I give myself a -2 in blog commenting.

Hi,

The magical number is seven, plus or minus two.

http://www.well.com/~smalin/miller.html

Have a nice day,
Antti
This result is irrelevant. The seven +/- two rule is for remembering bits of data, not for making rankings of things.

As the Spinal tap example hints, and as the old “on a scale of one to ten, she’s a twelve” joke also indicates, you should ignore the arbitrary boundaries often placed on these scales. Are movies rates from 1 to 4 stars (actually seven ranks, from 1 to 4 by 1/2 steps)? Then occasionally hand out a 6, or a -3. You know in your heart that some are just that bad, or that good.

Likewise with every other ranking/judging metric you have ever encountered.

Actually, I find it quite handy. Sometimes I download lots of stuff at once, including “song of the day” podcasts by artists I’m not familiar with, and then listen to it on the iPod. If something new pops up that I don’t like and don’t want to keep, I immediately give it a single star. Then every once in awhile on iTunes I search out all the one-star tracks and delete them.

That used to be my favorite too. I learned it from my uncle when I was a kid. Haven’t thought of it in years.

All of my family know to expect a call to the wizard at any time, day or night. Even wakened from his or her slumbers at 3 AM, the wizard has always come through.

I’m glad someone else knows the wizard.

Possibly, and could be a related mental barrier to the thought of ranking from “one to five” (with five being the highest) to avoid the numbers one, two, and five.

It’s something I’ve definitely noticed in music reviews. I write for both The Oxford Student (newspaper) and http://www.uk-fusion.com and both officially use a 5* system. The latter avoid problems by using halves and even quarters, while the former regularly give 1* or zero to anything they take a dislike to.

I have also noticed the same tendency with student grades, though there it’s obviously less justifiable to give zero to anyone you take a dislike to! It’s particularly hard when grading Americans and not really knowing the scale; or, as I had this summer, ‘poor, average, good, very good, superior’. When average = 2/5 you wonder whether it’s really the expected mode, or a euphemism for mediocre…

I worked for the police for about six months last year, during which I had access to the threat classification (it was no great secret internally, being posted on the inner door as we entered the building). The threat has mostly been severe general (second highest) since 9/11, but was infamously lowered to substantial about a month before 7/7 then raised to the maximum afterwards, where it remained for a further month. They also had separate classifications for particular groups, eg dissident and indeed non-dissident Irish Republicans, for both of whom the threat was raised to substantial for a brief period after the IRA bank robbery.

Thanks to this morning’s news, the threat is back to critical.

Ze Frank, by the way, is the host of (in my opinion) the only Video Blog worth watching regularly, http://www.zefrank.com/theshow .

That used to be my favorite too. I learned it from my uncle when I was a kid. Haven’t thought of it in years.

Prioritizing is the choice between #1 and #2. When a new time for making decisions arrives, a new set of priorities will be put together.

“Three” is the response of something over 85% of the subjects tested.

The reason? The power of verbal suggestion. In saying “one to four,” we hear “one two four” and most subjects dive for the “safety” of the only number not named in the test: three

Try it on a friend sometime, works like magic. Don’t even need a card to do it, but the card is a nice touch.

Speaking of card tricks, has anyone ever had you call the “wizard”? Far and away the best card trick and the one that most baffles and amazes that I’ve ever performed.