womzilla | Interlingual epiphanies

So, one day at work I was talking with two of my Ukranian co-workers about our market data feed application. This was the component of our (now discontinued) proprietary trading system that took real-time stock pricing information from an outside provider and digested it for the other components. Because there are so many stocks traded in the US (around 12,000 active on the four main exchanges plus thousands more on the "bulletin boards" and "pink sheets"), the market data server was split into many separate processes, dividing the universe into alphabetical regions. We referred to the resulting six-head process as "The Hydra". Apparently, the junior programmer hadn't ever heard this term before and looked, puzzled, first at me and then at the senior programmer, whose grasp of the oddities of English was superior. The senior said "Ghidra", and the junior nodded, comprehending.

And thus did I come to know the origin of the name of one of the great kaiju--Ghidorah, the three-headed antagonist of Gojira in several movies. Of course the Greek word I know as "hydra" would be translated into other languages in different ways. Of course.

My memory of this event was inspired by this photo-essay of awesomeness, specifically picture #9.

I started this post on December 25th, but failed to complete it then. However, it's not actually late for another 8 days. A belated Merry Christmas, and may your next year be better than this one.