Cracks in the Bell Curve

They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank,

Fuel burning fast on an empty tank.

Reckless and wild, the pour through the turns.

Their prowess is potent and secretly stearn.

--Cake, "The Distance"

With the Winter Olympics and all the accompanying Olympics-themed fast food promotions in full swing (Dunkin' Donuts is now offering, for a limited time only, gold, silver, bronze, and thank-for-coming-out flavoured imitation cream cheese spread on their imitation bagels), I've been thinking a bit about our need to rank things. Whether it's athletic accomplishments, beauty, musical talent, cooking ability, intelligence, etc etc etc, we expend a huge amount of time and energy determining who is the best (or worst) in a huge number of categories. Sometimes these rankings are created solely to sell magazines by giving people something to complain about...I myself am guilty of buying Maclean's annual university review issue just so I can bitch about how the rating system is skewed towards Ontario schools. Other people buy every third issue of Cosmo so they can bitch about how Ashley Simpson/Tara Reid/Steve Guttenberg beat out Jean Cretien/The Hindenburg/Kim Cattrall in the Top 10 Best Cowboy Dances/Worst Disasters Caught on Film/Most Awesomest Police Academy Cast Members lists. But I think that a lot of the importance we place on rankings is because they somehow tell us in an objective, detached, emotionless manner exactly where we stand in the world.

To some degree, I guess this is a normal human desire...we want to feel good about ourselves for being somehow "better" than a group of people who are ranked lower at something than us, and we want to know how much harder we need to work to cath up to the people "ahead" of us. Producing rankings for certain things like productivity, body mass index, or grades can motivate us to work harder, improve our health, and study more. However, placing too much importance on rankings can lead to burn-out, eating disorders, and transfering from a real faculty into business school (yes, Sloanies, this means you). This effect gets amplified in populations where people are all very similar and all very competitive, since the criteria for differentiation between levels of awesomeness become tighter and tighter. Just listen to Olympic figure skating commentators and I think you'll agree..."well John, I'm shocked and disgusted with the Rumanian's performance. I mean, her left toe pick was AT LEAST two millimetres too far to the left when she landed that quintuple-reverse-backflip. What does she think this is, Spongebob Squarepants on Ice? I don't see anyone in a jellyfish costume, Ivona!" Ivona comes in 29th overall and has to return to her job in the whale blubber packing plant, while the girl who landed the jump with her toepicks properly aligned gets (is forced to?) meet the president.

While the Olympics are probably the ultimate example of achievement-hair-splitting, the western bank of the Charles is also pretty good at amplifying these effects to ridiculous levels of ridiculousness. When TA's assign grades to their students, the difference between an A and a B often comes down to missing two or three questions over the course of the semester. Sure there are some people that clearly deserve their D's (like the kid that handed in a photocopy of his friend's -handwritten- homework once), but for the most part all of these people know what they're doing and are very good students. Still, undergrads and grad students alike compete fiercly with one another for the limited number of available A's, and put themselves under huge amounts of stress to move up in the rankings.

Now, I've already come to accept the fact that I'm really kickass at being a mediocre grad student. This kind of mindset allows you to stay sane while your colleagues throw themselves off the top of Building 10. But sometimes the urge to rank yourself and compare yourself to the people around you is still pretty strong. The other day I was giving a lecture (since the professor got stuck in California due to some snow scaring all the airplanes away from New England) to a bunch of grad students in nonlinear optics. If you just went "WTF is nonlinear optics", then you pretty much know as much about it as me. So I'm lecturing from his notes, trying to sound like I understand more than 2% of the material, when I get to a page that made zero sense when I went over it before class and somehow made negative sense when I reached it in lecture.

Since the class is half-full of Harvard physics students who really, really, really like math (what a loser school), they of course start to ask me questions. I started to freak out internally...what if they think I don't know what I'm talking about? What if they think that I'm not as smart as them? What if they assign me a rank of C- as a TA? AAAHHHH!!!!!!! I momentarily considered trying to BS my way through that page of notes...but then I remembered that I don't want to throw myself off of Building 10, and leveled with them. "You know what guys...I have no idea what this page is trying to show. It's just a bunch of math, we don't ever use it for anything, and I don't even know why it's in here. So just ignore it and save your questions for stuff that I at least slightly understand."

In my experience, over-emphasizing ratings causes you to lose sight of what's really important in your work or personal life. Doing the best job that you can, being the best person that you can to the people you love, and not throwing yourself off of buildings. Besides, I have insider information that the people doing the ranking usually aren't any better at the task in question than the people being ranked. So don't sweat the numbers, and pray that the professor makes it to lecture on time.

And I hate it
When you fake it.
You can't hide it,
You might as well embrace it.

--Sum 41, "In Too Deep"

PS: for everyone that harassed me about not posting in a long time, this is what you get!!!! SIX PARAGRAPHS!!!

Nooooo!

Sweet Caroline (bap bap baaaahhh)
Good times never felt so good (so good, so good)
I've been inclined (bap bap baaaahhh)
To believe they never would.

--Neil Diamond, Sweet Caroline

Crap! That last post somehow overwrote the Neil Diamond post, and now it's gone forever, lost in the internet jetsam, along with brittanyandkevinforever.com and paulmartinrules.org! Dammit!!!

And now I look at the night,

And it don't seem so loney.

We fill it up with only two.

--Neil Diamond, Sweet Caroline

O...M...G... (Can I Still Type That, or Will Allah Come Get Me?)

No suitable lyrics for this post, so I'm foregoing the tradition.

While I've been sitting around my empty apartment all morning waiting for the moving company to deliver my stuff, I've been reading some coverage of the "cartoon riots" that have been spreading across the Muslim world. The list of countries that have experienced riots / flag-burnings / embassy-stormings / slogan-chanting / jihad-vowing JUST TODAY include:

Iran
Iraq
Syria
Lebanon
Afghanistan
India
Indonesia
Australia

I haven't really been following this story very closely since it seemed, well, silly until now, so I'm not sure if there have been demonstrations in Europe but it seems more than likely. After reading about how violent some of the protests have become, including attacks on Christian neighbourhoods in Beirut, I decided that I needed to have a look at these cartoons. Since they have "offended" (I think that's the wrong word, since when someone "offendeds" you in the civilized world you typically write a strongly-worded letter in response) these Muslim extremists enough to form molotov-cocktail-tossing mobs, I imagined that they must be something truly nasty and hateful...the kind of nasty and hateful that I can't even begin to imagine, since I can't imagine ANY newspaper ANYWHERE printing ANYTHING about my religious beliefs that would convince me and 200 of my buddies to storm an embassy. I was even prepared to give the the benefit of the doubt, since I don't pretend to have a deep understanding of their faith and these people do seem to enjoy a good flag-burning, whatever the occasion.

But when I finally saw the cartoons (have a look here if you're interested) my only reaction was...IS THAT IT?????

It is absolutely unimaginable to me that so many people are so upset by these CARTOONS that they would form violent mobs and attack the citizens, embassies, and personal property of other countries. Yes, I can understand that drawings of their prophet are forbidden by their religion, and I can understand how the cartoons would be offensive in the "hey that offends me, let me write a letter expressing my feelings to your newspaper, or perhaps start an intelligent dialogue about the problem" meaning of the word. But firebombs and rioting?????? All that these people are doing is proving the cartoonists right, and showing that a significant (I'm not saying majority) number of Muslims are absolutely fucking crazy.

The fact is, the world is a diverse place with very diverse values. Many many many things about fundamentalist (I'm not saying mainstream) Islam deeply offend me, like their treatment of women, approach to education, and incessant need to blow shit up. Likewise, many many many things about fundamentalist (I'm not saying mainstream) Christianity deeply offend me, like their literal interpretation of the Bible and incessant need to hold bake sales. But we all have to learn to live with people that don't share our own views...fundamentalist Islam (thankfully) is not the official and sole religion of the world, and these people need to understand that they have no right to enforce their twisted beliefs on the rest of us through violence. Similarly, us Westerners have to understand that our way of life is also not the official and sole way of life for the world, and that our beliefs may seem twisted to a large number of people, and that maybe invading Middle Eastern countries is not the best way to promote tolerance and understanding between our cultures.

At any rate, holy shit (oops I just offended myself...JIHAD ON ME!!!), it's a cartoon...maybe these people should be focusing their anger on the repressive regimes that keep them locked in abject poverty, their desperation fueling the uncontrollable rage that their leaders channel towards the West and use as a bargaining chip on the international stage. A little bit of inward-focused anger in some of these countries (Iran, Syria, I'm looking at you) would do a lot more for the wellbeing of the Muslim people than declaring holy war (there's a great term) on a couple of Danish cartoonists.