Displaying the Laws of Form in ASCII
I first had trouble displaying the symbols Spencer-Brown uses for his Laws of Form when I wanted to include them in my essay on femininity and death. I wrote the paper in Google Docs, so using LaTeX wasn't an option, and the equation-menu being fairly constrained, I resorted to drawing my katjects – yielding unsatisfying results.
When I decided to post the essay on this blog I met the same problem – although Bearblog allows using mathematical notation, displaying the symbols requires more advanced code, which I don't think is possible to include here (it also would be overkill just to display three or four equations). Wikipedia seems to have similar problems, it uses small .gif and .png files to display the symbols and equations.
The solution is so simple it took me more then a month to come up with: just using ASCII-elements. The best fit seem to be the symbols used for drawing boxes.
┌─────┐
│ │
└─────┘
Then one can just puzzle the pieces together and arrive at the two stars of the show:
──┐
Cross: │
──┐
re-entry: │
└─┘
It takes some arranging, but it looks much better then the pictures and is simpler (at least for me) then using LaTeX. For good measure, here is an example from Dirk Baecker's latest book that shows data (d) as an articulation of the interaction of system, network, ecology and everything else:
────────────────────────────────┐
──────────────────────┐ │
────────────┐ │ │
───┐ │ │ │
∂d = d │ System │ Network │ Ecology │ n
└──────────┘ │ │
└────────────────────┘ │
└──────────────────────────────┘