Those Dang Daunting Round Numbers

It's the dog days of summer, and the country has experienced the the hottest first seven months on record. This heat wave largely affects the denizens of regions of the country that aren't used to such high temps. Last night, David Letterman's top ten list enumerated the ways in which a person could tell it was so hot. Maybe three of the jokes were amusing, a record in its own right. But I'm not writing to pick on Letterman.

He made an interesting quip though: "It's 98, but it feels like 103. Can you really tell the difference?" I think the heat index is largely ignored unless it tops 100. Buy why 100? That seems like such an arbitrary number. It's a nice round number, for sure, even sporting two matching zeroes, but why is 100 significant? Living in Texas, you get used to the temperature (not to mention the heat index) regularly topping 100. Does it matter? Is 100 really that bad? My answer: no. I find 80 with 100% humidity much worse than 100 with 40% humidity.

Now percentages. That's where the number 100 is significant. It means all, absolutely, without question, the universal quantifier!

When the Dow-Jones hits 10,000, that's a big deal to a lot of people, but really, what should matter is the percentage that their investments rise or fall, not the absolute value of an unabsolute index. The Dow is a very indirect measure of the economy.

When an NBA basketball team scores 100 in a game, it's a big deal. There is even a metric that tracks how many times a team scores 100 in a game, which is often applied in relation to the number of wins a team accrues over a season. It is meaningless otherwise.

I find that people tend to set very arbitrary thresholds in many aspects of their lives, including the normal speed limit of US highways: 65mph (roughly 100kph ;).