Accounting for things

More duties of the sort I described here require me to be away from "here" again for the next day or so, but I have the urge to post some little something, for some reason. More substantive posting to appear here when I return.

A couple of weeks ago, the Mrs., her father and I watched the last episode of The Sopranos together (we'll just set aside for the moment the strangeness of watching that episode when I've never seen a single Sopranos episode in its entirety), and somehow afterward we got on the subject of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men. My father-in-law said it sounded like something he'd like to read, so last week we got him a copy. And this past Saturday, my baby-wrangling duties greatly reduced, I went over to his place to help him assemble his hydraulic above-ground lift for cars (10- and 15-foot sections of cast iron of sufficient thickness to lift and support full-size cars and trucks (one of the top six models here) are really, really heavy), and while there, he told me that he was "addicted to that book."

Good to hear but otherwise unremarkable, you are thinking. Well, yes, except for that fact that the Mrs. later pointed out to me that in her memory she had never before seen her father read a book for pleasure. She's happy that he's enjoying the novel but can't get her head around the fact that this man she thought she knew has so caught her by surprise. Personally, I think it's her surprise that is the surprise here; though not highly educated, her father is an intelligent, thoughtful man. For his part, if he is also surprised by his enjoying the novel, he hasn't shared that with us. Even so, there's still the fact that her father has not been a reader for most of his adult life and now, seemingly out of the blue, he appears to want to become one (on Sunday, he asked me more about McCarthy, and after describing The Road to him, he said he thought he might like to read that as well). How to account for that?

My theory is that while, as he more than proved on Saturday, at 63 my father-in-law is much stronger than I have ever been or will ever be, he mentioned that day and in the past that his strength is not what it once was. But he's not willing, when the day eventually comes, just to fill the hours by plopping down in front of the television, either--he doesn't merely enjoy physical activity; his projects are of the problem-solving sort. They engage him intellectually every bit as much as they do physically. So, books. Maybe.

I know that one's more temporal predilections can change over time. But what about their underlying foundations--one's personality: apart from the experience of severe emotional or physical trauma, does that change as well? Or is the personality more like a sort of partly-exposed geological formation: as we grow older and experience more, different "sides" of us emerge, always there but, till a certain time, unexposed even to ourselves?

Well. It's not like my father-in-law's (apparent) new appreciation for books is causing us to think we need to lock our doors at night or something. Whatever the explanation, this is a Good Thing--for him obviously, and for the Mrs. and me because it presents us with a whole range of gift-giving options that we hadn't had before.

Two more tidbits having to do with Accounting for Things:

Via Clusterflock comes something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, defined as "the phenomenon whereby people who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge." "Knowledge," by the way, doesn't pertain here only to the factual: "Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd." (my emphasis)

Here's my question: we've all run into people who think they're funnier than they in fact are, and painful encounters they are, too. But how can one measure a sense of humor empirically? I've been puzzling over this all morning.

The other tidbit: Via the comments section for this post at Acephalous comes my first awareness of something called the Erdös-Bacon Number: "the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the 'collaborative distance' in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon." This is, in the grand scheme of things, a lesser piece of information to have than that concerning the Dunning-Kruger Effect--imagine hurling that little phrase at your blow-hard colleagues the next time you win, say, a debate over "who/whom" usage--but it's still fascinating to ponder the concept of the leisure time required to come up with such things.

He says, as he prepares to post yet another entry to a blog that is one day short of being 3 years and 4 months old.