MON
Something happened today.
We were trying to estimate the size of the book and discovered that the answer depended on what we meant by size.
Words. Characters. Physical dimensions. Font size. Public pages. Source pages. White space. Paragraph spacing.
A book is apparently very bad at being one number.
I liked that because it was another whole-coin problem in technical clothing. We wanted a simple answer: How many pages is Draft 2?
Fifty-two in Word.
Almost meaningless.
The public reader would use a different page size. Each diary source item would start on a fresh virtual page. Some would span two or three. Typography could change later.
The number was not wrong.
It was answering a different question.
That distinction comes up everywhere. A driver earns twenty dollars in an hour. Good or bad?
How many kilometres? What expenses? How much waiting? Was that active time or online time?
A company says ninety percent of customers are satisfied.
With what? Asked when? Compared to what?
Numbers are precise little creatures that can still wander into the wrong sentence.
The page-count problem reminded me to ask what the measurement actually measures.
That is not skepticism for the sake of skepticism.
It is curiosity wearing reading glasses.
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