I had a Chinese colleague who taught me an expression that was supposed to be the Chinese version of "Garbage In - Garbage Out". It was "Even a savvy housewife cannot cook a meal without rice". I used this expression when I stood before the entire engineering department at UMC (the #2 semiconductor manufacturer in Taiwan) and bet my life about my ID-ing which of there process machines was malfunctioning. I started my presentation using the Chinese expression. I hope I got it close to right! It was actually a big moment in my life. Anyway, the Chinese phrase stuck with me, although I doubt I can say it correctly anymore: Chow foo, nung wei, woo me, che sway.
Recently I was confronting the need to understand 'dependency' and add it to my narrative elements. The example I had in mind was the dependency of a meal on having rice. After some thought I could see that the meal would have a plan, or recipe, that included a step of making rice - which converts uncooked rice to cooked rice. A simpler dependency is: "You cannot cook rice without rice". Sounds sort of dumb but there it is.
I speculate that all dependencies are of the form of an event with a sub-event whose target that must be present. Anyway, playing around with the semantics of rice: Don't lie to me about rice.
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