Maybe the ship had a lido deck.
Here is an updated version of that famous reading for the BBC version:
I thought they did a pretty good job updating it for “today”
That is a load of horsehockey, as I pointed out at some length. But once again:
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There was no evidence at all that Watson’s injury was caused by a war. In Victorian England deformity was commonplace amongst all social classes due to everything from badly set bones to rickets. Holmes assumed that the injury must be due to Watson’s military service and pinned his entire deduction on that single assumption. But the assumption was totally unwarranted. It was far, far more likely that Watson’s deformity was the result of a rugby injury than from military service.
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In 1881 England had, within the past 10 years, also fought wars in South Africa, Ghana, Malaysia and New Zealand. Troops had also been involved in police actions in Australia, the Caribbean and and China. And British troops were the literal police over most of the colonies and were regularly being wounded in confrontations with bushrangers in Australia or with tribesmen in Siam. To which we can add the fact that British officers were commonly serving in the militaries of every nation from the USA and France to Japan and Mexico. Even if Holmes did have some reason to believe that Watson’s injury was caused in battle, he had no reasons to conclude it occurred in the service of the crown. And even if he could conclude that it was received in battle and that Watson was serving in the British army at the time he certainly had no reason to select Afghanistan out of the hundreds of places where British troops had seen active service.
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Picking Afghanistan was, at best, playing the odds. If we ignore the fact that Holmes has no reason at all to believe Watson’s injury was caused in battle in the service of the British crown, then maybe, as you say, the most likely place he got injured was in Afghanistan, though I doubt even that is true. But Holmes pronounces with absolute certainty that Watson had been in Afghanistan. There is no way in the world that he can be at all certain about that with the information to hand. Holmes himself commented several times that working with erroneous preconceived notions leads to false conclusion. But here he concludes that Watson was in Afghanistan based upon what you admit was nothing more than a best guess.
If I saw a ~30 year old man today with a buzzcut and a missing limb, I would certainly not come to the conclusion that they had served in Afghanistan, and for the same reasons Holmes could not. An amputation injury to a soldier is far, far more likely to have been received in a car crash than in combat. To assume that a soldier with an amputation must have received the wound in combat would make you wrong most of the time.
Even if we do assume that the injury was received in service, it is still an order of magnitude more likely to have occurred as a result of an injury during training on US soil than during combat abroad.
Even if we go against the odds and assume that the amputation was caused in combat, at the age of 30 the injury could have been sustained in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan, not to mention various embassy bombings etc.
There is nothing reasonable in your inference that someone with a buzzcut and an amputation must have been to Afghanistan, just as there was nothing reasonable in Holmes’ inference 130 years ago.
No worries. It’s $54.98.
Which is a perfect real life example of how this sort of armchair detective nonsense is absolute hokum.
Lions do not in any sense “always” break the necks of their human victims. Which us why for 563 attacks resulting in death there are 308 that only result in injury. Obviously if lions “always” broke the necks of humans they attacked the death rate would be near 100% and the injury rate would be miniscule, especially in a third world country. Instead we find that almost half the attacks are non-fatal.
So you read something once, which is obviously hokum if you think about it for even a second, and you believed it. All you needed to do was find one example of a person attacked by a lionwhose neck wasn’t broken to prove it to be hokum.
But you chose to believe it and you incorporated it into your “deduction” hokum and using that you drew a conclusion, which turned out to be correct. So you attribute the success to the hokum technique: you used erroneous data combined with an inexact method and you produced a correct result. And you attributed the result to the method. A classic example of confirmation bias and a hallmark of all hokum techniques from astrology to Scientology.
Of course it’s easy to point to examples of where people “knew” the same sorts of thing about how wild animals killed people and falsely convicted innocent people on the basis of their hokum.
Which is exactly what Holmes’ techniques would have done 50% of the time.
What exactly did he find shocking? That you knew the address, or that you cared enough to memorise it?
If someone who worked with a close relative of mine told me they knew where I lived, I would *assume *that they found out from my relative. I can’t see how this is in any way shocking. You spend 4 hours a day working with his sister. There were literally dozens of boring, non-shocking ways you could have discovered his address, from simply asking his sister 5 minutes before he arrived, to going through her bag months before to the sort of shenanigans you actually pulled.
This is nothing at all like the deduction technique Holmes used, where he could produce intimate details and physical descriptions of people he had no connection with after 10 seconds observation.
Yep, but you have to remember how pale middle class Victorians Londoners were. A suntan was a very undesirable trait. Men wore hats and collars and constantly, London is pretty cloudy at the best of times, and with Victorian era pollution the amount of direct sun exposure was at best a few hours a year.
A tropical a tan developed over years will take at least 6 months to fade to the fashionable fish-belly white of yesteryear. I can attest that for olive skinned people it can take years.
We tend to think of pale as “hasn’t seen more than a few minutes sun this month”. Victorians thought of pale as “hasn’t seen more than a few minutes sun in this lifetime”, which would have been the colour under Watson’s sleeves. A deep tan won’t fade to that colour for months if not years.
dude, your anger in several threads is out of line. Is this a lifelong pattern, or is something going on in your life? It’s off-putting.
Moderator Note
Blake, let’s dial back on the snark and personal remarks in this forum. You’ve received many notes for this in the past. Let’s keep the discussion civil.
Moderator Note
Likewise, get lives, personal remarks of this kind directed at another poster are not appropriate for this forum. If you have an issue with another poster, take it to the Pit.
No warnings issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Holmes fully admits several times in the canon that what he does is essentially “playing the odds.” In the terms of modern formal logic, Holmes engages not in deduction but rather in induction.
For example, in The Sign of the Four, the following exchange between Watson and Holmes takes place:
**“Then how in the name of all that is wonderful did you get these facts? They are absolutely correct in every particular.”
“Ah, that is good luck. I could only say what was the balance of probability. I did not at all expect to be so accurate.”**
Holmes bungles by relying too heavily on his “probable” conclusions several times in the canon, most notably in “The Yellow Face,” when the solution to the mystery turns out to be quite improbable, and therefore impossible to deduce from the facts Holmes had presented to him.
Holmes is not a little inconsistent; also in The Sign of the Four:
I never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive to the logical faculty.
I don’t think that’s inconsistent. “Guessing” suggests wild stabs in the dark not based on facts, or at least based on only a few facts, without any care as to the likelihood of the guess. Engaging in inductive reasoning is very different, and usually correct when properly applied, though indeed capable of failing, sometimes spectacularly. Holmes usually only publicly states a conclusion if he is reasonably certain of it.
To a limited degree, cops today (well, TV cops, the only kind I’m really familiar with) do much the same thing. Long fingernail on pinkie finger means cocaine user, manicured fingernails on a grown man means hit man, finger tattoos means ex-con, specialty tattoos indicate gang or military affiliation, etc. You can’t tell a man’s life story at a glance, but you can pick up one or two useful bits of reliable information.
Why would a hitman have manicured fingernails?
So as not to scratch his white cat.
Despite all his mentions of “simple deduction”, Sherlock Holmes almost never uses deductive reasoning.
Instead he uses abductive reasoning, which only has a good chance of being right, and that’s assuming that you have sufficient knowledge of the situation to begin with valid premises.
And actually it’s worse than that in SH’s case, because he often chains together several of these conclusions. So even if each individual conclusion is, say, 80% likely to be correct, his final conclusion may be for example .8 x .8 x.8 x .8 = 41% chance of being right.
Can you provide any evidence for this claim?
A consequence of the slight value which the author placed on his creation, particularly in later years when he had tired of it.
My SIL hired a “mentalist” for a birthday party she threw for my BIL last year. He performed close up in the living room, to a room full of relatives (i.e. no plants) and amazed everyone including me.
From what I remember
[ul]
[li]He had me and a BIL pick a random word out of a random page of a randomly selected book while his back was turned to us and he correctly identified the word[/li][li]He had five of us draw pictures on cards and give him the cards. Then, for each card, he asked each person if they had drawn that picture and had each person deny having drawn it. He then guessed the correct drawer.[/li][li]He stood next to my BIL and tapped him, with my SIL on the other side of the room with her back to him. On the basis of taps that she herself “felt” she was able to identify the location of my BIL’s body where he had been tapped, and the number of taps.[/li][li]He gave someone a sealed envelope, then had a bunch of people randomly write down numbers and then had the envelope opened to reveal a dollar bill with those numbers in the serial number.[/li][/ul]
And a bunch of other stuff that I don’t recall just now.
I was blown away. No clue as to how this could have been done.
That’s not a mentalist; that’s a magician (as, to be honest, most people describing themselves as mentalists are). Most of his tricks were probably actually fairly simple, if you remembered exactly what it was that you saw, but he was able to distract you enough from what you actually saw to remember other, slightly different, things that appear to have no rational explanation.