Sunday 27 January 2008

Thing #16: Done

For two weeks I have counted the number of bad words and I am happy to report that paying yourself the princely amount of 10p per bad words does help towards reducing your swear footprint on this planet. On average I used half of my available quota and with an average of 6.4 bad words a day I should award myself £19.2 pounds for the whole month. It seems I shot myself on the foot as this is £14.2 less than the average pocket money. So I propose (and I am sure you agree) that for Thing #51 I should give myself a bonus and double the difference, i.e. spend in one go 14.2x2+19.2=£47.6. I now need to decide what I will be getting for myself!

Saturday 19 January 2008

The brain: a powerful thing

The brain is a powerful thing - that can make you or break you. You get to learn to think in a certain way and that may often may be very different to how others think. Your experiences, the environment you live in, the people around you or away from you, will affect you, either contradicting or more often re-enforcing how you think. It's all in the process and bias. Bias gives you the building blocks: assumptions and 'rationale'; process puts them together, like the scaffolding that creates the structure for the bricks to follow or like puzzles pieces that come together to create a picture. Why all this totally unscientific and fascinating simplistic approach to neuro-science?

Well, it's been a long week of counting swear words. I estimated 11 a day and to my surprise I found that on average I use(d?) fewer words than that. This is good news, as I have to put 10p in my swear box for each one of them, but still... it got me thinking. Is it really the absolute number of words that matter. Is really my set target of 11 words a day that difficult to achieve? 'Yes and no' is my answer.

For example: assume you sleep 8 hours on average that leaves you with 16 hours with a quota of 1.45 words each. That's sounds difficult, especially if you take into consideration that when we use bad words they are more than one in a phrase!

What about the % that bad words represent of our total spoken words a day. I found a page that concludes that males use about 6000 words per day and females use 8800 per day. I am sure you were not surprised! There are other estimates that show the same trend, albeit with a larger gap. In anyway lets assume females use more words than men. With 300 words per page, that's 20 pages for a male and 29.3 for a female. With an average of 4-6 characters a word and 70 years of average talking life-span one can easily calculate the amount of storage space required to transcribe everything one said in a lifetime and save it on a PC, which I roughly calculated to be less than a gigabyte of data. Sad - my phone has enough memory to keep everything I've said so far and will say in my remaining days. Anyway returning to my previous argument 11 words a day is only about 0.2% of what males say and even lower for females. That makes you feel better eh? Perhaps, but this should not be an excuse to start using more bad words. In fact, that reminds me of a song that says "those who swear do so, because they have not learnt to talk".

Returning to the actual Thing in hand I've tried to count as accurately as possible and I found that counting was a good obstacles to using bad words. Often I found that I started replacing them with something less 'offensive'. You could perhaps use something totally irrelevant, like apples or oranges. That can even be a good ideas as saying oranges so many times a day may create the desire to eat one. Vitamins are good after all.

I will keep counting for another week - more counting will increase the validity of my experiment and perhaps will help me rewire the hardware in my brain and prevent me from using bad words in the future.

Poll

The poll is now closed and the results are:
  • Old 1 (4.34%)
  • Boring 4 (17.39%)
  • Old and boring 4 (17.39%)
  • None of the above 14 (60.86%)

Many thanks to all 23 of you who voted. For those 14 of you who voted none of the above - mid-life crisis is yet to come!

Sunday 13 January 2008

Happy new year!

It's 2008 and I have another 78 things to! No hurry; in 2 years time I will be there.

So, let's get started. My first Thing to do (16) will be to make a swear box and fine myself, if I say a bad word. Hmmm, that's semi difficult to keep track of, but I will try to put 10p as suggested in a box for every single word. Then, I will spend it all as Thing 51 suggests.

It actually suggests saving pocket money, but as I don't get any from myself, my swear-box will do. Interestingly, the average pocket money given in the UK is 8.35 pounds, i.e. 33.4 pounds in a month. By starting today, I will finish on the 13th of Febrary. I guess, the question here is whether I will swear more than 334 times until then to collect more money than the average pocket money. That's a bit more than 11 words a day! Easy!