The Danger of Metaphorical Excess
May. 14th, 2003 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurI left work yesterday in a severe grump -- work had been exceptionally scattershot. I was getting together with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladysprite in the evening, and was thinking on the way home about how I could describe my day in biological metaphors for her. (She being the doctorly sort.) I found myself giggling hysterically after I came up with the following (apt but horrifically stretched) metaphor, so it's worth writing down.
I'm the designated Release Engineer this week. The best way to think of the job of Release Engineer is to imagine a team of Mad Scientists, who are working together to build a better Monster.
Now, the crux of the problem here is that each of these scientists is a specialist. One guy (me) is building most of the brain, but I have to work closely with the guy building the long-term memory. Another is doing the hands, another the feet. Two guys are working together on the torso, one doing the musculature and another the nerves running through it. One is acting as the haberdasher, clothing the thing. And outside the castle are the townspeople. Every day, we loose a new Monster on the townspeople, to see if they are appropriately frightened, and to see how long it takes them to kill it. The task of the Release Engineer is to put an entire Monster together, and try to shove it out the door to scare the townspeople.
Understandably, keeping all of the Monster's pieces fitting together is tricky. Everyone is doing their best, of course. A few times a day, the guy doing the torso muscles will ask me to toss him a new head, which he sticks onto the torso to make sure it fits in the socket. A few people try to build a whole Monster themselves now and then, just to see if it all hangs together, but that's enough work that most people don't bother most of the time.
Yesterday's hell had two parts. First, there was an attempt to teach the Monster how to skip, which involved giving it smaller feet. Which was great, but no one told the haberdasher to make smaller shoes. So when I tried to build my first Monster in the morning, it got up off the table, stepped onto the floor and immediately fell flat on its face, complaining loudly as it did so. Not scary.
The other problem was actually partly my fault. For a while now, the Monster has been able to wave around either its left arm or its right, but not both at once. So I worked with the guy doing the torso nerves so that when I told it to wave its arms, it would wave both of them at once. I thought that that was working as of Monday evening, but it turns out that I was incorrect -- the Monster simply had twitchy nerves, and wasn't really waving either arm when the brain was telling it to; it was just jerking randomly.
So I basically started the day yesterday with a Monster lying on the floor, twitching spasmodically, looking more like a dying goldfish than a properly impressive Creature. It took me all day to get one that could actually walk out the door and look a little intimidating, and I had to build four of the damned things from scratch in order to do it.
Hence the grumpiness. That's far too much work, just to construct something that the townspeople are immediately going to stick pitchforks into.
Fortunately, today's Monster jumped right off the table, ran out the door and began ravaging the countryside. It's always nice see see a job well done...
ladysprite in the evening, and was thinking on the way home about how I could describe my day in biological metaphors for her. (She being the doctorly sort.) I found myself giggling hysterically after I came up with the following (apt but horrifically stretched) metaphor, so it's worth writing down.I'm the designated Release Engineer this week. The best way to think of the job of Release Engineer is to imagine a team of Mad Scientists, who are working together to build a better Monster.
Now, the crux of the problem here is that each of these scientists is a specialist. One guy (me) is building most of the brain, but I have to work closely with the guy building the long-term memory. Another is doing the hands, another the feet. Two guys are working together on the torso, one doing the musculature and another the nerves running through it. One is acting as the haberdasher, clothing the thing. And outside the castle are the townspeople. Every day, we loose a new Monster on the townspeople, to see if they are appropriately frightened, and to see how long it takes them to kill it. The task of the Release Engineer is to put an entire Monster together, and try to shove it out the door to scare the townspeople.
Understandably, keeping all of the Monster's pieces fitting together is tricky. Everyone is doing their best, of course. A few times a day, the guy doing the torso muscles will ask me to toss him a new head, which he sticks onto the torso to make sure it fits in the socket. A few people try to build a whole Monster themselves now and then, just to see if it all hangs together, but that's enough work that most people don't bother most of the time.
Yesterday's hell had two parts. First, there was an attempt to teach the Monster how to skip, which involved giving it smaller feet. Which was great, but no one told the haberdasher to make smaller shoes. So when I tried to build my first Monster in the morning, it got up off the table, stepped onto the floor and immediately fell flat on its face, complaining loudly as it did so. Not scary.
The other problem was actually partly my fault. For a while now, the Monster has been able to wave around either its left arm or its right, but not both at once. So I worked with the guy doing the torso nerves so that when I told it to wave its arms, it would wave both of them at once. I thought that that was working as of Monday evening, but it turns out that I was incorrect -- the Monster simply had twitchy nerves, and wasn't really waving either arm when the brain was telling it to; it was just jerking randomly.
So I basically started the day yesterday with a Monster lying on the floor, twitching spasmodically, looking more like a dying goldfish than a properly impressive Creature. It took me all day to get one that could actually walk out the door and look a little intimidating, and I had to build four of the damned things from scratch in order to do it.
Hence the grumpiness. That's far too much work, just to construct something that the townspeople are immediately going to stick pitchforks into.
Fortunately, today's Monster jumped right off the table, ran out the door and began ravaging the countryside. It's always nice see see a job well done...
(no subject)
Date: 2003-05-14 10:22 pm (UTC)Of course, since writing it up, I've been reworking the metaphor in my head, continuing to stretch things to the breaking point and beyond in the name of stricter accuracy.
Y'see, the *real* situation is that we've been wiring the limbs with loads of little nerves running directly from the brain. That worked for a while, but it's been turning into a nuisance. So about a week ago, I said, "Hey -- we've got this wonderful Autonomic Nervous System wired through the spine! Why don't I just use that instead?" So I got the guy building those autonomic systems to ready it for higher brain functions.
Well, on Monday I went to hook the cerebral cortex up to the spine. To test the results, I severed all those individual little nerves, and figured I'd try testing its responses. So I put the Monster's hand on a hot surface, and sure enough -- it jerked away. Okay, so I was reasonably confident that things were working right.
So I come in Tuesday morning and start building the Monster. When I'm done, I try one of our basic tests -- I wave at it, and it's supposed to wave back. Instead, it just stares at me dumbly. I poke and prod at it, and it falls flat on its back on the floor and doesn't move. No matter how much I wave in its face, it refuses to even acknowledge me.
We went in, and eventually figured out that the spinal cord hadn't been wired quite right, and was still rejecting all higher brain functions. After some investigation, I found out that my test Monday evening was invalid. Turns out that the guy building the arms decided that it takes way too long to get responses back from the brain, so he wired the nerves in the arms so that, when they feel something hot, they go, "Ack! Fire!" and jerk away, regardless of everything else. Who knew? You'd think someone would tell the brain about things like this.
Believe it or not, that's an extremely precise analogy for the bug I was responsible for. Still, the image of the Monster looking like a dying goldfish is a bit too funny to pass up...