Sogger’s Blog

OK, after reflection, I changed the title of the last post so that it has the more pretentious title that I decided not to use. Sorry - if you already read it, then you don’t need to re-read, unless you didn’t get the obscure message…

There is a thriving set of “associations” in our town (An association in France is a publicly-funded organisation that makes no money (a .org)). Last weekend was an exhibition organised by the local ornithological society. Now, I am fond of birds- I have bird boxes and feeding boxes ready to help them through the winter and give them a home in the spring. However, what I hate is to see caged birds. I have an almost overwhelming urge to open the cages and set them free. Pet shops are a nightmare for me as seeing caged parrots hopping from perch to perch makes me sad and angry - I have seen them in the wild and that is where they belong.

Visiting the exhibition last week brought this urge to new heights. Picture the scene: You walk into a room and are confronted with 6 rows of cages, each row with 4 cages piled on each other, and each row containing 40 cages: 480 bird cages. Each cage is 50 x 50 x 50 cm and there is a single tiny bird in each, all of them singing and generating a reverberating cacophony in such a small room. It was an impressive sight!

Each bird was beautiful, especially from someone who comes from a place where there is a constant screech of seagulls and the only colour is provided by blue-tits and robins if you are lucky (although pigeons do have an impressive chest when puffed-up during the mating season).

I have never seen such shapes and colours in birds. Tiny birds with striking purple, yellow and red intertwined, pale yellow, bright pink birds, birds with crests, feathers pointing in all directions and many more. My kids were fascinated: a beautiful sight when viewed individually.

However, the ensemble, to me, was depressing - these birds did not belong here, neither free-flying or caged. Although I could never have acted on it, the urge to set them all free was overwhelming. I imagined a lever which would open all the cages at the same time and set them all free to fill the hall with their noise and colours before flying, as one, through the door to freedom. It would have been like the explosions of colour that Sony put together for their TV ad recently (the one with the explosions of paint from tower blocks) - maybe they should consider it for a future version.

It could never have happened, but what a sight it would have been!

I saw a quote from Oscar Wilde yesterday: “Only the shallow know themselves” which I thought was a nice one. I definitely can’t claim to be an expert on me: in the past I have been called shallow, deep, smart-arsed, stupid, intelligent, a leader, a follower, brave, cowardly…all of this is completely subjective and depends on the relationships and circumstances. I definitely don’t really know the real me, so cannot, by his definition, be shallow.

So, can shallowness be measured? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop me from having a go and writing the following nonsense. Bear with me, if you have time on your hands.
The treatise of this scientific investigation is this:

“The shallowness index: Just how shallow is a person and can it be measured?”

Is everyone else as “shallow” as me? Are my thoughts on the same level as a goldfish, or did Einstein need such thoughts before he came up with E=MC2? Maybe my shallowness will lead to the realisation that Einstein was wrong and that E is actually equal to MC3, or that E stands for Elephant and not Energy.

The first thing to do is to remove the other parties - they are the ones that label you: the subjective parameters. This means that only I can measure my own shallowness and likewise for anybody else.

Have you ever heard of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Forget the dry explanation: it goes something like this: “the very act of measuring something changes its behaviour and therefore affects the measurement”.

I cycle to and from work. It’s about 7km and takes about 30 minutes. I like to think that I can use this time alone to plan my day and then, in the evening, review what actually happened and modify for the following day. However, I have noticed over recent weeks that this is not actually what happens. The truth is that, during the ride my thoughts are so banal that, written down, they seem ridiculous.

As a trained scientist (no, really?), I decided, over the course of a bicycle ride, to try to list the random thoughts and write them down in order to measure their shallowness index and come up with an aggregate score. However, as I stored them for later retrieval, I realised that Heisenberg had caught me out. By thinking about what I was thinking, my thoughts were altered. Confused? Let’s see if you can work out at which point Heisenberg kicks in.

1. That truck looks like it’s from Finland. I wonder what it is doing here?
2. There’s a BMW with tinted windows: probably a drug dealer…
3. If I fall off now, it’ll be a 10 metre drop, straight onto the motorway and instant death. Will my kids miss me?
4. I’d better cycle on the pavement here ‘cos it’s a bit narrow. Oh no, back on the road, there’s a cyclist coming the other way on the same pavement. But wait a minute, she looks quite nice…no, wait, she’s as old as me - back onto the road.
5. Is this saddle too low? I’ve got a sore backside
6. I wonder what we’ll be eating tonight?
7. Bloody hell, it’s cold enough to freeze the nuts off a brass monkey - I wonder where that expression comes from?
8. How am I going to get over my Snickers addiction? Why don’t they call them Marathons any more? Tomorrow, I will eat only fruit. Opal Fruits? Oh no, they call them Starbursts now. I wonder why that is?
9. The light is red, but I can cross because there is no-one and I don’t see a policeman.
10. I wonder if that hedgehog is still in the garden?
11. What can I think of next?
12. Come on, there must be one amusing thought…
13. Could I kill a tiger, armed only with a biro? No, I can’t use that - it’s straight out of The Office.
14. Doh. And that one comes from The Simpsons.

Yes, Heisenberg caught me out at #11. Up until that point, banal and trivial, yes, but spontaneous, no; afterwards, they were laboured, searching actively for banality.

So what have we learned from this exercise? What is my shallowness index? It is impossible to measure is the conclusion: objectivity doesn’t come into it.

I’ll have to think about the deep implications of this investigation when I’m cycling to work tomorrow and when the wine that led me to write this nonsense wears off.

I work in the software industry and interview lots of candidates for software engineering posts. I have a section on Google Reader which on a pretty much weekly basis argues the pros and cons of asking programmer-type questions for programmers during interviews. I’m pretty much of the view that you should ask these types of questions, albeit in my case in a standardised form which allows for direct comparison and doesn’t penalise syntactic errors.
Anyway, many more intelligent people than me have debated this subject to death and this is not entirely my point.

What I wanted to mention briefly here is a question that I was asked many years ago, and I often wish that I had kept my answer just to see how I got on.

After finishing a degree in Physics, I drifted for some time, not knowing which way to turn, but at least grateful that I had options. One of the options was to become a “technical patent attorney“. This would basically have involved protecting the intellectual property of engineering developments. Maybe it would have been interesting, maybe not - fate took me elsewhere. However, I will never forget being asked the following question, with an A4 sheet of paper placed in front of me for the answer:

“Describe a paper clip”

If I asked this question of most people with simply a pencil and paper in front of them, they would be an amazing range of answers - some just completely missing the point altogether. If you have some time, don’t try it and don’t expect me to be trying it either.

However, with an internet connection and a basic knowledge of search syntax (i.e. the ability to type “paper clip” into a search box, every possible detail, most of which you have no desire to know about, will be available to you…

This is great, but long live pen, paper, scientific analysis and imagination! And paper-clips.