Internet Manifestation

So what the heck, your turn.  And you know, there are worse things to spend your money on.  And you obviously need to get to at least the $35 level, so when people come over and see your fridge you can be all like “Oh, yeah, my buddy Levar sent that to me.  Perhaps you recall Geordi La Forge?”

H.R. Giger died yesterday, and it seems appropriate to link to a set of pictures from the famous artist’s garden.  It’s about what you’d expect, I guess.  Reminds me of my visit to Boris Valejo’s Pennsylvania compound.  Some of us can’t get out to Switzerland so easily, and have to make do, you know.

I read an interesting interview not long ago with Emma Donoghue and two of her editors – one from the US and one from Canada.  The considerations one has with trying to reconcile the comments of various people who don’t necessarily agree with one another is an intriguing thing.  But the thing that struck me was when Emma discussed her third (UK) editor, and how she’ll assign less weight to a problem only one of the three mentions.  In particular, she mentioned that one of her three editors had figured out who the murderer was early in Frog Music, and this was too high of a percentage.

Now, look.  You’ve only got three editors, which sort of gives you a whopping two degrees of freedom in this statistical analysis you’re performing.  Not something you really want to make decisions based on.  But worse than that, you can’t go around shouting “Thirty-three percent!” when you’ve got exactly one sample falling into that category.  One slight tip in the other direction and you’d think zero percent of your editors had guessed the murder, and where would that put you?  What if you decided the ideal number of people who figured it out was ten percent?  How would you ever know how close you were?  This is why all writers need a solid education in mathematics and statistics.

Also, I had a similar problem myself not long ago, and I thought 33% was about right.

So this post is by way of being a test for myself.  Back with the old blog, I wrote a series of posts on libraries, and despite a great deal of temptation, I managed to avoid calling down vast amounts of web traffic with the particular kinds of pictures of librarians that are quite popular, and are legion on the internet, settling instead of staid and educational photos.

I resolved to avoid library posts altogether after the last one, lest I give in and trade massive page hits for the integrity which you, my reader, have come to expect.  But not long ago, a study on “Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport” was done in the UK, and now that I’m here in a new blog, I thought perhaps I could give it another go.  After all, it combines two of my favorite things: libraries and quantifying stuff.

It will come as no surprise that visiting libraries is a great path to happiness, worth almost 1,400 pounds/year/person (happiness and libraries – you see how well I resist temptation?)  Libraries are worth more happiness value to the typical person than taking in a bunch of art or playing sports, in fact. Not only does this tell us that readers are not only smarter than most people, but happier, it also lets us know what should be first on the chopping block when public resources are scarce.  Sorry, museums and stadiums.