Spotting the Stuff you Know in Fictional Works

We've all done this, right? For me, we'll be watching The Lost Boys and the Coreys (Haim and Feldman) are playing two over-the-top dweebs who work in a comic store when suddenly one of them starts sounding off about some specific issue of Superman from the 40s or 50s (which I probably don't own) in which blahety-blah-blah happened, but he's holding up an issue of the title that clearly was published in the 70s or 80s (which I probably do own) and I can't help myself: I point out to the lovely wife that he's full of shit because he's talking about a completely different era (but at least he knows a Superman comic from an issue of Action Comics, and I guess that counts for something). Or we're watching Heroes and one of the characters references an issue of X-Men as an example of time travel but he's off by one (X-Men #s 141 and 142 had the Days of Future Past storyline in it that the show's writers were thinking of, not # 143, as Hiro cited in that episode) so I do the unthinkable (in any other household) and Pause the program long enough to drag Vicki down to the basement and show her the comics in question, just so she knows it's close but no cigar! (And of course this makes me think I should write a blog entry describing some of my funniest such moments, as this one wouldn't even top the list!)

But my point is: we all know something really well, and can't help but pick up on it when a reference to that topic just ain't right. Not everyone's as demonstrative about it as me (or so I've been lead to believe), but I gotta think it's still making the wheels turn in the brain, at least. Some people live for spotting anocronisms in period movies (remember the famous scene in Cheers where Norm and Cliff did this?), others for spying techno-babble that sounds perfectly plausible as long as you'd never, oh, I don't know, used a computer before ("His word processor's thrashing trying to establish an IP address for his MIPS-router? Oh my God, are you kidding me?") and others still for catching mis-attributions ("That was Charlotte Bronte, you moron, not Emily! Have you ever actually read a book?"). If you're familiar with the material, sloppy crap like that just jumps out at you.

One of the counter-examples of this problem that I always think of happened within the pages of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. As someone who's spent most of my 20 year career producing or being involved with software, I read something that absolutely rang true to me. In the story, someone had written some software for the monitoring system that kept track of the dinosaurs produced on the island. The concern was that animals would somehow escape the 'park' and so the software's job was to continuously find and count the number of each type of dino, to ensure none had gotten away. The brilliant bit of the story was that, in fact, some animals had gotten off the island and yet the program continued to report All Green for each type of animal. Eventually the characters realized the same-sex dinosaurs were reproducing by exhibiting dynamic gender-changes as supposedly some frogs (?) do in nature, but even that didn't explain why the tracking system hadn't picked up on the numbers being so out of whack, since it seemed highly unlikely that the number of new ones born would magically equal exactly the number that had left. What eventually came out was that the programmers, using the information they'd been given, designed the software to count each type of dinosaur until it reached the expected number, and then stop (and report success). Why? Because they'd been told the dino's were all one gender, meaning no new dino's could appear except the ones the corporation produced through the normal channels. So as long as the software found, say, 15 velociraptors, which was the number there were supposed to be, it stopped looking and moved onto the next type. I remember putting the book down, when I read that part, and thinking, "That's exactly the sort of bug we'll have so much trouble tracking down because the assumption was so embedded in the code itself!" Of course, out of all the projects I've ever worked on, not a single person (so far) has actually ended up being eaten alive or ripped limb from limb because of a high-severity bug that made it through QA!