KFC and ambiguity

Let me tell you about what happened at lunch time. Realising that I had not eaten a proper, nutritious lunch at work for many days, I decided to go to KFC. I didn't fancy any of the "standard" stuff like Zinger Meal or Chicken Burger, so I decided to go for a tapas approach and buy some individual items. So I ordered:

1x portion of popcorn chicken

1x portion of chicken wings

1x portion of fries

This cost me £6. I thought this was dear, but I paid it anyway. After all, you do have to pay for quality.

Now here is the crunch. A crucial fact which I did not realise at the time, but which I now appreciate only too well, is that everything KFC sells comes with fries, whether explicitly stated or not. So this is what I actually got:

1x portion of popcorn chicken plus 1x portion of fries

1x portion of chicken wings plus 1x portion of fries

1x portion of fries

Yes, people I ended up with three portions of fries. The seagulls in Newtownards befitted greatly from this.

My wallet did not.

Change of Title

Following some gentle teasing from my very good friend WhyNotSmile, I have changed the title of the blog from the somewhat mundane "Wesley Johnston's Blog". Alas, this change does mean the removal of the much-lauded apostrophe, but I think it is a sacrificing worth making.

In practice, now that I have one follower, this post will essentially be read by just that person. However, in the vain hope that at some point in the future people may be reading back over this blog in an attempt to piece together my life, I must still write in a tense that suggests I am addressing the Internet as a whole.

In that context, therefore, I recommend all my visitors to check out WhyNotSmile, a blog that manages to combine wit with insight and intelligence. Lots of mutual back patting all round.

And believe me, there will be plenty of posts about roads coming up. Not just about the roads themselves (the widened M2 is due to open any day now!) but also road theory (just why is it that Sandyknowes is so bad?) and transport theory (are cars really THAT evil?).

Finally, I have now been mocked for choosing white-on-black as my blog theme. Although a computer scientist by training, my approach to computers has always been "choose the default setting and keep life simple". If enough people complain about the colour, I will endeavour to change it. In the meantime, I will try to provide colour through the content of my posts.

On science

I spent four years of my life studying for my degree and then, when most of my friends went out and got a decent job and earned a living, I decided to go back for three more years of postgrad study. Seven years in university gives you a lot of time to think. Especially during the epically long four month summer holiday that students get. What was I doing all this time? Well, 50% of the time* was spent drinking tea in the chaplaincy. The other 50% of time I used studying computer science. During this time I was trained to be a scientist and to use the scientific method.

It was only towards the end of this time that I really started to understand what a wonderful thing the scientific method actually is. It's a beautifully simple concept, yet has allowed the human race to go from primitive cave-dwelling club-wielders to a species equally at home at the ocean floor and in interplanetary space.

Science is the study of creation. For reasons known only to himself, God made the universe obey rules. The rules are amazingly complex, but they are there nonetheless. But he didn't tell us what they are - we have to figure this out for ourselves. This is what science does - it tries to understand the rules that govern the universe, and then use what we learn to extrapolate new ideas and develop technology. Without science, you would not be reading this blog. In fact, you would not be reading. In fact, most likely you would not even be.

Like I said, the scientific method is wonderfully simple. It consists of four steps:

1. Observe a phenomenon or event.
2. Theorise. In other words, come up with a possible explanation.
3. Make a prediction. Find some way to test your theory.
4. Carry out the test, and accept or reject the theory.

This method can be used to test everything from the way a pendulum swings, to the temperatures on a mountain and the way in which a ball bounces. Almost all technology that we have developed as a human race was derived from knowledge acquired through the scientific method.

However, there are two things about the scientific method that deserve caution.

1. It can only be used to examine what can be observed and test. Things that cannot be observed and independently verified cannot be studied by the scientific method. One example is the concept of beauty, since that is highly subjective and cannot be independently verified by others. Another example is God, who appears to remain deliberately beyond verifiable testing. Some scientists make the mistake of thinking that if it can't be explored by the scientific method, then it does not exist. But this is irrational.
2. The scientific method is predisposed to disproving things. It is very easy to disprove a theory, but extremely hard to prove a theory. For example, if I have a bag of coins and I take out 100 coins and every one of them turns out to be a ten pence piece, I could theorise that every coin in the bag is a ten pence piece. This is easy to disprove - even a single example of another coin would be enough. But to prove it, I would have to exhaustively remove every single coin. Science is thus biased toward disproof.

The scientific method is a wonderful thing. I devoted 7 years of my life to it. It has transformed the human race and our understanding of the created world. But it is not the answer to everything. We should not rely on science alone. There are many things, God included, to which we cannot apply the scientific method. This does not mean that they are not there. It just highlights one of the shortcomings of science.

Science can explain a lot - an awful lot - but logically it can't explain everything.

*perhaps more

New blog

When I made the move from Omagh to Glengormley, I found it very noticeable how everyone in Belfast pronounces words like "flower" "tower" and "power" as if they were spelled "flar" "tar" and "par". Of course, being the only ex-Omaghite in Glengormley all my friends regarded my pronunciation as the weird one.... even asking me to say sentences containing these words, rather like how Irish people in America are often asked to "say something, say something"!

This is all well and good as far as it goes. Different accents in different places. But the other day I noticed myself saying that such-and-such was "par for the course", and I realised that while that might be quite unambiguous in Omagh, in Belfast there is no way to distinguish between the words "power" and "par" other than through the context. Similarly, I could point out a "tower" over there, or the "tar" over there and be understood quite fine in Omagh, but in Belfast everyone would be at a loss to know which you meant.

These are serious problems. The fear of mixing up my towers and my tar is almost enough to make me want to up stick and move back to Omagh.