What's in a name? Kelly-Bootle gets the last word even when talking to roses.
So, those boring anniversaries, by their very natures, keep cropping up with numbing regularity, and, for the record, must needs be recorded. (At this point, technology permitting, you should hear a certain chord from Brecht/Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper that captures the absolute essence of a depraved yawn.)
My bimonthly Post-Mortem Debunker column celebrates a year of rambling obscurity, a sort of EngLit version of those infamous Obfuscated C contests of yore [1]. It started here on June 1999 with "The Fence Less Straddled," and has survived the Y2K [2] and other discontinuities, cleverly hidden at the back of our esteemed organ among les petites annonces and ads for parsers and T-shirts.
The catchy title Post-Mortem Debunker was coined not by me, alas, but by our inspired Editor-in-Chief, Marc Briand. I recall some panic creeping in as the deadline approached with no agreed title that would indicate "content" (if any) while avoiding past-worn clichés ("EOF," "Last Word," "Scrag Ends," and "Not That Bugger Again?") The Journal had already gone through a titular crisis with Dan Saks running a column called "A Column That Needs a Name." [Dan's little jab at another author in another magazine, both of which shall remain nameless. — mb]
Having yet another column called "Yet Another Column In Search of a Name" seemed unduly Zenophilic [sic]. I had already used up with Computer Language (subsequently Software Development) magazine my all-time favorite "Seamless Quanta," a title of such stunning inanity that only one reader (IAS, Princeton, of course) dared write to question my sanity. Then Marc came up with the sublime Post-Mortem Debunker [Originally I came up with "Core Dump," but thought better of it. — mb] — and the rest is history, well at least a solid year's worth.
Returning to this column's subtitle, we have another annual event to celebrate: MAW [3] is Math Awareness Week, sponsored by JPBM (the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics) which unites the "awareness" activities of the MAA (Mathematical Association of America), AMS (American Mathematical Society), and SIAM (Society for the Industrial Applications of Mathematics). There are dozens of related organizations involved in this enterprise, such as COMAP (Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications), NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics), ARUME (Association for Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education), non-denumerably more. Cynics may wonder how effective all these well meaning bodies are in increasing Math Awareness, or, indeed, how one could possibly measure "success" or discount "failure." Are you more or less aware of mathematics (on a scale from epsilon to googol?) than, say, last year? I have so many bright friends and lovers who remain not so much unaware as wary of mathematics and its active cast of weirdos.
Here's the crunch: last year JPBM expanded its MAW (Math Awareness Week) to MAM (Math Awareness Month) — is it a doomed "Walt Disney" effort? I suspect (non-PC) that true Math Awareness is enjoyed by a happy few, a low constant percentage of Homo sapiens regardless of location, culture, and bright-eyed funding.
But, did you know that June is Stan Kelly-Bootle Awareness month?
References
[1] Ken Iverson was justifiably annoyed at my question "Why isn't there an Obfuscated APL contest?"
[2] Another yawn according to a disappointed press longing for disasters. But unfair to those of us who worked hard to prevent the calamities. Nevertheless, there was a disturbing letter from one software vendor that said "As in 1999 we'll be with you 7x24x365 hours throughout 2000." I.e., don't call us on February 29.
[3] MAW is a nice case of acronymical overloading: apart from the basic meaning "cavernous mouth/gob — center of a voracious hunger or greed," we have "Microsoft At Work."
Stan Kelly-Bootle has been computing on and off since 1953 when he graduated from Cambridge University in Pure Mathematics and hacked on EDSAC I (the first true stored-program computer). He is a contributing editor for UNIX Review/Performance Computing, and a Jolt Judge for Software Development Magazine. His many books include 680x0 Programming by Example, Mastering Turbo C, Lern Yerself Scouse, The Devil's DP Dictionary, The Computer Contradictionary, and Unix Complete. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, his songs have been recorded by Cilla Black, Judy Collins, the Dubliners, and himself. Stan welcomes email via skb@crl.com and his website http://www.crl.com/~skb/.