Once again it appears that my little missives are a hotbed of lies and untruth. In Letter 18, I foolishly called Octavian Caesar's nephew by marriage. Not so, I am reliably informed by PNJ Howell, my Y2k spy in the UK, and an authority on subjects Latinic. In paraphrasing the sentence "The son of a senator who married a niece of Julius Caesar, he became Caesar's adopted son and principal heir", I made a booboo. The niece was Octavian's mother, not his wife. Mea culpa.
"Augustus AKA Octavian was not an inlaw of Julius Caesar - he was his great-nephew, a blood relation, thus suitable to be an heir. Caesar's only daughter Julia had died young with no children. Octavian's sister Octavia was at one time married to Antony. When Ant had an affair with Cleo (some year's after Caesar's), Octavian had added reason to attack Ant after his infidelity to Octavia. The family tree over the next 3 - 4 generations would need a 3D computer. Suffice it to say that Ant was several times over a great grandfather of Nero - very inbred. The history books don't tell you that sort of fact." PNJHThanks Penny, for setting me straight, eventually we do get to the real facts. Shades of "I'm my own Grandpa".
So Octavian murdered the blood heir (Caesarion) his (nominal) half brother (by adoption), not his nephew. I personally think that is even worse. It is a little while since I read any Roman Law let alone the Institutes of Justinian. My question is whether Caesarion would have had a claim to the estate? Assuming he lived, poor little bastard. The Romans invalidated wills that took more than 50% of the money away from the blood relatives. Did Octavian do in his baby brother for the loot? Now we know where the "Soapie" writers get their plots.
As a matter of morbid interest, the reason February is our odd month out is that Octavian (when Augustus) threw a tantrum because "his" month did not originally have as many days in it as Caesars month (July). So February was cut down and August increased by one day.
"This order was interrupted to gratify the vanity of Augustus, by giving the month bearing his name as many days as July, which was named after the first Caesar. A day was accordingly taken from February and given to August; and in order that three months of thirty-one days might not come together, September and November were reduced to thirty days, and thirty-one given to October and December. For so frivolous a reason was the regulation of Caesar abandoned, and a capricious arrangement introduced, which it requires some attention to remember."(Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, all the rest have thirty one 'cepting February alone which has twenty eight and twenty nine in each leap year).
Source: Gregorian Reform of the Calendar: Proceedings of the Vatican Conference to Commemorate its 400th Anniversary, 1582-1992, ed. G. V. Coyne, M. A. Hoskin, and O. Pedersen (Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Specolo Vaticano, 1983). AREA: Calendar TITLE: Gregorian Calendar URL: http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Things/gregorian_calendar.html
For those who are perhaps not completely au fait with the lesser known facets of South African history let me first explain who Nomkwasi was.
At the time of the British Settlers in 1820 the Xhosa people on the East Cape border region begin to experience the population pressure of the White settlers moving inland and northwards from Port Elizabeth.
A young female "seer", Nomkwasi by name, had a dream that if the Xhosa were to kill all their cattle, the white intruders would be driven into the sea.
One must understand the importance of cattle to the Nguni peoples. Essentially pastoral, their entire wealth, food chain, social order and status is linked to cattle. (Any of this sound familiar? We are linked to Oil and Electricity.)
Unfortunately for the Xhosa nation, the tribal elders were moved to implement Nomkwasi's dreams and the cattle were duly slaughtered.
The resulting famine decimated the Xhosa nation and broke their political power from that time on.
Mind you, Nelson Mandela is a tribal chief of an offshoot of the Xhosa, so times are perhaps a-changing.
In the Y2k context, the "Nomkwasi Effect", (I suppose the closest European equivalent would be "Cry Wolf"), refers to the damaging effects of imperfectly implemented remediation, triggered by panic. Trevors thesis (he is after all an experienced and grey bearded consultant) is that the IT community is sowing the seeds of its own destruction in attempting to counter Y2k.
Nicholas Zbegintzov has long held a similar view that Y2k is a pure maintenance issue and should be left to the professionals.
I agree with certain parts of these hypotheses. We know that windowing and encapsulation techniques, although popular and widely used, contain problems and set new timebombs that will go off at various times in the future.
But Y2k has gone way beyond a mere IT problem. Embedded systems, Risk Analysis and Contingency are out of the IT department league. My cynicism prompts me to say that at this late stage they are now probably beyond the league of most Senior Managers.
Perhaps a real world example of the Nomkwasi effect is the new Port Control system recently implemented by Transnet. The port of Durban is almost at a standstill. Long queues of freezer trucks containing export quality food are waiting at the gates, and the smell of rotting food hangs over the docks.
Apart from the pure economic losses, this is damaging South Africa's reputation as a supplier of fresh produce and at a time when economic successes are few and far between, orders are being lost.
The cause of all this mayhem is the new COSMOS system implemented to replace the elderly and definitely non-compliant systems that used to do the job quite satisfactorily. Sounds like a lack of testing to me.
Trevor now maintains that Y2k Activists (such as yours truly), in reliving Nomkwasi's "dreams", have now actually caused these problems by shouting about the problem before it actually happened, thus triggering a rush to "break" perfectly good systems.
This is where he and I differ. If no action had been taken to circumvent Y2k, the resultant chaos and economic damage would have been far worse by reason of being deferred. There is still a major global concern that folks are still not taking serious action. Bit late now.
I maintain that most of the Y2k problem areas have probably been fixed by now, or are in the final stages of implementation. And this the result of four years of gruelling hard work and countless billions in costs.
The likelihood of all Y2k related problems being sorted out in time is becoming more and more unlikely, but the bulk of Y2k work is in progress, at least we can hope to achieve some degree of critical mass. If we lose a few thousand laggard SME's here and there the Scenarios will put it down to "normal attrition".
Yes, there will be localised problems, such as COSMOS, but these will have been caused by poor systems design, underpowered solutions, and poor or non-existent volume testing. Symptoms of the loss of Systemic Skills and the invasion of the industry by herds of dumb untutored microminded yuppies and incompetent management.
It is far more likely that any new systems have been implemented for "fashion" reasons rather than for Y2k reasons.
I stand by my own decision to shout Y2k to the skies. Precious little good has it done me.
Let us contrast the "Nomkwazi Effect" (which is somewhat speculative), with another term that has reared its ugly head, "Iatrogenesis", which is real and can be predicted with some degree of statistical relevance.
We know absolutely that a significant percentage of Y2k remediated code will contain errors. We have just never had a cute word to describe the effect before.
The "Iatrogenesis" word comes from a recent US Naval War College study, which I consider to be very significant. It is the first time that we have had an independent Y2k think tank evaluation on a global basis...., the notion of "iatrogenesis," which is narrowly defined as the unintended side effects resulting from treatment by a physician, but which we use more broadly to mean average people doing stupid things during stressful times (although the notion of unintended side effects caused by a true expert is useful as well--namely, the mistakes created by software remediation).
To my mind the value of this study is not that it has produced any earthshattering new scenarios, but that it has revisited and organised and clarified many of our old favourites. And some of the insights are excellent.
There are also traces of a certain wry tongue-in-cheek humour which I find appealing. It gets the Cinderella four (out of five) pumpkin rating. Highly recommended reading.
As they say, "In short, while we're not interested in unduly hyping the Y2K situation, we are interested in exploring the "dark side" potentials because, frankly, that's what we get paid to do as a research organization that serves the U.S. military".
Giggle. B>)
AREA: Strategy TITLE: Year 2000 International Security Dimension project Summary COMMENT: Editors copy of US Naval War College (more current) URL: http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/6926/y2kproj.htm