I'm a racist too!

Gee whiz... anyone see that cartoon in the New York Post? I'm not going to bother describing it much further here, but Google can help you out. Briefly, a couple of police officers are portrayed in a cartoon having shot a chimpanzee, and saying that they'll have to find someone else to author the stimulus bill.

Sigh.

Today, one of my colleagues approached me with a problem that I created. For those of you who don't know, which is pretty much everyone, I made a trivial mistake at work. I support an electronic Lab Notebook and part of my job is to create "notebooks" for scientists to record their data. Requests come in, and I create the notebooks.

So, these notebooks have identification, and it's based on two things... a number that describes its place in a series, and an alphanumeric sequence that identifies the scientist. We have a group of scientists that all use the same alphanumeric ID sequence. I'm not that into the contents of the notebooks, but I assume we just farm out chemistry assignments of some sort to this group. They're in another country, and their names are somewhat recognizable, and could probably identify their ethnicity.

Here at "the company" each scientist has their own unique alphanumeric sequence that identifies them. However, some of them have names that might identify them as a member of this same ethnic group that we farm work out to.

I created a notebook for a person with the wrong identifier. I used the identifier that is common among the scientists we farm work out to, and their name probably would place them in that group, but their location is here at "the company".

Honestly, it was a mistake, but it looks pretty bad. The error is fixable, and I don't foresee any negative consequences, but I feel pretty bad, especially after seeing something that has so many people upset about groups of people being portrayed as ape-like.

Seriously, what kind of editor doesn't say, "dude... this might not go over well..."? Probably all of them, but they've gotta sell papers. I'm not much for censorship, but "censure-ship" probably should have kept this out of the spotlight. Somebody, somewhere, should just said to themselves, "um... no."

People are never eager to read any sort of high-level satire into something like this. We're looking at the most base, opportunistic interpretation, so that we can say something about it. Perhaps it is time to look at why we say what we say, as much as we study what is said.