"Illogical, Captain."This page is for the Spock in all of us. Or am I on my own here? If anyone has any more of these curiosities then please send them to me. |
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| Ambiguity is funny What, funny amusing or funny peculiar? Okay, that example may not have been amusing but on this page I'm going to offer some examples of how in the world at large, especially in entertainment media, being wrong gets laughs. Even where they aren't outright funny, in the real world woolly ideas are perfectly acceptable to the concensus and are a sign of being human. The serious intention here is to train the mind to spot these errors and to avoid them when thinking analytically in our work. Getting things wrong may be funny on TV and in movies, but in the software industry it's no laughing matter. |
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| Classes and Objects In everyday non-technical usage the blurring of the distinction between the separate concepts of class and object is both common and apparently acceptable in a way that would not be tolerated in the field of object-oriented analysis. For example, it's fashionable in the ever more dumbed-down media to use animal instead of animal species. Animals (objects, instances) do not become extinct as many writers and broadcasters would have it, but rather species (types, classes) do. Our experience helps us make sense of these harmless inaccuracies in our human languages, so why should we be concerned about them? Simply because requirements documents are written in human language and when an analyst is given a requirements document describing an unfamiliar or abstract problem domain, s/he is going to get no help from experience should the document contain flaws of accuracy or ambiguity. |
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| Classes and Roles Another problem is the way human language encourages us to confuse class with role. The syntax of the phrase "Bill is a baker" suggests to the object-oriented analyst that we are being told something about Bill's class whereas we are really learning his role. Unlike formal notations such as the Unified Modelling Language (UML) of Booch, Jacobson and Rumbaugh, human language was not developed with accurate, unambiguous expression as a priority and it requires care to make it so. Bill, of course, is not a baker. Bill is a person. Bill has a role 'baker'. He may also have a role 'husband'. But his wife is not a wife. She is (more than likely!) a person too. |
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| Sets Linda (admiring Joey) : "He's cute!" Gladys : "You think anyone with pants on is cute." Linda : "That's a lie! I like plenty of people not in pants! I mean-" That was a quote from the 1957 Frank Sinatra movie Pal Joey. Linda seems to have interpreted Gladys' assertion as a definition of everything which was in the set of people Linda thought was cute. But by mentioning only people in pants, nothing was asserted about people not in pants, and in logic nothing should be deduced about absent information. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as scientists are fond of informing us. Instead of arguing about the already exaggerated partial inclusive definition of the set, Linda bizarrely elects to argue against an imaginary assertion in favour of more inclusion. But that, of course, is crucial to the joke. |
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| I Was Only Being Ambiguous Rod Steward is a great songwriter but he'd make a lousy writer of requirements specifications. The song 'I Was Only Joking' contains the phrase '...collected lovers like butterflies' which has the amusing quality of being able to be interpreted in four different ways. Firstly, and the one Rod intended, it might mean '...collected lovers the way people collect butterflies.' Secondly, '...collected lovers the way butterflies collect lovers.' Thirdly, it might mean '...collected lovers who were similar to butterflies.' And finally, it might be taken to mean '...lovers, when collected together, have a liking for butterflies.' Of course, the four words are excellently succinct in the context of the song but it's sometimes fun to play with possibilities. |
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| Transferred Epithets The national TV news (and repeated with the same phrasing on Have I Got News For You) recently reported that "scientists have cloned the first human embryo". How they got hold of the 'first human embryo' in order to clone it is something of a puzzle given that the homo genus gradually appeared a couple of million years ago. A transferred epithet is where, deliberately or otherwise, an adjective is put with the wrong noun. In this case it is not the embryo which is first, but rather the cloning. The correct wording is probably "scientists have performed the first cloning of a human embryo" but until we have robots listening to the news I'm sure the original wording will remain popular. |
| last updated: 26-jan-02 |