[humanmarkup] Silver Linings, Loose Ends,El Niņo and other Metaphors

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

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