Letters To An
Overseas Friend.

This is all kind of a paraphrasing of Richard Feynman’s chess example, but let’s see if I can put a spin on it.

A thought experiment on three possible worlds.

World One:
You see white has two bishops on dark squares. This seems impossible but you aren’t sure. You suspect something against the rules has happened. You look at the moves log and see that white’s light bishop had been captured. Sometime after that, a pawn was promoted to a bishop. This happened on a dark square. You conclude that two dark bishops is a possible situation. This is good science.

World Two:
You see white has two bishops on dark squares. This seems impossible but you aren’t sure. You suspect something against the rules has happened. You look at the moves log and see that white’s light bishop had made an illegal move and ended up on a dark square. You conclude that two dark bishops is an impossible situation. This is bad science.

World Three:
You see white has two bishops on dark squares. You conclude this is impossible and a cheat must have occurred. The end. This is not science.

I think you can replace the word “science” with “creative investigation” and it still works.

A few days ago, I took an afternoon constitutional (aka a walk) with no fixed destination, like the ones we might have taken but this time by myself, and noticed a murder of crows.

It was snowing. Given my compulsive need to not waste a rare weather event, I thought the snow would be nice mise en scène for a stroll, like in a samurai manga about a ronin; but nope, it was wet and windy and miserable, like in a ronin reality about a beggar.* Yet there were the crows, basking in the cold, almost mocking my softness. But maybe that was just me. Somehow I assumed crows shun foul (get it?) weather. It sure didn’t look it. Crow don’t care. There might have been 50 of them, randomly(?) distributed on some exposed rocks by the water. Then one of them flew a short distance and landed on a large rock. A second or two or three later, another one landed on the same rock. In the popular consciousness, there’s some endearing but muddy belief about crows mating for life, isn’t there? So I watched them for a while to see if there was any evidence that they were ‘togethers.’ Specifically, to see if they would fly off simultaneously.

No fighting over food or territory. No exerting dominance. No harassment of any kind. Although no signs of affection either. Or cooperation. No interaction of any kind. Even so, they sure seemed full of “pairiness.” I looked around at the other crows. Some of them also looked paired. Or so it appeared until the bunches would shift and old “couples” separated and new ones formed. Then I remembered Poisson distribution Poisson Clumping. A term I still might not know about if you hadn’t told me. Then I remembered confirmation bias. Something else we might have discussed at one time.

Without the courtesy of a warning to its real or imagined partner, one of the two crows on the large rock flew away. Quickly. And for what felt like a corroborating amount of time, the second one did not follow. Observation debunked, right? If the story ended there, yes, but soon after the remaining bird suddenly took to the air in order to follow the other and even caught up to it. Confirmed? Well… almost at the same time, a third crow, I’m not sure where it came from, swooped by and caught up to the pair and you wouldn’t have known who’s who. Or whose is whose.

Just telling you about my day because, supposedly, I don’t tell anyone anything.

* For some reason it is a revelation every time it happens: walking in snow is a lot like walking in rain.