11/15 White Paper

It's the age old dilemma. When at work, and presented with a topic that you have no knowledge of, should you publicly ask someone to explain to you what the hell they are taking about, or do you feign comprehension and then look it up on wikipedia later. Today, I chose the latter option, and after my meeting had ended, I looked up what a white paper actually was. Historically, white papers were government reports that detailed government policies. I like the simplicity of wikipedia's statement, "White papers are used to help people make decisions."

Today, most white papers are written by companies and used as marketing tools to describe the benefits of their technology, research, or products (walking the fine line between a purely factual report and a sales pitch). The name "white paper" originated (I'm guessing in the U.K.) because the reports were informally bound with white paper, as opposed to the traditional blue binding of official government reports.

11/12 Ceylon Tea

Today I was drinking some wonderful tea made by "The Republic of Tea" called Mango Ceylon. Thank goodness I bought the cup of tea at a restaurant where you pretty much just get hot water and they you choose the tea bag yourself, because I'm not sure that I can properly pronounce "Ceylon", even now that I know what the word refers to. Sri Lanka was known as Ceylon up until 1972. The tea leaves that are grown there today, be they black, white, green or oolong, are still referred to as Ceylon teas.

One thing I don't understand though, is the statement on the Sri Lanka wikipedia page saying that Sri Lanka was know as Ceylon before 1952. What happened between 1952 and 1972? Was there some other name in place during that time or have I come across my first wiki-fallacy?

11/10 Meme, Même, MEMS

This all starts with a post on my significant other’s blog having something to do with: im in ur base killin ur d00dz, where he refers to the phrase as a “meme.” I realize now that the only context in which I previously knew this word is as the French word “même” meaning: same, and this starts a chain reaction of confusion. I read the word with a pronunciation of something like mehmuh, which makes me think of MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), which this has nothing at all to do with.

A meme is an idea, phrase, or as wikipedia puts it: “a unit of cultural information” that spreads from one person to another. The English word meme is pronounced with a hard first “e” so that it will sound sort of like gene. Meme is unrelated to the French même, but instead is derived from the Greek “mimos” meaning: mimic. There is lots to read on wikipedia about memes, memetics, memeplexes, and even meme-splicing. And it is interesting to note that there is more on wikipedia about memes than MEMS, which makes no sense and yet makes perfect sense.