The sleeper curve

Tim’s post on sun exposure being not-all-bad for you (or is it?) reminds me of this post that I’ve been meaning to mention for some time. It discusses the phenomenon of people not being as stupid, nor things as bad for you, as conventional wisdom suggests.

In the case of TV being more stimulating than once thought, Steven Johnson calls it the “Sleeper Curve” after the Woody Allen movie. Having become an Atkins devotee, I’ve often thought of this movie in recent times! Also, being old enough to remember both the days when PABA was supposed to be the safe way to avoid getting too much sun and the even more bygone days when SPF numbers didn’t exist and coconut oil for “frying” was the be-all and end-all of a day at the beach, I have long been suspicious of answers to the question of how much sun exposure is good/bad for you.

Kum-bay-yah

Okay, Mary Mary’s attempt to start an urban legend does indeed go a bit far… But there was a lot of comraderie and shared purpose in the room on Friday when Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer gave an update on the Sun-Microsoft relationship. I’ve been deeply involved in the collaboration work we’ve been doing (you can see two jointly produced draft specifications here) but haven’t been able to say a lot publicly about it until now. Fair warning: I will probably have to go underground again on some of the future work.

At this event, we did a demo of planned support for Sun-Microsoft interoperability in cross-domain single sign-on, using honest-to-goodness XML-based protocols. Ballmer prefaced it by predicting some people would think it’s the most boring demo they’d ever seen because we’d be showing an integrated user experience. Charlie Feld, EDS executive VP and one of the several customers and system integrators offering testimonials that day, commented that with EDS’s 100,000 servers and millions of devices and “the complexity that’s been built in this 40 years’ worth of junk yard that we call the IT era”, he was actually excited about the demo. That felt damn good.

I hope to share more thoughts — and even photos; did you know we have a Steve Ballmer lookalike on the Sun federated identity team? — in the coming days. But here’s one more tidbit. At the event, Ballmer observed that we’ve moved from the courtroom to the computer lab over the last year and now we’re moving to the marketplace, and McNealy talked about how we’ve been figuring out the “anthropology of working together”. I think both sides have benefited from the personal interactions we’ve been able to have over the past year, and that’s something that I know will continue and strengthen. Sun has a brochure on the topic of interoperability that uses the image of a piano duet to summarize what it’s all about. Some wag suggested that maybe we should have used an image of oil and vinegar — they don’t naturally mix, but if you periodically shake them up real hard and increase the one-on-one interaction of individual particles, they can figure out how to get along. That sounds about right to me. Enough talk about interop — it’s all about emulsification!

Well-formed birthday cake

Best wishes to Sean McGrath on the occasion of his 0x28th birthday!

For a time I was using hexadecimal exclusively for my age, as it seemed better than Botox for general age-reducing. My dear hubby Eli threw me a wonderful party for my 0x28th, and even commissioned the creation of a cake that looked just like a full-size computer monitor. We were remiss in not capturing a picture of the thing before it started getting dismantled for consumption, but we did get one shot of the “screen”:

Well-formed birthday cake

Eli, being a technical professional with a good grasp of XML, agonized over the correct information model for this, along with managing space constraints and wondering whether the cake decorators would make it ill-formed somewhere along the way. But they really came through. The cake was a bit hit with my geeky friends, and with me.

Now, (mumble) years later, my age in hex just looks weird and will unfortunately remain so for a while. Maybe it’s time to switch to vigesimal…

The Language Log

A while back I followed a link somewhere at Michael Kaplan’s blog to the Language Log. This site offers up a steady stream of linguistic insights and tidbits that are just plain fun to read. One discussion is about “words needed for words used for special reasons”:

I’ve recently come across another kind of communicative act whereby words are used for something other than their conventional effect, in a way that doesn’t seem to have a conventional name. This is where you say something not because you mean it, exactly, but because it gives you a chance to use a word or phrase you’ve been saving up.

Make sure to read the whole entry to see an example of this phenomenon in comic-strip form. I can think of another halfway famous example: “I hope not sporadically!” In the technical documentation world, DocBook provides the wordasword element, which is for when you want to revert to a regular English (or whatever) meaning after having twisted a word all out of shape for some technical purpose; depending on whether you see technical jargon as “conventional” or “unconventional” usage, wordasword is either used for examples of this phenomenon or as an antidote to them…

The post never does find the word it’s looking for, but it eventually alights on a discussion of the Nihilartikel, a fake dictionary or encyclopedia entry created for playful or copyright-trap reasons. LRF should count as a Nihilartikel, at least on a metaphorical level — shall we call it a Nihilwort?

UPDATE: Ben Hyde had me laughing out loud with his response to what you call the communicative act of using a word because you’ve been saving it up:

I thought the word for that was blogging.