Difference between revisions of "Talk:2485: Nightmare Code"
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| + | <!-- I *WILL* EDIT THE BELOW OUT LATER --> | ||
| + | As I feared, I got into an Edit Conflict after doing (significantly more than I intended) editing of my own 'starter' explanation. I can't easily resolve exit conflicts, and I really want to review the new item at more leisure before I junk my input entirely, so I include my initial effort below, hidden in an HTML comment so as not to be too intrusive to the casual reader. I shall come back and edit it out ASAP (when I'll be on another device, without a simpler way to just carry across a portably-stored copy and keep you lot out of it!) or feel free to dip into this edit yourself if you want to look for any gems amongst the copious spoilheap tailings. Sorry about the awkward way I'm doing it. Didn't expect to have a new comic at this time of day, but got drawn in, and now I'm too short on time. | ||
| + | <!-- The comic is depicting a lecture or other presentation in the (far) future, the fog of intervening history obscuring various facts reasonably well-known to ourselves to the point of triviality. | ||
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| + | Phenomena such as Hurricanes/Typhoons, Tropical Storms, Ice Storms and other large-scale weather-fronts of note have been increasingly identified by naming systems, typically personal names appropriate to the geographic area of the designated meteorological authority. These are prepared in advance may be arranged alphabetically so that the first event of the season is given a name starting with 'A', the second with 'B', and so on, to make it easier to understand that Hannah is a newer threat than Fiona or Kevin was identified before Michael. | ||
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| + | Because weather can be unpredictable, in the medium term, this does not mean that a prepared name granted to a nascent weather system ''will'' affect an area, or even arrive before the next-discovered threat does, and events given Spanish names may travel far enough to interleve with those named with Irish ones, but it does tend to be a relatively organised system. | ||
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| + | With current technology and analysis available, including remote satellite surveillance of storm-generating far oceanic areas, many more potentially nameable events are being identified, even before the question of whether climate change is also creating more of them due to the 'global weirding' of the weather. The naming lists tend to be for a given season (or calendar year), before starting back at 'A' in an alphabetic list prepared for the next period. When there are more than 26 nameable events, one of the fallbacks used is to use the Greek letters (Alpha, Beta, Gamma,...) to cover the shortfall, so as not to delve into the next timespan too early - or look like one has. And this is not as rare as it once was. | ||
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| + | The variations of Covid have recently been similarly assigned Greek letters in common parlance, in this case to replace the 'geographical origin' name given ("Kent variant", "India variant") which may both be misleading - given that this is only the place of first identification and may have actually been seeded there from elsewhere with less variation monitoring available - and prejudicial to the area concerned. (c.f. the "Spanish Flu" which did not actually originate in Spain, but was just deliberately underreported in most other places.) For more precise identification, there are identifiers that relate more closely to the exact viral mutations, but these are rarely known or readily understood by anyone not deeply invested in the field of study. For strains of influenza, the H''x''N''y'' format has the advantage of being (mostly) easy to recall and also describing two of the most important operational aspects of the strain (e.g. the infective 'coating'), but this is significantly different to the coronavirus situation. | ||
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| + | Between our present and the future setting, it also seems that disasters caused by runaway nanomechanical events have also become a recurring or multipally-arising threat and have required serial classification to make easy sense of. | ||
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| + | Culturally, the world of this future appears to retain a memory of weather, disease and technodisaster, but have lost or diminished its knowledge of the lettering system, whether through continually evolving communications or periods of apathy towards events on a long-lost homeworld, perhaps due to the sheer destructive power of a nanobot swarm having 'eaten' much of the reference material and the experts who would have attempted to keep such knowledge alive. | ||
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| + | As such, the words are now known only as the default labels to apply to various 'Nightmares' that can be experienced, and most people do not realise that they were once used as neutral element in the writing down of an ancient language, their use in algebra or any other non-Nightmare classification scenario. Our futuristic lecturer does know (some of) this, however, and is trying to inform his audience, but framed within his own still-limited knowledge of the subject. | ||
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| + | The title-text persists in treating the word "alpha" only as a known indicator of 'something bad', insisting that it is the badness of the word (and the source-word "beta", unless the awkwardness is against the wagering reference in the element of "bet") that discouraged the use of the 'scary' word "alphabet" and left everyone use a similar term based upon the phrase "character set". --> | ||
| + | <!-- I *WILL* EDIT THE ABOVE OUT LATER --> | ||
Revision as of 16:07, 5 July 2021
As I feared, I got into an Edit Conflict after doing (significantly more than I intended) editing of my own 'starter' explanation. I can't easily resolve exit conflicts, and I really want to review the new item at more leisure before I junk my input entirely, so I include my initial effort below, hidden in an HTML comment so as not to be too intrusive to the casual reader. I shall come back and edit it out ASAP (when I'll be on another device, without a simpler way to just carry across a portably-stored copy and keep you lot out of it!) or feel free to dip into this edit yourself if you want to look for any gems amongst the copious spoilheap tailings. Sorry about the awkward way I'm doing it. Didn't expect to have a new comic at this time of day, but got drawn in, and now I'm too short on time.
