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Subject: [humanmarkup-comment] Silver Linings, Loose Ends,El Niņo and other Metaphors
Hi Everyone, The joint Web Services TCs finished up their work a day early so I will have some time today to catch up on the second and final round of proofreading corrections before we make our announcement Monday. As many of you know from Karl Best's message yesterday, we are ready to make our announcement once these corrections are finished, and the message itself has been drafted. I will do both and submit the first draft of the message to the TC either late today or tomorrow morning. I'm sorry to ask you to take time from your weekendsto run your eyes over ths but we are nearly done and this really is the last of the loose ends for this part of the process--so that takes care of the Loose Ends Metaphor, for us at least. So the Joint Web Services TCs finished up business yesterday, so we all get a day off today. Riiiight....! In my dreams. As for Silver Linings, I am listening to the first blast of a recently, dramatically increased equatorial Pacific temperature differential flowing east to impact the west cost of South American, pushing north at this time of year, creating the winter-storm season syndrome we call El Niņo. The Silver Lining is that it makes it more tolerable to remain indoors. From here on I am rambling around to an eventual point, and I thought I would warn you so you can skip it if you want. It will add no specific information relevant to our tasks. However... Even with a full night's sleep (including an extra hour and half this morning when I could not pry my carcass out of the rack-due to my own post-stress cave-in) the-condition-my-condition-is-in is threatening to develop into a cold, which I really would rather dodge if a little more rest will accomplish that. So I made myself stay in bed an wallow in it as long as I could, listening to these sounds of El Niņo wailing outside. It was the sudden onset of a dramatically increased intensity in this particular weather syndrome which Peruvian and Chilean fishermen dubbed "El Niņo" a few decades back that prompted this train of thought. Because the sudden warming of the equatorial Pacific following the currents east shifted their usual catch North (to our Baja and Alto California waters actually) and brought a whole catch of weird and unusal fish into their nets in what they evidently decided was unusual enough to associate with Biblical Events surrounding The Nativity, they named this warming "Baby Boy" or "Boy Child." Oddly it was our culture that named the reverse phenomenon "La Niņa" or "Baby Girl." This time of year also happens to be their spring-summer which is one of the more odd cultural displacements of this season. I mention all this devastatingly dull information because it made me think about how peculiar we human beings are. And how oddly culture bound, if you think about it. The coincidence that struck me as odd is that Post Columbian (Colonial European) South America was overtaken culturally by the Spanish/Portuguese Version of Christianity allied with a fairly straightforward exploitation-based military invasion, due largely to the cultural effects of three technologies-- improved ocean-going Navigation, Gunpowder-based firearms and artillery and Horseback Riding (Navigation and Horseback Riding allowed humans to communicate over greater distances more quickly and thus coordinate military actions using overwhelmingly superior weapons technology). This rather ugly cultural process of subjugation was greatly aided by an apparently magical and supernatural connection between the invaders and the invaders' gods giving the invaders these great powers. Yet in the long run, this winter storm in Northern California is called El Niņo because the underlying religion, (which had to be superior in the minds of the subjugated peoples due simply to its evident power as the professed religion of the conqueror), resonated with the subjugated people whose adopted Language was then used to describe weather and climate phenomena that have little to do with the cultural conditions of Roman Domination of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures 2000 years ago. Go figure. And we now have the the job of publicizing, promoting and gaining adoption for the first specification of a set of computer languages to describe us humans more accurately. I knew there was a point in here somewhere, along with the pony that produced all this.... Ciao, Rex -- Rex Brooks Starbourne Communications Design 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309 http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com
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