Engineers the world over constantly marvel and cringe at the things marketing wonks tell the public, and for good reason. Marketing people often seem a bit detached from reality. A colleague and I were discussing our Marketing department’s "use" of their budget, since he and I have actually been the ones responsible for some recent high-profile things that have been sent out to customers, and neither of us are in the Marketing department. I took the position that their salary budget could be better spent on us, since they don’t seem to be using it. He countered that it is used, in the same way a black hole "uses" matter: money goes in, and nothing comes out.

I thought about some of our recent marketing efforts, and decided he was fundamentally right. As you may know, one of the distinguishing features of singularities is immeasurable density. I found some evidence of that the other day when I found this gem of a sentence in one of our publicly-released documents:

[The company] cannot guarantee backwards compatibility going forward.

Um, yeah.