BERNEVAL

Vantages…

In the space between meaninglessness of the present and the unknowable past is the entertainment of history. The artifice of history’s words is to give historians, whoever they are – gossips, priests, academics – control over the past in a way participants could never control their present. Historians, again, whoever they are, are outsiders. They always make a drama out of what the participants experienced as one damn thing after another. Historians always see the past from a perspective the past could never have had. They are like meteorologists predicting yesterday’s weather today. They get their certainties from consequences.

Greg Dening, “A Poetic for Histories” in Performances

And so for day 2381
20.06.2013

I have been trawling through the literature on overlapping hierarchies and have repeatedly come across puns and other forms of humour. One of the outstanding examples comes from Steve deRose.

This model, originally named HORSE (Hierarchy-Obfuscating Really Spiffy Encoding) may seem wooden at first, but soon it comes to look quite natural. With its spartan syntax it should be attractive; but its name seems less so, and clearly a Muse meant us to rename this model

CLIX

because of its heavy use of point events scattered throughout the text or data stream: click, clicks, clix.

The acronym in itself is funny but even more humorous given that it is part of an extended conceit playing with a name: “This approach, which after Troy [Griffiths] is called ‘Trojan milestones'”. And is redoubled by the allusive heading to this section: “Catching Hell’n Tagging”.

From “Markup Overlap: A Review and a Horse” (2004)
http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2004/DeRose01/EML2004DeRose01.html

And so for day 2377
16.06.2013