An Invitation to Exit: a rant.

Hotmail has started putting advertisements at the top of my Inbox. It's slightly annoying, but Hotmail provides an excellent and necessary service at no cost, so that's fair enough. 

The advertisements are in any case easily ignored - except for one. It's from Opentrons.com. The subject line says:

Automate Your Normalizations. High Acc

Well, I didn't know I had any normalizations, and, if I had, I'm not sure I'd want to automate them. 

I don't want to open the email because then I shall be dogged for months with dozens of increasingly-earnest offers of normalization automation services, and, quite frankly, my technical enthusiasm is such that I haven't yet worked out how to switch on the TV.

But Automate Your Normalizations...it has an intriguing ring to it.

Blast it. I'm going to have to look it up, now.

Word To Use Today: normalization. Normalization in sociology refers to the way some new social behaviour becomes accepted as normal. In data-control, normalization seems to mean first throwing out superfluous data, and then making sure the stuff you're left with is all joined up correctly.

The word normal comes from the Latin word normālis, which means conforming to a carpenter's square, from norma, which means norm.