The Bathtub: Too Much Information: Childmetrics

If you've ever read YouTub (it's the one you have to scroll past to get to E-bathing) you'll understand the high demands involved in asking me to write a post with significant written content. I needed a theme from the past rotation that I had a lot to say about, which narrows it down to New Jersey and children (alcohol as well, but the things I have to say about it mostly consist of disconnected syllables). I think I've made my feelings about New Jersey pretty clear, especially after I learned that it was so boring and uninteresting that I couldn't even find a good YouTube video about it, so let's take a look at children, and how much I dislike them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those sociopathic hermits that hates all children universally, but I do avoid them because, generally speaking, they annoy the shit out of me. How best to express this? One thing I've found that is pretty good at objectively measuring these kinds of things is sabermetrics, advanced statistics that are used to take a deeper look at baseball players and teams to most accurately evaluate their performances.

The most well-known of these is VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), which measures how many more runs a given player would produce in the lineup than a generic replacement player. We can easily modify this for our purposes – let's measure the hours of entertainment a child can provide over a replacement human. Oh, and for comparison, let's also evaluate what I consider to be two perfectly acceptable alternative companions, a puppy and a beer. My super-secret, proprietary formula gives us this:

.753 hours

2.342 hours

8.392 hours

The child has a little trouble competing with the puppy because, being marginally more intelligent, it catches on way quicker to the fact that you're just making it do inane things repeatedly and laughing harder and harder about it. Beer is more reliable than either of them. And keep in mind this is over a replacement person, so the real lesson here is that puppies and beer are a lot more entertaining than any of your friends, as if you needed confirmation.

Dollars and Cents per Hour is our next childmetric, a careful adaptation of Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched and an easy way to assess exactly what all these hours of entertainment are costing us.

8.50

4.25

10.60

All right, so beer loses some ground here for all those high priced imports. Children need only be clothed and fed, and better yet, puppies need only be fed (and I guess both need medical care if you want to go really crazy about the whole thing). What this tells us is that unless you want to stick with nothing but Pabst Blue Ribbon or raise a really malnourished and mostly naked child, puppies are the way to go here.

Finally, we need to quantify how much any of these things would, to borrow my earlier scientific phrase, annoy the shit out of us. Taking into account important variables like loudness, whininess, the beating-to-behavior ratio, and the sleepiness coefficient (based on the seminal work of Steiner and Weiss) we can arrive at reliable figures for Hours of Quiet per Day:

3.91

12.32

24.00

It’s important to consider that, unlike the child, you can ignore the puppy until it shuts the hell up without any legal ramifications.

Anyway, I think the numbers here speak for themselves. A child is the mediocre, semi-expensive option, the puppy is the high-value low-cost steal, and beer is the high cost but exceptional quality companion. So, bringing back our original metaphor, the child is Pat Burrell, the puppy is Jose Valverde, and the beer is, say, Alex Rodriguez. I suppose is breaks down a little when you consider that beer is even better in October than the rest of the year.

Too Much Information is normally authored by Lauren McMahon and appears on Monday at noon.