Tuesday, July 19, 2005

"but, um, you know, if (x+y)/2=z, then y=2z-x" "shut up! don't think you are going to math your way out of this one!"

A couple people commented to me about how yesterday I started including my actual weight in my update about my diet, as opposed to whiting it out before posting (e.g., here). Why? For one thing, it felt a little silly posting these updates about my weekly weight change for anyone in the world to see and yet keep my weight itself some secret. More importantly, since the last post was about having lost 10% of my original weight, it felt especially silly to post the amount of weight I had lost and that I was down 10% and then pretend that one could not deduce what my starting weight approximately was.

Irresistible related anecdote: When I was a junior in high school, I dated a woman from an even smaller school in a nearby town. Unfortunately and unexpectedly, she got a 10 on her ACT and was sufficiently embarrassed about this that she didn't tell any of her friends to know and made me swear I wouldn't tell anyone. She did, however, tell some of her friends what my ACT score was, and she also told somebody what the average of our two scores was. Then, she got very angry with me because suddenly everybody knew she had gotten a 10, and, since she hadn't told anyone, it had to have been me.

Addendum to irresistible related anecdote: Actually, I would be doing this Woman From My Past wrong if I didn't note that she really was a good deal smarter than what one might infer from either the anecdote or her ACT score. I've wondered what happened to her, but I haven't been able to find out from other sources and she has a Googleproof name. Another thing about her, though: her father owned a bank. I hadn't known that somebody could do that, just one person, own a whole bank, even just a small-town bank.

7 comments:

dorotha said...

I come from the land of SATs. What's a 10 mean? And what were your average weights?

jeremy said...

The scaling of these things have changed over time. Roughly, I think, a 10 ACT would correspond to a 550 SAT.

dorotha said...

i've only ever cared about my scores on standardized tests in relation to my sister's scores. we get a teensy bit competitive at times (fortunately, not about spelling).

Ang said...

I took the ACT. A 10 would have given me a stroke.

The people that got really high scores on the ACT seemed all to be of the same academic ilk - good at calculus and science, able to understand "logic." As you can imagine, I did only so-so.

Anyway, Dorotha, you'd probably have done well.

Anonymous said...

Now I am wondering who you dated as a Junior, as I only remember you dating MW??? Hmmm. I don't think I would have told anyone if I had gotten a 10. I do, however, remember what Jeremy got, and he ROCKED!
-jnsys

Anonymous said...

I would like to buy a bank, but for some reason my banker won't lend me the money!

jeremy said...

jab: I believe that GWB's SAT scores were actually higher than Al Gore's, but don't quote me on that.

jnsys: I didn't start dating M. until the very end of my junior year.