The tyranny of numbers

A world often obsessed by metrics can be hell for a person with a quantitative inclination, which would include me. Of course I am watching the markets pretty constantly, though I try not to focus on them on a minute by minute basis. Then there are of course the coronavirus case counts, which are suspect in many ways but are the best indicator we have of how well or poorly we are doing. First thing in the morning, I weigh myself. At the end of most days, I look over at 538.com to see how approval and Presidential polls are tracking. Beyond that, there are numbers and numbers, ever more as the world cranks out more data.

So you'd expect that my leisure at least would be relatively free of quantitative stress. Parts of it are, like watching funny stuff on TV, though it's hard not to peek at how many episodes are left of a given series (right now we have about 11 left of Communiy, maybe 5 left of Psych). Thankfully, there's a whole world, a whole catalog, of content to watch or rewatch when we're done with that. And pandemic or no pandemic, they keep making more stuff, and they are stubbornly refusing to accelerate the release of season 4 of The Crown, which actually gives me something to really look forward to.

Then there are books. I have a lot of those. The problem I have with those is keeping track of where I am in a given book. Try though I may, I can't not do it. Right now I am reading a murder mystery that is 414 pages long (Elizabeth George's Well-Schooled in Murder). 414, of course, is divisible by 9, which means it's divisible by 3, and it's also even, so divisible by 2. It is, in fact 2 x 3 squared x 23 pages long. Which gives my feverish brain a lot of ways to track progress through the book, which somehow it can't not do. Sigh