Message In A Bottle:  To a certain someone living near the land of Walt…who I used to talk to way back when…in another time…

So,  bear with me here a little…  Jacob Bronowski tells of how Dimitri Mendeleeve used to play a little card game with himself that his friends used to call Patience.  He played it with cards that he’d written the known elements of his day on, along with their atomic numbers.  He put hydrogen aside, since it was kind of an odd one, and instead began his first column with lithium.  Next came beryllium, then boron, then the familiar elements, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and then fluorine at the seventh column.  Then next known element was sodium, and since it had a likeness to lithium, Mendeleeve decided it should go under that element, starting a new row.  He continued putting known elements into the second row, and as he did so, noticed that they all lined up perfectly with the elements that had similar likenesses above them. 

He continued doing this, and starting a new row as necessary, until he came to a…difficulty.  And that was the element titanium.   It didn’t fit exactly with the elements above it, boron and aluminum.  However it did seem to line up with carbon and silicon. Mendeleeve interpreted this difficulty as a missing element.  Aha, thinks he, there is an element we don’t know about yet, but when we find it, that element will have properties that put it under boron and aluminum.  He called the missing element, eka-silicon.

When they found it, they named it germanium, since it was discovered in Germany.  But it was Mendeleeve who first realized it was there.  He had in fact, predicted just what properties germanium had, even before it was discovered.  He knew the element was there, because the elements he had told him it was there, and where to look for it, and what it would look like when they found it.

So…here’s the point.  There is something that we folks who work in Information Technologies understand about data, that most people miss.  Data is not important, really.  Data does not matter.   What matters, are the connections between the data.

So…anyway…I have these keys.  Some of which I found for myself, and some of which you gave me.  But there was one I wanted that you would not give to me.  And..well…you know how I am.   So I knew it was out there somewhere, but none of the keys I had would give it to me.  But I knew that if I used the keys I did have, they would probably give me another key, and that key would give me another, and so on.  Which I did.  Until I came to a…difficulty.  And there most people might have figured it for another dead end, but that difficulty told me where the missing key was, and pretty much what it would look like when I found it.   And so I went looking there, and I fit one of the keys I had into that place and turned, and the key I needed just sort of popped out.

And you told me why I couldn’t use it, and you were right.  I can’t.  I can see that for myself now.  So I won’t.  I reckon I’ll just keep tossing these messages in a bottle out to you until the day comes, maybe, when you give me one I can use.

Be nice if we didn’t have to keep waving flags at a distance to each other.  Be nice if we could just…you know…talk.  Like we used to.