Fic: Wrong, [2. Noise]
Noise.
So much noise.
So much noise as to drive a man mad. It was an affliction-a higher rate of suicide in those suffering from tinnitus because they could not bear the noise. That was the essential problem in the scientific/forensic method of solving mysteries. The noise of it all.
Mysteries, not crimes. For a crime might occur but the parties involved may not be a mystery. No mystery, no problem-no problem, no interest-no interest, no thrill. Instead, an intense, pressing desire for something to occupy the mind, preferably stronger than nicotine, but one makes do.
For example, one might be working with a sample of blood found on the left collar of a fifty percent polyester track shirt worn by a jogger, female, one point six two meters, fifty-seven kilograms, blonde hair with highlights, found under a park bench with her neck snapped at the C4 vertebra and the natural questions the police ask are-is this her own blood, or is it the blood of her killer, can we take it down to the lab and extract something useful from it such as the identity of a possible suspect or perhaps an accomplice-but working with that sample of blood one finds there is not nearly enough substance to run the necessary tests to determine the identity of anyone or anything and if such tests were to be undertaken the processing and interpretation and certification of the results might take days because the laboratory assistants are behind schedule by which time the criminal may have hopped, skipped and made a convenient jump from Heathrow to John F. Kennedy airport and the extradition paperwork takes another few weeks by which time the killer has engaged a lawyer who charges not a set fee, but by the hour and it’s no trouble because the killer also happens to be the son of the former chief executive officer of a high profile financial organization and in the interest of maintaining affable relations between the two powerhouses that are New York and London finance, the case is sealed and filed away as unsolved, leading to an unhappy police force and a bereaved mother, father, and younger brother who decide to take their story to the papers and stir scandal, by which time Mycroft’s mobile explodes with a thirty-seven messages because the entire ordeal is an embarrassment for both the American and British governments and it would be best kept quiet, and for that reason he makes the decision to retrieve a certain relation from the cell in which that relation was comfortably sitting, serving an indefinite amount of time for hacking into the MI5 servers and retrieving national security files to prove that one could.
Now-noise.
The essential question is: was the blood on the left collar of the track suit relevant to the case? A simple guess by an average person with some notion of how one goes about solving these things would yield the answer, yes, it is relevant to the case and yes, it will be useful. Well, perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, perhaps it was deliberately placed on that left collar by the killer to lead the police on a merry chase by which time the killer would be safely ensconced in a their five hundred and fifty six square meter penthouse. The point is noise. Noise is not important if one assumes that there is an infinite amount of time and laboratory resources in which to solve a case-it would simply become an exercise in waiting for the centrifuge to stop spinning. An assembly of the data and it is commonly assumed by the general public that the picture becomes immediately clear, when this is never the case. Data must be interpreted, data has the potential to generate more noise, data has the potential to be a dead end or a false lead. Furthermore, one does not have the luxury of an infinite amount of time to solve a case because there are four other folders needing immediate attention on the DI’s desk, ranging from an ongoing investigation of drugs smuggling to a tip concerning the strange Arabic-sounding music playing in the flat next door. Thus, the key is time.
When tracking a mystery, especially in a city such as London, noise increases with time. Time spent on listening to noise is time well wasted. Distinguish between signal and noise and one has already solved a third of the riddle. One is set against time because there are certain signals which are time-sensitive, and there are certain noises that grow stronger as more time progresses. Working with a skewed data set is never pleasant, working with an old data is also unpleasant. In the case of the track suit jogger above, if the investigators had immediately noticed that the suit had been placed on the body after death, as evinced by the peculiar crease patterns, and examined particularly the jogger’s shoes, laced too tightly by a man who liked triple knots, the identity of the killer would have been obvious (proof omitted, left as an exercise to the students. Hint: consider the ingested ostrich burger). Obvious from a single thorough examination of the crime scene and a few well considered enquiries put to the dead woman’s secretary-and then the entire ridiculous aftermath involving thirty-seven messages and retrievals of familial relations would not have occurred.
Of course, the case of the track-suit jogger was a crime, but hardly a mystery. A scene that requires one glance and three questions is not a mystery. It was rather insulting that the incident which should bring Sherlock Holmes from incarceration in a classified intelligence cell to a sort of modified house arrest was a crime but in no way a mystery and in his opinion, only went to illustrate the dismal state of Scotland Yard. They were as hopelessly mired in their own stupidity as they had been two hundred years previous. Sherlock thought he might prefer incarceration, and if it hadn’t been for Mycroft’s rather pointed insistence he would have stayed.
The point: he was flung out into the wide, noisy world and told to assist Detective Inspector Lestrade in his investigations for at least two years. Sherlock himself thought it was a rather harsh sentence to be subjected to such constant tedium. Lestrade made it clear that he disliked the assignment as much as Sherlock but, having been recently promoted and eager to establish a reputation for himself, he was determined to make the best of things. The man was not intelligent but he was not stupid as far as Scotland Yard types went, nevertheless Sherlock found Lestrade positively dull, and the work moreso. As cases flowed in, the problem of noise and time presented itself rather quickly in this context, and Sherlock rediscovered his favorite game of childhood: I Spy.
He spied with his remarkable, brilliant, and absolutely extraordinary eye details no one else thought to consider important, details which seemed to others completely incidental and subjective in nature, but it allowed him to circumvent almost entirely the time consuming process of forensic science and the general monotony of interviewing suspects, witnesses, and relations. He found that interviews and forensics only added to the noise, introduced unnecessary uncertainties when everything that was needed was written in the crime scene. That was his hypothesis-the brilliance of his new science of deduction. Lestrade, of course, blind clod that he was, did not believe him. He couldn’t follow Sherlock’s process, and being trained in the traditional schools of investigatory method, he thought the premise of the hypothesis was ridiculous. The choice of a fellow’s ringtone did not mean he was having an affair with his manager’s wife, he’d objected. Besides which the evidence would never hold water in court.
Lestrade entirely missed the point. Sherlock did not care about the conviction or the sentence-only of finding the right answer. He’d retorted that so long as they found the right answer, they could reverse engineer the crime and find the salient data points to create an argument anyone with half a brain could win-thus, all parties would be satisfied. Except Sherlock, for a solved mystery meant the cessation of all interesting intellectual activity and onset of boredom.
The DI had been speechless, sputtering first at the thought that Sherlock did not care about crime, but about mystery. And it was true-crime and mystery are two separate categories which people, thanks to popular novels concerning unsolved criminal mysteries, were too eager to conflate. He was not interested in crime, he had never taken the slightest interest to law or contemporary criminal justice systems. The only thing that mattered was the game-playing it fast, and getting it right.
Like most games worth playing, there were levels of mastery. The first level was to deal with the problem of noise and to find an empirical means by which to solve a case in under thirty-six hours. It was appalling that cases sometimes took detectives days to solve.
His answer: the science of deduction. It required evidence, it required logic and keen powers of observation, it may or may not require a few questions directed towards select parties related to the crime scene, but it did not require an army of forensic twats who waddled in their sterilized blue suits armed with cotton swabs and plastic totes. In some cases, he posited that he could solve the crime from the convenience of his sitting room sofa, looking at a few high definition photographs of the crime scene and asking less than ten questions. Lestrade, never one to disappoint, threw down the gauntlet and challenged Sherlock to prove it.
Which he did, of course. Much to the frustration of Lestrade.
Therefore, the problem of noise-he solved it. Elegant, neat, efficient solution. It also temporarily solved the problem of his perpetual boredom, as he limited himself to three questions and four photos, or five touches and four minutes, or two glances and five statements. The rush was exhilarating, almost equal to the task of distracting him from his addictions. The only disadvantage seemed to be that one was required to be a genius in order to use this new method he’d invented.
He didn’t mind.
It was brilliant, being a genius.
So much noise.
So much noise as to drive a man mad. It was an affliction-a higher rate of suicide in those suffering from tinnitus because they could not bear the noise. That was the essential problem in the scientific/forensic method of solving mysteries. The noise of it all.
Mysteries, not crimes. For a crime might occur but the parties involved may not be a mystery. No mystery, no problem-no problem, no interest-no interest, no thrill. Instead, an intense, pressing desire for something to occupy the mind, preferably stronger than nicotine, but one makes do.
For example, one might be working with a sample of blood found on the left collar of a fifty percent polyester track shirt worn by a jogger, female, one point six two meters, fifty-seven kilograms, blonde hair with highlights, found under a park bench with her neck snapped at the C4 vertebra and the natural questions the police ask are-is this her own blood, or is it the blood of her killer, can we take it down to the lab and extract something useful from it such as the identity of a possible suspect or perhaps an accomplice-but working with that sample of blood one finds there is not nearly enough substance to run the necessary tests to determine the identity of anyone or anything and if such tests were to be undertaken the processing and interpretation and certification of the results might take days because the laboratory assistants are behind schedule by which time the criminal may have hopped, skipped and made a convenient jump from Heathrow to John F. Kennedy airport and the extradition paperwork takes another few weeks by which time the killer has engaged a lawyer who charges not a set fee, but by the hour and it’s no trouble because the killer also happens to be the son of the former chief executive officer of a high profile financial organization and in the interest of maintaining affable relations between the two powerhouses that are New York and London finance, the case is sealed and filed away as unsolved, leading to an unhappy police force and a bereaved mother, father, and younger brother who decide to take their story to the papers and stir scandal, by which time Mycroft’s mobile explodes with a thirty-seven messages because the entire ordeal is an embarrassment for both the American and British governments and it would be best kept quiet, and for that reason he makes the decision to retrieve a certain relation from the cell in which that relation was comfortably sitting, serving an indefinite amount of time for hacking into the MI5 servers and retrieving national security files to prove that one could.
Now-noise.
The essential question is: was the blood on the left collar of the track suit relevant to the case? A simple guess by an average person with some notion of how one goes about solving these things would yield the answer, yes, it is relevant to the case and yes, it will be useful. Well, perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, perhaps it was deliberately placed on that left collar by the killer to lead the police on a merry chase by which time the killer would be safely ensconced in a their five hundred and fifty six square meter penthouse. The point is noise. Noise is not important if one assumes that there is an infinite amount of time and laboratory resources in which to solve a case-it would simply become an exercise in waiting for the centrifuge to stop spinning. An assembly of the data and it is commonly assumed by the general public that the picture becomes immediately clear, when this is never the case. Data must be interpreted, data has the potential to generate more noise, data has the potential to be a dead end or a false lead. Furthermore, one does not have the luxury of an infinite amount of time to solve a case because there are four other folders needing immediate attention on the DI’s desk, ranging from an ongoing investigation of drugs smuggling to a tip concerning the strange Arabic-sounding music playing in the flat next door. Thus, the key is time.
When tracking a mystery, especially in a city such as London, noise increases with time. Time spent on listening to noise is time well wasted. Distinguish between signal and noise and one has already solved a third of the riddle. One is set against time because there are certain signals which are time-sensitive, and there are certain noises that grow stronger as more time progresses. Working with a skewed data set is never pleasant, working with an old data is also unpleasant. In the case of the track suit jogger above, if the investigators had immediately noticed that the suit had been placed on the body after death, as evinced by the peculiar crease patterns, and examined particularly the jogger’s shoes, laced too tightly by a man who liked triple knots, the identity of the killer would have been obvious (proof omitted, left as an exercise to the students. Hint: consider the ingested ostrich burger). Obvious from a single thorough examination of the crime scene and a few well considered enquiries put to the dead woman’s secretary-and then the entire ridiculous aftermath involving thirty-seven messages and retrievals of familial relations would not have occurred.
Of course, the case of the track-suit jogger was a crime, but hardly a mystery. A scene that requires one glance and three questions is not a mystery. It was rather insulting that the incident which should bring Sherlock Holmes from incarceration in a classified intelligence cell to a sort of modified house arrest was a crime but in no way a mystery and in his opinion, only went to illustrate the dismal state of Scotland Yard. They were as hopelessly mired in their own stupidity as they had been two hundred years previous. Sherlock thought he might prefer incarceration, and if it hadn’t been for Mycroft’s rather pointed insistence he would have stayed.
The point: he was flung out into the wide, noisy world and told to assist Detective Inspector Lestrade in his investigations for at least two years. Sherlock himself thought it was a rather harsh sentence to be subjected to such constant tedium. Lestrade made it clear that he disliked the assignment as much as Sherlock but, having been recently promoted and eager to establish a reputation for himself, he was determined to make the best of things. The man was not intelligent but he was not stupid as far as Scotland Yard types went, nevertheless Sherlock found Lestrade positively dull, and the work moreso. As cases flowed in, the problem of noise and time presented itself rather quickly in this context, and Sherlock rediscovered his favorite game of childhood: I Spy.
He spied with his remarkable, brilliant, and absolutely extraordinary eye details no one else thought to consider important, details which seemed to others completely incidental and subjective in nature, but it allowed him to circumvent almost entirely the time consuming process of forensic science and the general monotony of interviewing suspects, witnesses, and relations. He found that interviews and forensics only added to the noise, introduced unnecessary uncertainties when everything that was needed was written in the crime scene. That was his hypothesis-the brilliance of his new science of deduction. Lestrade, of course, blind clod that he was, did not believe him. He couldn’t follow Sherlock’s process, and being trained in the traditional schools of investigatory method, he thought the premise of the hypothesis was ridiculous. The choice of a fellow’s ringtone did not mean he was having an affair with his manager’s wife, he’d objected. Besides which the evidence would never hold water in court.
Lestrade entirely missed the point. Sherlock did not care about the conviction or the sentence-only of finding the right answer. He’d retorted that so long as they found the right answer, they could reverse engineer the crime and find the salient data points to create an argument anyone with half a brain could win-thus, all parties would be satisfied. Except Sherlock, for a solved mystery meant the cessation of all interesting intellectual activity and onset of boredom.
The DI had been speechless, sputtering first at the thought that Sherlock did not care about crime, but about mystery. And it was true-crime and mystery are two separate categories which people, thanks to popular novels concerning unsolved criminal mysteries, were too eager to conflate. He was not interested in crime, he had never taken the slightest interest to law or contemporary criminal justice systems. The only thing that mattered was the game-playing it fast, and getting it right.
Like most games worth playing, there were levels of mastery. The first level was to deal with the problem of noise and to find an empirical means by which to solve a case in under thirty-six hours. It was appalling that cases sometimes took detectives days to solve.
His answer: the science of deduction. It required evidence, it required logic and keen powers of observation, it may or may not require a few questions directed towards select parties related to the crime scene, but it did not require an army of forensic twats who waddled in their sterilized blue suits armed with cotton swabs and plastic totes. In some cases, he posited that he could solve the crime from the convenience of his sitting room sofa, looking at a few high definition photographs of the crime scene and asking less than ten questions. Lestrade, never one to disappoint, threw down the gauntlet and challenged Sherlock to prove it.
Which he did, of course. Much to the frustration of Lestrade.
Therefore, the problem of noise-he solved it. Elegant, neat, efficient solution. It also temporarily solved the problem of his perpetual boredom, as he limited himself to three questions and four photos, or five touches and four minutes, or two glances and five statements. The rush was exhilarating, almost equal to the task of distracting him from his addictions. The only disadvantage seemed to be that one was required to be a genius in order to use this new method he’d invented.
He didn’t mind.
It was brilliant, being a genius.