As I said the last time I talked about this, several times a week I find myself saying something and I realize that while I know what it means, I don’t know why it means that. When I catch myself at this, I’m off to find out why.
This morning brought two new examples.
The first was “proof”. I mean “proof” in the alcoholic sense, of course. I know, as everyone does, that the “proof” of a particular booze is a number that’s twice its alcohol percentage. What I realized today is that A) I have no idea why this is called “proof”, and B) I have no idea why it’s twice the alcohol level.
A little research turned up the very interesting explanation of why it’s called proof: apparently this comes from a British practice dating back to the 18th century, where liquor was checked to see if it was boozy enough by mixing a specified amount of the alcohol with a specified amount of the booze. If you could ignite the mixture, it was “proved” strong enough to use for the liquor ration, etc. If the mixture wouldn’t light, then there wasn’t enough alcohol in it. This, incidentally, is a lovely story with essential Man elements: booze, fire, rough measurements, and the potential for explosions.
The point that it would light at, it turns out, is 57.15% ABV. Since they called this “100 degrees proof”, it follows from a little math that 100% alcohol was 175 degrees proof.
What my research didn’t turn up, and which I’d love to know, is how we went from that to the modern North American 2:1 standard. In North America we don’t talk about something being “80 degrees proof” (not quite 46%ABV), but instead say “80 proof” (for 40%ABV). I can see the laws that establish this 2:1 relationship, but I can’t seem to dig up information on the point at which we switched from “degrees proof” to “proof”, and why it went from 175:100 to 2:1.
The other one that hit me today was “vicious circle”. I think, in my head, this was defined as “one of those things that keeps repeating, which there’s no way out of”, and when I ran into a technical work today that referred to a “non-vicious circle” I was stopped. The definition I was using internally didn’t really explain how a circle could be non-vicious–I mean every circle kept repeating over and over, right?
Turns out I was just wrong on that one, that a “vicious circle” is essentially what I, as an engineer, would call a “positive feedback loop”–that is, a series of events or operations that drives a loop in which each cycle reinforces itself. Actually, it’s a specific case of a positive feedback loop: one in which the thing that’s being reinforced is undesirable, or “bad”. There is also a “virtuous circle” in which the reinforcement leads to a desirable or or “good” result. So rather than “a cycle that is locked into repetition”, a vicious circle is more “a cycle that is locked into a repetition where each subsequent cycle follows the same pattern but is worse.”
Of course, any engineer will tell you that a positive feedback loop tends, and rapidly, to an unstable state. For a vicious circle, this kind of makes sense–the negative outcomes reinforce themselves until the cycle is interrupted, or else it will inevitably lead to its own collapse. For a virtuous circle this makes less sense–that the desirable outcomes keep reinforcing themselves until some kind of positive singularity, unless interrupted. Maybe that’s the Nerd Rapture again.
These facts brought to you by an interminable meeting about CMMI.
