of quantifying and guessing

The littlest of things do make me happy.

It was HP tute this afternoon. and I had this African tutor complete with hard-to-understand accent. but he's cool, some economist that deals with the health industry.
and he started telling us about how to measure illnesses which involved two units, the DALY (Disability Adjusted Life Years) and the cost imposed by the disease.
and for some reason or other, I was flummoxed. absolutely fascinating stuff.
humans do want to make darn good sense on everything in this world
and to do that, measuring it sure makes sense.

giving a quantitative value to everything qualitative is clearly the way to go.

we give star ratings to movie reviews, restaurants.
we count the life expectancy of populations.
bosses ask their underlings, "Are you 100% commited to this project?"
we ask patients, "how severe is the pain in your chest, ma'am/sir?" the patient clearly worried goes, "really painful, doc" and we HAVE to ask, "on a pain scale of 1 to 10, what rating would you give it?"

we even measure intangible things like light.

but i think there are some things that should never ever be measured. coz it will just take the fun and mystery out of everything. (i always love to be kept guessing)
and goodness knows, we deserve a little mystery and fun everyday to make up for quantifying everything.

omg, craving MaxB again...



but you didn't even do the littlest of things today.