly braces
leads to an expanded citation in my table of such
sources. Many of these sources are available for download from Project
Gutenberg or can be read on the web at Bartleby.com
The following learning aids appear in color-coded boxes if you
use a styles-enabled graphics browser. But if you use a text
browser or if you turn stylesheets off in your graphic browser,
these learning aids appear between rules (horizontal lines) and the
name of the type of learning aid appears in parentheses just below
the top rule. Thus previews have (preview) just below the top rule
and so forth. If you cannot use the color coding, simply turn off
stylesheets in your graphic browser and the text cues should
appear.
This is a Dummy Preview
- A preview lists some points to look for in the following
text.
- A preview is not necessarily an outline.
- A preview will not list every important point in the text.
- But if you miss the preview points, you probably missed
important stuff.
- Or I screwed up making the preview.
- There are no links in previews because previews are supposed to
be and aid in reading the material.
This is a Dummy Summary
- Summaries are similar to previews, except they come after the
relevant text.
- Like previews, summaries will not always mention every
important point.
- Use summaries to reflect upon the preceding text and when
reviewing the chapter as a whole.
One of the principal weaknesses of the print editions of this
book, which the online edition hopes to overcome, was the lack of
exercises. Exercises in a book (or an online book), of course,
cannot take the place of practice, but they can help to indicate
what to practice. There are several kinds of exercises here.
- Exercises in Review: These exercises pose questions about the
preceding text. Answers are not provided. Readers who are not
confident of their answers should review the preceding
material.
- Exercises: Exercises other than Exercises in Review may or may
not have answers. Unlike exercises in mathematics, most exercises
here do not have precisely one correct answer. Some exercises will
depend upon work from a previous exercise. In that case, I should
have included a link to the prerequisite exercise.
This is a Dummy Exercise
- This might be one problem.
- This might be another.
- The link below might go to the answers, but doesn't in this
case because this is a dummy exercise.
[
Answers ]
This is a Dummy Comment
Comments are little articles, similar to what are called
sidebars in print. (Sidebars a little too challenging for some
browsers, so we have comments.) You may or may not find the
material in the comments useful, interesting, or amusing. Comments
may include some dubious anecdotes which nonetheless serve as a
mnemonic for a useful point.
Pullouts are short quotations from the text set in large type.
Pullouts are often used in magazines to break up large blocks of
gray text and as enticements to the read the article. Pullouts
serve something of the same functions here. In addition, pullouts
may help you find your place in the text or may help in reviewing
the material.
"Pullouts are often used in magazines ..."
This is a Dummy Discussion
Many of our subjects are given to much "on the one hand," "on
the other hand," "yes, but," and "nevertheless." When this gets too
thick, I may include a discussion, which is a kind of summary that
tries to sort out the pros and cons of a subject. In some cases, I
will prompt you to do some of this work. You are encouraged to
think how you would give a five-minute speech or write a three- or
four-paragraph essay that would sort the subject out.
In other words, sometimes discussions are like focused, detailed
summaries. Other times, discussions are like an essay-question
exercise.
This is a Dummy Example
When there are more than one or two examples or the examples are
lengthy, the examples may be gathered together in an example box
like this. I hope you won't take this as an invitation to skip the
examples, but it should make it clearer when the examples are over
and the text has resumed. When there are number of examples grouped
together, some may illustrate slightly different aspects of the
subject.