Artifacts

I would like to propose the following glossary entry:

Artifact - 1) A remnant of something that is dead and gone, as in "The shard
of pottery found in the Yucatan was an artifact of the high Mayan
civilization"; 2) A defect or error in something otherwise regular and
useful, as in "Sixty cycle interference is a common artifact in monitors
sited too close to power sources".

Perhaps you can add other meanings for the word?  I think you should if you
are going to insist on using it.

Listening to how you folks are using the word artifact, I hear it meaning
different things at different times.  The most common meaning that I infer,
however, is that it refers to a piece of information which is emitted by
some actor in the drama under consideration and potentially consumed by
another actor.  Uh, isn't that what I would call a message?  I have this
weird feeling that there is an extreme shyness about using the word message,
as if some other discipline has dibs on it.  Well, I think that the
archeologists more or less have dibs on artifact, and I would really like to
hear words that I understand more clearly in the context that you are using
them.

Best Wishes --

Roger (a.k.a. Andy Rooney, curmudgeon).