Sidebar re randomness (was Trademarks, random strings, sharing, reserved words)

[David Collier-Brown <davecb@Canada.Sun.COM>]

Michael Dillon wrote (some time ago):
> This is sort of how I created the word Memra that I use for my company.
> Nine years after I created this word and incorporated the company I
> discovered that "memra" is actually a word in an ancient language that
> bears some rather eerie connections to the roots and processes that I
> went through to create the name. I was less concerned with a semantic
> connection between the name and the business and more concerned with
> having a name that sounded good.


  Humans are both time-binding and information-binding creatures, and
will attempt to attribute meaning to some of the **oddest** things...
The classical example from psycology is the sentence

	Colorless green dreams sleep furiously.

  This was dreamt up (:-)) to be both meaningless and 
self-contradictory, yet in experiments, people were found to try to
attibute meanings to it.


  I strongly recommend against using random letter or number sequences,
as they will be interpreted as if they were meaningfull, effectively
changing their meaning into the first appreciation of the reader.
  For example, I'm DC238 in the NIC whois database.  This sounds
to me like I'm a Douglas Aircraft product, made of uranium 238.
And probably too soft and heavy to get off the ground...

  If someone needs to distinguish their name from another, let it be
done by things for which the meaning is known beforehand, not after the
fact. That's a guarantee of unforseen consequences, which are known
to be at least risky if not downright bad.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
Willowdale, Ontario   | davecb@hobbes.ss.org, canada.sun.com
N2M 1Y3. 416-223-8968 | http://java.science.yorku.ca/~davecb