Yes, I’m an Idiot

Important lesson: Never compose a blog entry before you’ve had your morning coffee. Or after driving in a car smelling of child vomit (long story — all clean now).

As Tom so rightly pointed out in his comment on my entry below, depending on how you measure speed, it is perfectly possible to have increases of greater than 100 percent. If speed is measured in the time necessary to complete a discrete task — as I did in my example — then no. But if you measure speed as the number of discrete tasks that can be performed within a specific time frame — in other words, a tasks-per-time rate rather than a time-per-task rate — then yes. You’d think that since I heard this commercial while driving in my car, I’d have thought of the obvious comparison: Vehicle speeds as measured in miles per hour (or kilometers per hour for all of you folks from... well, anywhere else in the world). Sometime, I really should get out of my little theoretical world and enter the practical one.

So please forgive my momentary lapse in common sense, and read somebody who actually thought before writing. Like E.J. Dionne, who today impresses upon us the importance of retaining “intellectual solidarity” in personal religious faith (as opposed to mere tolerance of different faiths for pragmatic purposes). Or Richard Cohen, who expresses astonishment that the Bush regime isn’t being held accountable for errors in judgment that — in any other industry or political entity — would be grounds for at least an admission of error, if not outright removal.