Computers as Unreliable Witnesses and Other Musings

What my desk looks like this week

The randomness of my thinking today has to do with what I have been up to.  This past Friday, I began in earnest to research a new novel, set in a brand new place, with brand new people.

Another part of the forest

The second of my British East Africa series, The Idol of Mombasa (Tolliver2), is sold and awaiting a pub date—sometime next year.  I have a decent second draft of The Blasphemer, Tolliver3, which I have put aside until I of M is finalized.  So I have picked up a new story that has been haunting my imagination for about a year now.

Because I write historicals, getting the time, place, and characters sufficiently vivid in my mind takes a lot of research, something some writers find daunting or boring or both.  Not so I.   Once I have amassed some source materials, either at home or on my special, privileged shelf at the splendid New York Public Library, I dive in and before I know it a torrent of story ideas is pouring into my head.  It’s an exciting period for me.  But it has its drawbacks.  I tend to lose track of time and to neglect my everyday to-do list.  I work with such abandon that when I pick up my head, I find it’s getting dark when it feels like it must be 11 AM.

With this going on for the past few days, I have been too immersed to study up and write any of the blog topics I have had in mind to post here.  Hence these ramblings.

I live right under the "8" in "8th Street"

This morning I tried to leave off the creation compulsion for a few hours and go to visit David.  I got the car out of the garage and started for the Lincoln Tunnel at about 9:30.  As I approached Fifth Avenue along East Ninth Street, I saw a purple line painted down the center.  Yikes!  The Gay Pride Parade.  I had forgotten it would be today.  We have so much to celebrate this week after the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality.  This year, the annual ritual, which started out as a protest of inequality, was bound to be even grander than usual.  As in past years, the march was to start at noon, come south, and spill onto my local streets.  The revels, I knew from experience, would go on until the wee hours of tomorrow morning.  Even if I could find a way west to New Jersey this morning, I would not be able to drive home until well after midnight. 

This year's NYC Grand Marshalls

Huzzah!  Hooray!  But not a place to pass through with a car!

At any rate, my way across Fifth Avenue was already blocked by police barricades.   I took the car back to the garage and came home.

 Other than that one attempt to escape the vise grip of the new story, about the only things I have done in the past four days were to “attend” a one-hour webinar about book marketing and to post once in while on Facebook, which gave me the illusion of being in someway still connected to real friends.  As opposed to my whole new set of fictional ones.  Here is where the computer as an unreliable eyewitness comes into this stream of unconsciousness.

On Thursday, which is TBT (Throw-back Thursday) on Facebook, I posted a few photos from a trip David and I took to Malta in 2010.  Now you likely have read in posts here on MIE that although eyewitness accounts are given great weight by jurors, such reports are in point of fact very unreliable.   People can make mistakes.  You might have thought computers would be more likely to know spew out facts.  That is where you would be wrong.

Tell me.  Are these two pictures of the same person?

The top photo is David on a ferry between two Maltese islands.  The second one is my friend and fellow mystery writer Jeff Markowitz.  The main thing these two men have ever had in common is a hilarious wit.  Not something that shows in a photo.  But Facebook’s algorithm labeled my photo of David as one of Jeff.  And Facebook told the world that in 2010, I had traveled to Malta with Jeff Markowitz.   No matter how hard I try, I cannot convince Facebook to retract its false testimony.

Carol Markowitz, Jeff’s darling wife, being a reliable human eyewitness, can look at a picture of my husband and recognize that he is not her husband.  Thanks to that, no marriages have been ruined in this process.

Annamaria - Monday