Das LanguageLog versagt nie, mir die Abend‑/Nachstunden zu versüßen.

Ges­tern Nacht war ich—nach einem Tag voll Arbeit für RESET—hellwach, wäh­rend Sven nach sei­nem Spät­dienst Erho­lungs­schlaf brauchte (nach dem Spät­dienst war in die­sem Fall vor dem Spätdienst).

Und wohin wen­det sich die Amy, wenn sie Ablen­kung und Lese­freude sucht? In Rich­tung Lan­guage Log, die Bei­träge von Geoff Pul­lum (& Mark Liber­man) sind ein nie ver­za­gen­der Quell von Inspi­ra­tion und Amü­se­ment. Ges­tern bestand die Belus­ti­gungs­kost aus fol­gen­den Artikeln:

• Gae­lic as a bon­sai word bag (with two mis­sing) (ins­be­son­dere die Kom­men­tare 1, 2, 3, 4, uvm.—eigentlich die gesamte Diskussion)
• Come back, Dan Brown, all is forgiven
• No word for integrity?
• Incom­mu­ni­cado—hier eine Kost­probe:

Ⅰ may per­haps have com­men­ted before that Ⅰ am a firm belie­ver in the pes­si­mistic prin­ciple that every upgrade is a down­grade. So when Ⅰ saw on Decem­ber 22 a mes­sage from our tech­ni­cal staff at the Uni­ver­sity of Edin­burgh say­ing that on the fol­lo­wing day the Unix ser­vers would be taken down „for the instal­la­tion of secu­rity patches and gene­ral main­ten­ance“, Ⅰ natu­rally felt a chill like the cold­ness of the grave.

Instal­la­tion of secu­rity patches, invol­ving chan­ges that could affect remote access, and „gene­ral main­ten­ance“, all to be com­ple­ted five hours before a com­plete uni­ver­sity Christ­mas shut­down? Well, natu­rally (for Ⅰ do basi­cally take this sort of thing as com­ple­tely nor­mal now), since Ⅰ left the office on Decem­ber 22 there has been no access of any kind to the Unix ser­ver on which my life mainly depends […]

Of course, nearly all such disas­ters with infor­ma­tion tech­no­logy even­tually get (to some degree) fixed. After a few days of des­pe­rate aca­de­mics pani­cking and being unable to finish their con­fe­rence papers for con­fe­ren­ces bet­ween Christ­mas and New Year, hard-working tech­ni­cal staff do come in and reboot. So it really should not sur­prise you too much that as soon as Ⅰ had finis­hed the above post, lite­r­ally wit­hin seconds of finis­hing it, Ⅰ saw one of our hard-working tech­ni­cal staff mem­bers wal­king past the door of my office in our almost-empty buil­ding. And of course he had just fixed the pro­blem in ques­tion. After six days with our main ser­ver off the Inter­net, the moment Ⅰ told you about it, the trou­ble was repaired.

[…]

The nerds among you will want to know what had happened. […]

The ans­wer was that the „gene­ral main­ten­ance“ had inclu­ded (in my heart Ⅰ knew it) an upgrade of the Linux ker­nel. And the new ker­nel ran for 36 hours or so, just to lull people into a spu­rious sense of con­fi­dence about it being all right. Then on Christ­mas Eve, as soon as the last tech­ni­cal staff per­son had left the buil­ding and gone home for the holi­day, it went into a state known as ker­nel panic. It is inte­res­ting (did you ima­gine there was never going to be a touch of lin­gu­is­tics in this post?) that we rede­ploy ter­mi­no­logy rela­ting to emo­tio­nal and psy­cho­lo­gi­cal sta­tes to obtain a voca­bu­lary for unan­ti­ci­pa­ted con­cepts like the beha­vior of the core of an ope­ra­ting sys­tem when it has begun to spend so much of its time in a des­pe­rate effort to main­tain its­elf inter­nally that it has no abi­lity to per­form its func­tions exter­nally. The ope­ra­ting sys­tem had gone into a state that is so remi­nis­cent of neu­ro­tic cri­ses and irra­tio­nal panic attacks that the meta­phor seems abso­lu­tely per­fect – bet­ter than mecha­ni­cal meta­phors like „spin­ning its wheels“.

The hard-working tech­ni­cal staff mem­ber who came in (thank you, Ced­ric!) knew how to roll the ope­ra­ting sys­tem back to use the ver­sion it had been using before Decem­ber 23, and that got things back in order. (As so often hap­pens, it was necessary to down­grade in order to res­tore func­tio­na­lity.) If psych­ia­trists knew how to do the same thing with human minds, psych­ia­try would be a sci­ence that could sup­port engi­nee­ring, and a lot of men­tal ill­ness would be rea­dily and easily cura­ble. But instead, psych­ia­try is in a state simi­lar to that of lin­gu­is­tics: we know a fair bit, but so much fun­da­men­tal know­ledge is lacking that com­pa­red to many sci­en­ti­fic sub­jects we are just gro­ping in the dark. As are, of course, the hard-working tech­ni­cal staff mem­bers who try to keep ser­vers run­ning through Christ­mas holidays…

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