Sunday, July 26, 2015

Proposed Naming Convention for Random Acts of Violence


If you are like me, you are confused by the different random acts of violence in this country. Who can remember if the murders were committed by an extreme Muslim, a right wing nut trying to cause a race war, a local police force who traditionally murders black people to keep then in line, murder by special teams of major city police forces, murder by pretend-suicide in jail?  And whether they used an automatic weapon, ran into them with their HUMVEE or dropped a piano on their head.  Nobody can remember, its too confusing.

I think that we need to have a good naming convention, or at least a naming convention of some type in order to keep things straight.

When the time comes to build your digital studio, naming conventions will also be very important so this is good practice for you.   Naming conventions bring order out of chaos, give meaning to otherwise random strings of letters, and help you to find things both during a project or later, when the project is long over.  Because when a project is over, the project isn't over and very often a project needs to be revisited years later.

In this case, I propose that each random act of violence (RAV) have two names: a short one that is easy to remember, and a long one with all kinds of information.

The short one might be something like ELIJAH-2015-3, meaning the third RAV of 2015, named for the prophet Elijah.

The long name would be something like ELIJAH-2015-3-<type of violence>-<weapon>-
                                                                 <number dead>-<number wounded>-<location type>
                                                                  <location by name>

So it might be something like ELIJAH-2015-3-INDIVIDUAL-SEMIAUTOMATIC-5-8-
                                                                        MOVIE THEATRE-COLORADOSPRINGS

Of course we could come up with clever abbreviations to make things more obscure.

I am not sure if I really like this naming convention, but maybe with more thought we can come up with something that would work for us and help us to remember and keep separate the various criminals, nuts, insane and other people who are running around in America these days.

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