Measuring natural disasters

September 2017 was a month of natural disasters - hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes. Two terms you may have heard used are examples of eponyms.

Charles F. Richter (1900–1985) was an American seismologist and physicist who came up with the earthquake-measuring scale in 1935 that bears his name. It has lost some of its prevalence as scientists have replaced it with other, more precise systems.

The most dangerous tornadoes are classified as EF5. Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita (1920–1998) id the "F" in that measurement system. He was a Japanese-born storm researcher who created a system for classifying tornadic destructiveness. As with the Richter scale, a newer refined Enhanced Fujita scale has been adopted. Fujita also contributed to hurricane and thunderstorm analysis.

Demon and Dæmon

St. Anthony plagued by demons, engraving by Martin Schongauer in the 1480s.

The word "demon" has a variety of usages. Typically, it refers to an evil spirit, devil or fiend.

It can refer to an evil passion or influence - demon alcohol or drugs.

It can be a very human person who is considered extremely wicked, evil, or cruel. It can also be more positively used to describe a person with great energy or drive - "He's a demon when it comes to his work."

In classical mythology, a daemon was a god, though a subordinate deity. It would be associated with a place or be a person's attendant spirit.

Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine was
one source of inspiration for Pullman's "dæmon" concept.

I encountered the word dæmon as a being in the Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. where they are external physical manifestations of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. These dæmons are not evil but essential.

Still, our modern usage of demon (from Greek daimónion) is usually a supernatural and often malevolent being prevalent in religion, occultism, literature, fiction, mythology and folklore, even though that original Greek word did not carry the negative connotation.

The word took on religious meanings. In Ancient Near Eastern religions as well as in the Abrahamic traditions, including ancient and medieval Christian demonology, a demon is considered an unclean spirit, a fallen angel, or a spirit of unknown type which may cause demonic possession. This is where the need for a cleansing exorcism originated.

Returning to the Greek conception, we find it in the works of Plato, where it describes the divine inspiration of Socrates. T

In usage, we distinguish the classical Greek "good" concept by using the anglicized daemon or daimon. The later Christian interpretation is demon.

The female demon Lilith appearing as a snake cavorting with herself
as personified within the Garden of Eden by John Collier, 1892

Halt and Catch Fire

Halt and Catch Fire is an American drama television series about a fictionalized version of the history of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and then the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.

The show's title refers to a computer machine code instruction abbreviated as HCF. Halt and Catch Fire refers to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease any meaningful operation to the point of requiring a restart of the computer.

Originally it referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers. Later, the joke became real when developers actually wrote such code.

Usually, when a computer hits a bug in the code it probably can still recover, but an HCF instruction is one where there is no way for the system to recover without a restart. It halts the computer, but the "catch fire" part is not literal. There is no computer bursting into flames. The exaggeration was that the circuits would be switching so fast that they would overheat and burn.