Crow White
By Michael Swaine
I am not Dale Dougherty, and for that I owe you an explanation. Dale, who so recently graced this last page with his erudition, insight, clarity, and charm, can be found elsewhere in this month's issue. I am Mike Swaine, whom some of you may recognize as the culprit who filled this last page back when the magazine was first launched—in 1837 or 8, if I remember right. Well, I'm back. "Yes but...," you ask, cutting to the heart of the matter with that thirst for the truth that endears you to all your friends, "...but why are you back?" I wondered that myself, and finally developed a theory.
It's based on philosopher Karl Popper's Nonblack Noncrows Strategy. To support the claim that all crows are black, you might think you would have to observe one or more crows and note their color. Well that's-a no good, to quote Chico Marx (something that, to my knowledge, Dale Dougherty has never done). It's just inconvenient to go trudging about outdoors in the cold looking for birds that have probably flown south for the winter anyway. Happily, it suffices merely to observe nonblack things and to establish that they are in fact noncrows. Each nonblack noncrow is evidence for the blackness of crows. Construct the truth table and compute the marginal probabilities if you don't believe me. This is a very useful and, in my opinion, sadly underused research tool. You do need more data to reach the same level of certainty using this strategy as compared with what I suppose we must call the Counting Crows strategy, but there are always a lot of nonblack things at hand.
It was, I think, with the Nonblack Noncrows Strategy in mind that Bob Kaehms invited me back to write for the magazine.
