Don't mention the nuts.

THEY (and for the moment let's just imagine that there is a THEM, and that THEY have some vague idea about what THEY are saying. Dangerous, I know, that much assuming before we really get started, but still..)

THEY say to observe something is to change it. THEY reckon this is pretty universal. Like bouncing little bits of light off other little bits of stuff will never show you exactly what those little bits where like before you came along. (Or like trying to guess whether a cat in a box is dead without opening the box or some such nonsense.) Stands to reason, right? Also - zooming out a bit - people in cars, or people in hoods, tend to behave differently when there's a camera pointed at them, presumably in response to the off-chance that some diligent monkey with a finger on a button is going to scan through all the hours of tarmac slowly cracking.

(Interesting aside, that. The Idea - and yes, lets capitalise the bastard - that it's not just the observing, it's the chance that someone may observe some time in the future that has an effect. Lets not delve into that deep-end sans armbands too fecklessly though. Needs someone with a bigger keyboard, I'd imagine.)

The idea seems pretty sound. Sure, you could argue that last friday you (or maybe your FRIEND) was spying on (... sorry, I mean casually gazing through binoculars at) a neighbour without curtains, and they had NO idea and they kept going for HOURS - and so you got away with a bit of observing for free, so to speak. However, there are a couple of holes in that. For a start, there is the whole micro level, which you REALLY don't want to mess with. I don't know, but THEY might say something about little bits of light hitting your neighbour in a slightly different way, causing a knock-on effect (exciting, huh?). Also, when you next see them in Londis, I don't care how good your poker face is (tempted to make a play on "The Nuts", but I think we'll leave that one), you will look at them differently. Then there is the "hairs on the back of the neck" angle, which most of THEM will probably scoff at, but you never know - THEY'VE been wrong before.

So, all in all, see something - effect it. Argue if you want, but you are probably wrong.

What really gets me though, is this. By saying "to observe is to change", THEY are saying something about the nature of observation. Something THEY have noticed. Something THEY OBSERVED. This is intolerable! Not only are we going around changing things (for better or for worse, we don't know; I mean, how would you?) just by looking at them. No, that was bad enough; now that those clever fucking THEM's had to go and admit it, we're changing the way we're looking as well! It stands to reason; you can't have one without the other. It would be like saying "wow, this paper is really useful - look, I drew a cat!" and completely ignoring the distant chatter of chain-saws.

Where can all this lead? Nowhere good, I'd imagine. I'm not saying anything against change as an idea, I'm just suggesting that it can't be a good thing right before your eyes. You change things as you observe them, and your faculty for observation changes as you think about it. So it must follow that the things under observation change even more, along with the changing observation. Do you really want your children growing up in a world with that amount of unsupervised, inexpressible change going on? I know I don't.

Incidentally, if one more person mentions to me how many times you get caught on CCTV in London each day, I shall weep.