I seem to have caught the boys’ cold, it is no one’s favourite time of the month, and the sky is dark grey and it’s chilly and rainy. It’s like a trifecta of mildly depressing things. Also mildly depressing is that I am repeating behaviours that I repeat every single June: I listen to the weather report which states that it will be chilly and rainy and also that the average temperature for this time of year is twenty degrees Celcius. This throws me into a Hulk-like rage because that cannot be true. The math does not work. If the temperature is almost always in the low teens, then in order for the average to be twenty degrees, then there must be several days in which the temperature is much greater than twenty degrees. This is how averages work. This is how math works. I want to see the data that goes into the calculation of this so-called average temperature and then I want to make my own calculations. SHOW YOUR WORK, weather stations.
I have, on occasion, gone so far as to search for historical weather data, but then I have to take a deep breath and tell myself to dial down the crazy a little. I mean, what am I trying to accomplish here? If I did find out that the average temperature was fourteen, and not twenty degrees, would I phone all the local stations and scream “IN YOUR FACE” and then show them my calculations? Would I burst onto the set where the meteorologist would be saying that we are living in the currently coldest major city in Canada, with the exception of Iqaluit, which isn’t exactly a cheering thought, and push said meteorologist out of the way shrieking that it is all a lie, we will never obtain an average temperature of twenty degrees? And would the discovery of this information actually change anything, whereas I would suddenly be living in a warm and sunny city?
No, it would not.
Speaking of mathematical discourse, I was endlessly amused by this post by Swistle, in which she a) references the Monty Hall problem, and b) discusses the ridiculous, yet nuclear hot button topics that married people fight about. We all have those, don’t we? The fights that ramp up to eleven out of ten immediately, but when we actually analyze those fights, they are actually incredibly stupid.
Now, my husband and I really don’t fight much. Part of this is compatibility, but part of it is also the realization on both our sides that sometimes we can be difficult to live with. Sometimes. Especially, I should say, me. I mean, my almost pathologically-insane method of rinsing dishes prior to loading them in the dishwasher alone probably puts me pretty high on the crazy scale. My mother was over the other day and she actually backed away from the dishwasher, silently, as I agitated about the treatment of a knife recently used to spread peanut butter. She is unlikely to ever try to load the dishwasher as a helpful favour ever again.
Anyway, the biggest fight we ever had, and it was one that was the cause of much crying and door-slamming, by me, and much calm-but-annoyed-you-are-crazy commentary by my husband, was in 1999 and it was spurred by a – are you ready – Sex and the City episode. The episode was the one where Mr. Big marries Natasha, Carrie uses the line “Your girl’s lovely, Hubble”, and at the end Carrie says how happy she is to be a wild horse running free, or something like that. My husband’s reaction to this was, essentially, that Carrie was in some kind of denial and that she was unhappy being alone and just wanted to get married, which turned into a statement that all women wanted to get married. My reaction was a very – VERY – strong disagreement to this attitude, which spiralled into door slamming and tears. And we weren’t even married then! Sex and the City, a fictional television show, was the cause of our biggest fight ever. As I read Swistle’s post, I reminded my husband of that fight and we got into it all over again! Carrie Bradshaw put a strain on our marriage. As a social experiment, I should bring this up in twenty years and see if it elicits all the same reactions.
We have never fought about the Monty Hall problem, however, but I do remember getting into a very involved and impassioned discussion about it with some colleagues many years ago, although perhaps not so many as when the Sex and the City fight occurred. The end result saw my colleagues and I using a random number generator and creating thousands of simulations to prove the result of the Monty Hall problem. What can I say, we were a bunch of nerdy quantitative analysts and mathematical simulations were what we did every day. In the end, we all agreed that sometimes the math doesn’t seem logical, but there it is.
Which is to say, I am NOT going to try to dig up historical weather data and calculate a mean. I am not.
