Nam shub
I'll start with a passage from Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash (pp. 211-212): “A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English word would be 'incantation,' but this has a number of incorrect connotations.” He goes on with:
Nowadays, people don't believe in these kind of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech - the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife's fiber-optic network.
By way of explanation so you don't have to read all this obscure science fiction: the metaverse is Stephenson's archetypal cyberspace (a term coined by William Gibson in his seminal Neuromancer, the precursor of all these cohesive virtual realities), the pattern that inspired the Wochowski Brothers in the movie trilogy, The Matrix. It's a multi-media construct that users can roam in, the ultimate multi-user virtual reality gaming experience, with its own physical laws - although game is a tad euphemistic. For such a deep alternate reality to function believably, users need much better interfaces than the ordinary PC or Mac of 2009 can provide. In The Matrix, they jack in using a monstrous electronic probe that is jammed into a socket permanently installed in the backs of their heads. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse for a longer explanation of Stephenson's vision. L. Bob Rife is a character in Snowcrash who pretty much owns earth's telecommunications infrastructure, certainly the significant parts that support the Metaverse.
Curious, I googled nam-shub and got some interesting results. One where the author quotes the entire nam-shub of Enki translated from the Sumerian and then goes on to mention Stephenson's Snowcrash (1992) from which he obtained the Sumerian quote and passes on that Stephenson obtained it from Samuel Noah Kramer and John R. Maier's Myths of Enki, the Crafty God (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.) The author goes on to reference both Hofstadter and Jaynes, both being heavy contributors to my visions of media and mind - good grief.
Looking a little further down the result list from googling nam-shub, I found a site named simply namshub.org (no longer there) which consisted of a single page saying that the site was inspired by Stephenson and that's it. (And I thought I was spreading myself too thin.) Then there's a guy (Jörg Piringer) who has created a piece of software called Nam Shub that is “a tool and software art project for the creation, modification and performance of text oriented electronic art ranging from experimental literature to visual sound poetry performances or interactive art installations.” The pdf explaining it is at http://joerg.piringer.net/namshub/namshub.pdf.
After absorbing all this, I realize that there's more here for me than amusing tangents. The concept of a nam shub has implications for how I see software engineering as a unique species of mind-set. When a money-changer (a person who's primary short-term motive is personal profit) is exposed to profitable information, whether presented as such or derived through some analysis, there is a sort of tingling effect that supercedes rationality. Like with a trail of bon-bons in the forest, we can lead the commerce-driven Hansel and Gretel anywhere we please with promises of business intelligence (BI), a powerful latter-day business nam shub, no matter the consequences so long as they enhance personal profit.
Embroiled in the business of one of the big purveyors of BI, IBM, I wondered if I shared the mindset of a typical catholic priest, believing devoutly in the system and its goals, but finding myself an unsuspecting contributor to little but the wild affluence that routinely accrues to the big guys at the top of our organization. Not that my rewards were insignificant, but I was quite dispensible as I found out on March 1st, 2010.