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+\title{Malcolm's gleanings}
+\author{Malcolm Clark}
+\begin{Article}
+\section{In consistency}
+`A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'. That tireless
+defender of \TeX\ Allan Reese made no mention of \TeX\ whatsoever in
+his last article published in the \textsl{Times Higher}
+(March 17th?) demonstrating his immunity
+from the charge of hobgoblin. That's fine this once, but if he wants his
+accolades to accrue he must adhere to the one true path.
+
+\section{\textsc{Minse}}
+Browsing through the World Wide Web Consortium's maths-related pages, I came
+across \textsc{Minse}. Described by its author, Ka-Ping Yee,
+as a `simple, extensible
+way to express mathematics' it does seem to contain many interesting and useful
+ideas. Besides taking a semantic description of an equation and rendering it
+into several different forms, it may also render it into audio (with some
+acknowledgement to T V Raman). Ping also says that a \textsc{Minse} expression
+may be turned into a form which is understood by \TeX. If you want to know
+more, point your Web browser at \url{www.lfw.org/math/demo.html}.
+
+\section{Times change}
+Our chairman, now the proud possessor of a copy of
+`\TeX\ and Metafont, New Directions in Typesetting', pointed out
+the following quotation to me:
+\begin{quote}
+ ``Those of you who wish to define control sequences should know that
+ \TeX{} has further rules about them, namely that many different
+ spellings of the same control sequence may be possible. This fact
+ allows \TeX{} to handle control sequences quite efficiently; and
+ \TeX's usefulness is not seriously affected, because new control
+ sequences aren't needed very often.''
+\end{quote}
+Robin adds,
+\begin{quotation}
+``It's plain that Knuth hadn't at the time yet discussed life, the
+universe and everything with Lamport!
+
+The rules themselves are indeed horrendous, and go out of their way to
+put automatic generation of control sequence names pretty much out of
+the question.''\end{quotation}
+\section{\TUB}
+It was good to see \TUB\ recently. I did note that there has been a minor
+presentational change to the journal. The spine now merely notes the volume and
+number, omitting the month and year.
+It does make it that bit more difficult to see how
+late it is. Wise move, if ominous, just as it seemed to be getting on time.
+Not that I
+can really say anything about timeliness, the edition of \BV\ that I edited
+took an awfully long time to get through the process. I do think the content
+was good. Thanks to those who contributed. On the subject of journals, let me
+commend Don Hosek's \textsl{Serif} to you, now on edition 4 (see \BV\ 5.1). It's
+early preciousness seems to be evening out, and the proof reading has similarly
+improved. Since it is set in \TeX, it is especially fascinating. Just how does
+Don manage to do all those things which we never expect \TeX\ to do. It is a
+great pity that he did not provide the article for the Santa Barbara
+\TUB\ Proceedings (it should have been in 15(3))
+from the talk he gave there, where he discussed ways of
+bending \TeX\ to his will. Hint?
+
+\end{Article}