RE: those funny non-ASCII characters

[Buchs, Kevin]

> I am simply ignorant of "water over the dam".
> My mistake was not asking it directly:
> What do you mean by "water over the dam"?

Thien-Thi,

No problem. It is an expression meaning, in general, that lots of events
have come and gone, and are now passed. It is an analogy to the flowing
of water over a dam in a river, in the sense that once water flows up
over a dam, it is going downstream and has passed the reservoir behind
the dam and presumably passed your field of view. 

In this specific instance I was referring to a large number of messages
having been posted to the email list by several people discussing a
topic that Xah Lee brought up. So, the busy-ness of the list made me
think that perhaps there were some people who were going to reply, but
the number of messages coming from the list got to be so large that they
just deleted them including my message or lost my message in inbox
clutter. 

I could have applied the analogy of "water over the dam" even further to
say that: "though there were many messages posted on this list that are
now water over the dam, I would like to bring my message back to allow
it to float to the top again."

Kevin Buchs | Senior Engineer | SPPDG | 507-538-5459 |
buchs.kevin@mayo.edu
Mayo Clinic | 200 First Street SW | Rochester, MN 55905 |
http://www.mayo.edu/sppdg