Unneccessary Detail is Cluttering My Life

At my last job when I wasn't busy grumbling about how we were counting kisses to measure love, a metaphor I was very proud of, I responded to a lot of suggestions by saying "Just because you can, doesn't make it a good idea."

I was thinking of that the other day when, for the first time in years, I was at a gas station filling up my car, which took 5.94 gallons. When I was first driving, not only did we have the old pumps with the analog display like the odometer, but the gallons advanced much quicker than the dollars did.

Those old pumps, which couldn't display prices over one dollar a gallon, were accurate enough to have kept the American motorist on the road for the first fifty years of driving, I'm guessing, but when we advanced to the computer-controlled, digital pumps, we suddenly realized that we could needlessly measure the gasoline dispensed. As if that helps anyone.

I've long been a fan of slide rules, which got me through high school. I have no idea whatever happend to the large ones in my math classrooms that were nearly as long as the blackboard, but I'd like to think they ended up somewhere. As calculators and computers have replaced them, I can't help thinking back to how much of the world was engineered and built to "slide rule accuracy," a term whose loss I regret nearly as much as "jungle."

Slide rule accuracy, as I understood it, meant three digits. That's not very many, but somehow it worked and, just as importantly, was always a number I could understand. We can now easily calculate things out to ten or one hundred digits and, having that ability, do so. The thing is, I'm not convinced that it honestly adds anything of value.

Do I really need to know, to five digits, the percent of my expenditures that go to food? I have to admit that 27.847% gets rounded off by me to 25%, or one quarter of my expenses. That's a figure I can understand, one that makes sense to me, and one that gives me a ballpark figure I can live with.

I noticed this obsession with needless accuracy when I got my first digital watch. Instead of telling me the time, I read 11:47, and then had to visualize that before I knew that it was quarter to twelve. Few things are more annoying than asking someone with a digital for the time: they'll read off the digits instead of saying "it's almost noon," or some such answer that actually gives you what you need to know.

I can no track my gasoline usage to one-thousandth of a gallon. Last time I checked, that was 3.78541ccs, or, as I like to call it, three and a quarter. I'm guessing that's about a thimble full, and is unneccassirly complex. It does permit me, however, to calculate my mileage to thousandths as well, or five and a half feet.

I think that's silly.