Thursday, May 17, 2012

Namespace Collision

I always enjoy a good joke, especially when they're related to work.  This one is a bit edgy, so I hope you forgive the nature of the content.

3M has a product called the Healthcare Data Dictionary that it uses in many of its products as a way of mapping and related concepts from different domains or standards.  They've made this available for use online for free and are open sourcing it as well.  Since I'm in healthcare, I thought I'd do a little searching around just for fun.  One of the entries I stumbled across was "failure of orgasm."  Oh, there are things much more risque, trust me!  I thought it was quite funny, though, when the 3M HDD told me that related to this condition was "Parent - Reactions - has child."  I'll leave it to you to interpret the direction of the implied causality and likelihood of actuality.



Clearly I took some liberty in misinterpreting the layout of the results, but the collision between the healthcare namespace (which has you thinking about sex and topics related to sex) and the relational namespace (where parents and children represent a hierarchy) makes for a fun joke.