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From: Jasper
Date: 10/14/03
Time: 4:21:09 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.207.154
Jean,
Common sense isn’t JUST common sense. It’s uniquely human and really quite complex. Whether you are talking about preparing astrological carts, counting change, designing cars or anything else that involves a computer, you have to keep in mind that the computer doesn’t know a lot of simple things you and I take for granted.
For example, programmers write computer software to DEFAULT to things that no designer in his or her right mind would ever do. You have to go to school to learn how the program thinks and make adjustments in your work to get things right. Sometimes an operation that takes hours or days by hand can be done on a computer in seconds. But more often than the next generation will ever know, it can also do things in seconds that cost far more time in fruitless activity. One of the things that made me crazy when I was modeling on the tube rather than in clay was when I looked for a tool to do a simple job and it wasn’t there. The clay modelers could do the job in minutes. It took hours to do the same thing on the tube. Sometimes it took several weeks.
I rely on my Word program’s spell-checker because my spelling can be very creative at times. It usually does a great job but if I don’t go over what I write very carefully with my eyeballs and my brain fully engaged some strange words can creep into the wrong places. It can be a little embarrassing but it’s no big thing on the boards because the readers use “common sense” to see what should be there and keep on stepping.
In Murder in Spokane, Fuhrman doesn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that he contradicts himself on key points several times. His analysis of how the Spokane serial murder task force bungled the investigation is a case in point. He nails it with their over reliance on the computer, but he also nails himself with what he did in the first hours of the Bundy murders investigation to put so many people off on the wrong track. There was too much evidence against O.J. and Fuhrman found too much of it. It happened so quickly and appeared at first blush to be so damning that that the investigators closest to the case failed to see that it didn’t add up. He did to them what the computers did to the task force in Washington State. He robbed them of their common sense. –Jasper