"Explaining binary search to a cop" should've caught on as a saying tbh.
I forgot about the context to this. God this is so funny
Image description: screenshot of two paragraphs that read, "Afterward I found a chat room thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of the theft no one would look at the footage. He said he tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all.
"You don't search the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it isn't there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It's very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would still probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of the theft. This argument didn't go down well."
teaching an old dog new tricks: trite cause dog likes you and wants to help but maybe is getting a bit hard for them
teaching a cop binary search: real cause even if they were smart enough to understand and use it they wouldnt because fuck you they dont care
I need people to stop saying that this doesn't work because cops are stupid. The actual breakdown in communication is that the cops don't want to be more efficient because reviewing hundreds of hours of surveillance footage is one trick for getting overtime. Its also the busywork they do to justify having enough officers to shutdown any riot. Its not that you can't teach a cop to do a binary search, its that learning the search technique threatens the system that cops rely on to pull six figure incomes from municipal budgets and get increased budgets every year for the last 40 years.
