Framed!

Context can be everything. Is a thing good or bad? It seems like a straightforward question. (Hint, "Why, then, 'tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.")

Except nothing is that simple and thinking is more complicated than we think. There are always exceptions. There are nuances to almost any statement or position. There are reasons, some of which might not be intuitively obvious, or might not be available to the general public, or might be completely erroneous.

Then there's the limited time and space to present the thing. And the limited attention span of most of the audience. That's what makes today's environment so frustrating. Sometimes I want to find out more of the background in order to make sense of the foreground, and it's not available.

We have the most amazing tools to disseminate news, and the problem is that it gets overwhelmed by the lies and bullshit and what is called entertainment. There's a saying, "if the rich and powerful let something get published, it's advertising. If they don't want it published, it's actually news." Or something like that. I can't find the quote now for attribution. And my goodness, the internet is full of advertising and 'fake news' which btw, is a major clue to it being actual news or real facts.

Movies are perhaps the easiest and most readily example of declining attention spans. Go borrow an old movie from the library or a buddy. No, not something from 2018. Old. Really old. More that 70 years old. Made in black and white. Notice how short the credits up front are, as opposed to the advertising of names at the beginning of movies now. (An x production of a y film in association with z and on and on and on.)

Once you get past that, notice how long the scenes are. By today's standards, some shots are impossibly long. Try a more modern film, say, 2001 in Blue Ray out of the library. Most people can't stand it. They start fast forwarding through it, waiting for something to happen. Or now they'll probably haul out their phones and check facebook. I wrote a blog during parts of it. Now it seems if you blink you'll miss an entire shot.

How long are movie clips on youtube? Generally really short, and the first few minutes for most of them are excruciating. A long stupid introduction. Subscribe. Opening setup. Blah blah blah. What's wrong with "Hi, I'm X and welcome to Y. We're going to..." I probably bail on half the videos I start, or skip to some more promising spot a few seconds or minutes in. And advertising, don't get me started.

So there's a nice little loop for you, or maybe you'd call it a digression, and you're waiting for me to get to the point. Context. I try to think about what is surrounding something, for example, a simple thing like a serial number on an object in a database. Seems straightforward. The object closest to me on my desk that is not the keyboard I'm typing on has a serial number. 2505A74345 is a painfully simple number, but then that object is at least 30 years old. (An HP 11C, if you're curious.)

Serial numbers often contain information embedded in them, such as date of manufacture, model features, assembly plant, or other information but I don't know if that's true here. To the bane of database people, they often contain punctuation such as dots, dashes, and worst of all, spaces. I once worked at a place where their solution was to strip all that out and have just the alpha-numeric characters. I nearly had a meltdown at the meeting where that was almost an actual decision.

Serial numbers ought to be unique, and this is where context comes in. If it isn't, there might be a problem with your data integrity. Someone might have fat-fingered the entry, or read it wrong, or wrote it down wrong, or any number of other explanations. Don't get me started on zeros and the letter o, or sevens and the letter t, or poorly stamped eights and threes, or fives and the letter s, or the letter u and the letter v. I could go on. I once had to deal with a guy who had painstakingly copied nameplate information out, by hand, into several big binders that lived in his truck. He flat out wouldn't let me borrow them. We had to send someone out to copy them, while he watched. I can't blame him. Then I had to train a data entry person to go through, and understand his gradually more cryptic shorthand, and how he made certain letters.

Just like I despair at the QWERTY keyboard I'm so good at typing on, I despair at our letters and numerals. I'd love to see some evolution in the design so that they were all easily distinguishable from each other, even when reading a long complex serial number badly stamped in soft metal on a curved surface with characters about a half cm high complete with scratches and scuff marks, on an object bolted to the top of a pressure vessel 200 feet high. I speak from personal experience. It was a stabilizer tower at the Whitecourt gas plant.

So one serial number by itself is nothing special. A long list of them, along with other related information such as A NUMBER, CRN, DESCRIPTION, CLASSIFICATION, LOCATION starts making things interesting, especially if you can compare your list to the list that the regulator has. Context helps you solve problems. I once asked a field guy to go out and photograph the name plates of two specific vessels and the location sign for the facility. I told him I was pretty sure the database was wrong, and I wanted to get the information directly from the nameplates. Turns out there'd been a mixup in stamping the nameplates, and it kicked off a process to correct, and document the correction, a whole bunch of information in several databases. No wonder we couldn't "find" a vessel the regulator was asking us to find. And yes, documenting the correction is important, otherwise someone will find an outdated report, and will undo the correction and the whole merry go round starts over.

The more typical context of being framed is in a criminal trial. The accused pleads that he was framed, that the circumstances or context are being created to make him look guilty. Or that the police are suppressing evidence. Or something else that paints a misleading picture. In some cases it's a story and he really is guilty. In other cases, however, it or something like it is true. There are documented cases in Canadian legal history of the conviction of innocent people. I go on about this in this blast from the distant past blog. Which also ties into a more recent UBI blog.

Sometimes the context is impossible. Two drunk people, an accusation of sexual assault, no witnesses. He said, she said. How do we figure out what happened? What really happened? Our minds are strange places at the best of times, and under the influence of drugs they become even more unreliable. Lately I lean toward believing the woman, but lots of people don't.

Painters get to choose what they paint. They can ignore the power lines or anything else that messes with their vision. Photographers have to work a little harder, since the camera isn't smart enough to ignore stuff. All the photographer can do is work with the limitations of the camera. Like creating a frame around a beautiful wet rose.

Of the Day
Curtis and Celina enjoying their vacation. Don't tell their agent I snuck in this shot.

Flowers a recently blooming giant lily.

White Peony

Driftwood