[geeks] What desk toy or "tchotchke" says "geek" to you?

[Brian Dunbar]

Mike Meredith wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 23:39:17 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> 
> 
>>Yeah, there are some idiots, but cops in various European and UK
>>cesspools would beg to differ with the rosy impressions some of their
>>governments like to leave you with.
> 
> 
> I prefer hard numbers to anecdotal evidence which is inherently biased.
> The police aren't lying about their experiences but they're not in the
> best position to see the overall picture. After all 'it's boring,
> nothing much happens around here' isn't much of a story is it ?
> 
> To put it another way, I don't trust myself to be able to say whether
> the amount of spam being blocked by my mail servers is higher now than
> it used to be 2 years ago. That's why I measure it so I've got some
> numbers.

One problem is that you're talking about soft numbers that are easily
fudged.  Not cooking the books by the bean counters but ... people lie.
 People lie to pollsters and they lie to the Man and they'll lie even
when there is no reason not to.  The books are pre-cooked if you will
even before the bean counters get them.

You - we all are - used to dealing with hard verifiable numbers.  Spam
up or down - the numbers are on disk and verifiable.  1s and 0s. Binary
- it happened or it didn't.

Social issue numbers are harder to verify and harder to tally and, in
general, squishy.

-- 
Brian Dunbar
System Administrator
Liftport - The Space Elevator Company

brian.dunbar at liftport.com
aim: bdunbar1967

this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private

Remember.
But move forward, too. Light a candle, yes. But also drive a rivet.
~Lileks