re: rock 'n' roll...

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> I'm curious about Leigh's data-gathering technique for his
> observations about the correlation between `testosterone-poisoned'
> individuals (operationally defined as those who play their rock 'n'
> roll music too loud in their cars) and their level of intellectual/
> social/spiritual enlightenment (apparent at a glance).

Oh, no. That was not my operational definition of testosterone
poisoning. It is a much more widely spread affliction than that. It
extends to clinical manifestations like pickup trucks with chrome
roll bars, elevated four wheel drives - and a bra to protect the
paint job! It seems to infect a diverse population, attacking
indiscriminately all races (of which we have more in Vancouver than
most in the US can imagine) and even both sexes! It does not seem
to affect the elderly (those over forty), however. I believe that the
principal cause of this is an outbreak of affluenza.

> What was the number of observations?  Is there a correlation between
> increasing volume and decreasing intellectual achievement?  Is it
> perhaps an inverse, or inverse-squared relationship?

At age sixty-two I have, of course, made many more observations than
any callow youth. Still I have been unable to discern more than
qualitative rules. I once entertained the thought that there was a
universal invariant which was deriveable from the sum of the width of
the tires on an automobile and the driver's IQ, expressed in
appropriate units. The fad for "racing slicks" seems to have abated,
however, without a compensating increase in the average level of
intelligence of the drivers, so there must be another term I've
missed in the computation.

Leigh