I wish I had metadata on what really makes snow white

Clay Thompson

Today’s question:

Sometimes I think reporters, including myself, use words such as metadata just because they make us sound like somebody who knows a lot.

Meta- is a Greek word that means higher, or beyond. Think metaphysics or metabolism.

So metadata more or less means data about data — data gathered from the study of other data.

For example, if you were dealing with a text document, its metadata might include the document’s length, the author, the date of its origin and maybe a short summary of the contents. As for surveillance, metadata might include what number called what number or frequency or length of calls.

In other words, metadata is pretty much stuff about stuff.

Next, a somewhat embarrassing bit of housekeeping.

In a column last week, some knucklehead wrote that the reason snow is white is because it absorbs all the colors of the spectrum. Any fourth-grader can tell you that this is balderdash and, in fact, a couple of fourth-graders have.

As we all know — or maybe most of us — snow is white because it all the colors of the spectrum.

Anyway, the Valley 101 security staff, my dog, Dumb, has launched an extensive internal investigation to find the nincompoop responsible for this mistake. The list of suspects is somewhat short.