As I went through just over two weeks’ worth of email today, several were pertinent to my impending deployment. One, in particular, held my itinerary for flying out of the country and into Baghdad . . . and I found that I am going to be leaving on the 17th. That is, two weeks from tomorrow! And I still have to drive out to Tucson to drop off my cats . . . So I’ve been frantically calling around and making appointments all day, letting people know that for all intents and purposes I have only this week in which to get everything done, except for the very last bits of outprocessing that I can do on Monday the 16th. I’ve been in adrenaline overdrive–if I thought I felt that way last night, well, let’s just say I’m definitely 10x past it now . . .
However, I do work best under pressure, and I seem to be getting a lot done. And for what it’s worth, all the people around me tell me that it’s all going to get taken care of. One coworker told me that she once managed to deploy after leaving her passport and relevant paperwork in a neat pile on her desk at home . . . yes, it was a hassle but they made it happen. After all, they’re not exactly going to tell you, “No, go back home and get your stuff together” once you’re over there . . .
All the same, I’m hoping to get all my ducks in a row for real. I think things are shaping up pretty well, as long as I can get nametapes made and sewn onto my brand spankin’ new DCUs in time. (Desert Combat Uniform–shorthand for desert colored camoflauge)
No more time, for the moment, to mess around playing with hairstyles on the Internet–though I’m sure I’ll be doing that again at some completely inappropriate time. I do know that I behave wackily under stress! However, once I get all my appointments for this week done, it’s my intention to get on the road on Friday so that I can spend a few days with friends and family and then head back here for my last couple days of outprocessing. It’ll be weird to be driving a rental car in my hometown, but I guess you do what you have to, right?
Totally off-topic, I ran across this today and thought it was an interesting idea. Thoughts?
TALKING ACROSS THE GAP A friend of mine, an academic psychologist, remarked offhandedly a few months ago that communication between two human beings is difficult if the gap between their IQs is as much as one standard deviation (i.e. 15 points). If you try communicating across gaps bigger than that, she said, mutual understanding quickly becomes impossible.
I’ve been trying this out on people in conversation ever since. People register mild disapproval at first, with clicking of tongues and shaking of heads. Then, if you press the point, they furrow their brows and say something like: “Yes, I sort of know what you mean.” One friend, a professional software developer/entrepreneur, was more blunt. Way more blunt:
Yes, I don’t find myself in long conversations with people whose IQs are in the 11x or 10x ranges, let alone any lower. In software development projects us smarter team members end up having rapid fire complex conversations and at the end explain the conclusions to the lesser minds.
If this is a fact about the human world, it’s a pretty depressing one. The full range of human IQs you are likely to encounter spans about six standard deviations; so depending where you fall in the range, there could be an awful lot of people with whom, for you, mutually rewarding conversation is not possible. That number will be less, the nearer to the center of the distribution you are (i.e. IQ 100), more the further out on one of the “tails” you are. And the whole effect (if it is an effect) is masked by the fact that we spend most of our time with people whose IQ is roughly equal to our own.
I suppose politicians target their utterances at the middle of the IQ range, or a few points above it (since the left-hand tail of the distribution doesn’t vote much). That gives them the biggest potential “catch.” Still, for any given speech by any given politician, there must, on my friend’s theory, always be tens of millions of Americans who have no clue what the guy is saying, and tens of million more who wonder why he’s talking down to us.
Interesting . . . as I remarked to someone who pointed the article out to me, that would explain why I find politics and politicians so incredibly mundane at times–you wonder why they’re stating and restating the intuitively obvious . . . but perhaps to their target audience, it’s not intuitively obvious???
OK, that’s it for tonight. I have a very full day tomorrow. Registering my car in Alabama, picking up orders (for real ones this time–Congress finally approved the military budget so I have funding to get where I need to go . . . who would have thought it would ever have interested me whether or not Congress passed a spending bill?), ordering nametapes for the aforementioned DCUs, buying a plane ticket from AZ back here, and . . . I’m sure I’m leaving something out, but anyway, that’s most of it!
