Metrics Matters

There is a fire in my house. In the kitchen, on the stove, there is smoke. On the floor there is molten metal that looks like what liquid mercury looks like. And it has caught the wooden floor on fire. As a highly-trained observer, I take note of the time. It is 3:34 pm. Well, both those numbers are fibonacci numbers, and that fact does not escape me. I've also been tracking the average daily temperature outside, and since it's summer, I've noticed that the 50-day average daily temperature has crossed the 200-day average daily temperature to the upside. This is not a good sign. It is the absolute ideal conditions for a fire in my kitchen.

I'm in the process of developing a strategy to fight the fire in one part of my brain, but in another part of my brain I have to pat myself on the back for seeing this coming. I made notes on rainfall the past year and if you plot the amount of rainfall in inches over the past 13 weeks (fibo number), you will clearly see a head and shoulders pattern developing. This can only mean one thing. Rain fall is about to "quote" -- fall off the charts. The correlation between lack of rainfall and fire is obvious to even the casual observer. Duh. A fire is to be expected.

I get my fire extinguisher and douse the flame. I know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and I do not hesitate to do what must be done. Strangely, I notice the stove is on and I've ruined another pot from boiling water until there was no water left.

The job I was given was simple. Boil some water for potatoes. I turned on the water and while I was calculating North Atlantic current fluctuations, the water strangely boiled completely off until all that was left to heat was the base of my pot. Which melted and then caused the fire. And now I'm trying to figure out the correlation between the North Atlantic current fluctuations and the water from my pot boiling off so quickly.

This will require more analysis, but one thing is clear. You can always learn from your own fires.