Spoonful of Rice

I thought about writing this entry after replying an earlier comment. I am not a normal person by any measure. Granted, everyone is a unique individual but I am also weird on so many levels all stemming from the way that my brain works. An example of my weirdness is exemplified by the simple request for a spoonful of rice.

I can recall the very event that happened while I was having dinner with a few other friends at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. It was the Shanghai Family Restaurant, which is one of the two Chinese restaurants with edible Chinese food in Cambridge. It has the most wonderful of all Chinese dishes in this world on its menu: pig’s leg (or hand – depending on how you look at it).

Anyway, I digress. A few friends and I were happily having dinner when the time came for our second helping of rice. For some reason, probably because the rice bowl was next to me, I was scooping the rice. This was when my friend asked for just a spoonful of rice. I immediately stopped and looked rather stunned and confused because I did not know how much a spoonful of rice was. Eventually, someone else took the spoon out of my hand and did the scooping instead.

I have to reiterate that I was neither pretending nor was I doing it as some sort of ploy. However, I honestly did not know how to scoop a spoonful of rice as I did not know how much rice that entailed. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be exactly a spoonful of rice filled to the top, or an overflowing mountain of rice, or a specific number of grains, weight or volume of rice.

A lot of people do not understand how I could come to think like this. I have to attribute it to the fact that I am used to dealing in the unambiguous world of computer programming and hardware design. In this line of work, everything is meticulously defined and spelled out to the minutest detail. You are unlikely to know how far we’ll actually go to define things, so I will use a well known anecdote to illustrate it.

A computer science professor walks into an introductory programming class with enough material for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He then asked the class for instructions on how to make it. It went as follows:

1. Put the peanut butter on the slice of bread.
   He held the jar over the slice of bread and started to shake the jar.
2. No, you take the knife and use it to spread the peanut jelly.
   He started to grab the knife by the blade end.
3. No, grab the knife by the other end.
   This time he holds the knife correctly.
4. Spread the peanut butter on the slice of bread.
   He starts to put the peanut butter on the edges of the bread.

This went on in minute detail until it dawned on the students that in everyday speech, we leave a lot out assuming that everyone knows what we are talking about. The students got an understanding of how we must communicate with computers.

People in my line, will have little problem with analysis and synthesis because we go through them all the time. For someone like me, who lives and breathes computers, I go through these processes in almost everything, not just when it comes to computer work. So, when I receive a request for a spoonful of rice, it will stump me thoroughly because the term “spoonful” is ill defined.

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