As everyone may or should know, it was Mr. Larry Brown and the Pistons who won the NBA championship in 2003/04.
Mr. Brown obviously knew a great deal about basketball. His Detroit Pistons were obviously first-class athletes. But we guessed that Mr. Brown had a little extra something going for him. As alluded to earlier in this article, It may have been something about team play statistics that he picked up during his time with the Pacers.
And we don't suppose that he'd necessarily want to discuss that now, whether we've guessed correctly or not; while we took the approach of publishing our team-play statistics, others prefer to keep such information secret.
In 2004, for example, we were told by a spokesman for the Seattle team that they used a computer program to generate statistics on player performance. The numbers the computer generated were confidential and not published.
But--by stark contrast-- reams and reams of more-or-less meaningless NBA statistics were being published.
They were to be found in such places as newspapers, team web sites, and the NBA site. Evidently there was a belief that there existed avid fans who'd want to study and perhaps memorize such data. One would hope that there were, in fact, no such fans: indeed, one would be inclined to worry about any fan that actually did spend time poring all those meaningless numbers.
But, while meaningless numbers . . . are . . . meaningless, the right numbers can provide the winning edge.
We salute Mr. Brown, formerly of the Pacers and Detroit Pistons as an astute and successful competitor. It seems to us that he fully earned his championship victory.
But let's get back to the Bulls. Perhaps with a dominant individualistic player such as Mr. Michael Jordan, team play statistics wouldn't be as significant as with teams lacking such a performer. But for a team like the post-Jordan Bulls, such team statistics seem the sine qua non of success.
I could bore the reader by reciting many instances of encountering famous people in public places.
I've mentioned Mr. Brown.
But perhaps it's fitting to mention that, circa 1998, I did once also recognize Mr. Jordan in my neighborhood in Indianapolis. He seemed to recognize me, too, but (as I imagined afterward) for a different reason than Mr. Brown.
Mr. Jordan glanced at my shoes.
I walk a lot and never wear shoes with leather soles. That may have been of interest to Jordan since he's been a spokesman for shoe companies. I'm usually a bit surprised when someone like Jordan seems to recognize me, because I wouldn't say that I'm famous.
But perhaps I'm well-known.
It may be relevant to enlarge on that slightly. In 1984 a movie based on my persona was set in Chicago and, in part, filmed there. The film was Doctor Detroit and it featured a character that liked to jog, as was true of me then. (Now, since I'm older, my exercise is mostly walking.) There was a lot of other David Gaus verisimilitude in that movie--verisimilitude that the public wasn't much interested in.
Really, I'm a rather dull person.
So Doctor Detroit wasn't a very good movie. It's hard to imagine why Hollywood would have imagined that anyone would have wanted to go see it.
But for some reason, over the years, I've been made fun of a good deal in the popular media. Mr. Gary Trudeau seemed to be thinking of me when he drew a series of cartoons about Deadman's Curve. Supposedly Deadman's Curve is used at mythical Walden College where the grading is very hard. In order to let the reader see what I mean, while still respecting the copyright of the strip, I've posted just a small portion of one of the strips in question at the top of screen, left.
Now, the point is that in real life, there's something called the Gaussian Curve.
Like the Gauss-Jordan method, the Gaussian curve isn't made use of as much as it should be. Why does that matter? Mr. Trudeau went to Yale, where grade distribution figures aren't released--and where, in 2008, almost everyone may have been getting "A"s almost all the time.
That was according to the source at left.
Statistical science attests that the only authentic cure for grade inflation is to use the Gaussian curve. Perhaps that was why Mr. Trudeau seemed not to like it. Perhaps he himself got through Yale on an inflated grade system that might have deserved the derisive name of "baby-grading."
Now, I don't want to make this too complicated for the reader. But at that time Mr. Trudeau was at Yale, the "baby-grading system" may have itself been in its infancy. By 2008, unfortunately, the system had grown up--and revealed itself as a coddled monster that is in its questionable maturity is coddling the American educational system to death.
By 2008 grade inflation had created an unhealthy, uncompetitive elitist society in America. It had created a "dysfunctional elite"--an elite that had helped cause a war in Iraq, along with financial collapses, and that was doing nothing effective about global warming.
Grade inflation had also proved a covert way to resegregate.
That was because grade inflation made it difficult to compare grades. The resulting confusion aided resegregation. It wasn't that white people wanted to exclude black children, of course. On the other hand, they did want their own children to succeed, and that amounted to the same thing. You see, since mathematical consistency was lacking, there was really no overall national grading system. Numbers were being produced, but were close to being as meaningless as a lot of the NBA statistics mentioned above.
And, because of its exalted position, Yale's mathematical debauchery was immitated in the manner of the assorted debaucheries of the ancient Roman emperors. Or, to switch metaphors, the "witches's arithemetic" at Yale had spread to lower educational orders, by routes that would preferably be nutritive and maternal.
So private "college preparatory" schools (that supply Ivy League colleges such as Yale with freshman students) didn't feel the necessity of using the same scale for grading as did inner city schools.
After all, students at those prep schools were God's Elect, and clearly destined for Yale or other top schools. Thus, one would surely EXPECT those students to all score "higher than average."
This is "witches' logic."
Now, it was Goethe who coined the phrase "the witches's arithemetic." I find myself compelled to follow his example here and contrive my own demonology. Witches's logic, then, is a specialized area of witches's mathematics, which one may study at the University of hell at Nethermost Abyss (UHNA).
(I don't pretend to know whether or not the UHNA had an exchange program with Yale in 2008.)
As for the public schools, grading there in 2008 could have been described as "rolling the dice" or "a mathematical Tower of Babel." It was all basically nonsense, and, since nonsense isn't always funny, the bad grading system was a hurtful aspect of underclass deprivation.
So: Karl Gauss of Germany hadn't toiled in vain to perfect his "Gaussian curve." Without it, there were real problems, problems that seemed likely to get worse.
I've designed a specialized version of his curve for modern educational purposes. This may be viewed by clicking left.
When grades become less meaningful, an excuse or necessity is provided to use other criteria for making decisions about students.
This may be clearer if we imagine an extreme situation. Imagine every student at every single school in the country getting an "A" in every class.
Then "A" would become a meaningless grade.
Yale and other "top" schools could then dispense entirely with the sham of evaluating grades. They could rely entirely on what had already been their primary consideration: the secondary school that a student had attended. That school, not the grades, would indicate whether or not one was Yale material. Schools that gave students that mark of distinction would be, by definition, the "best" or "elite" schools.
No doubt the tuition at such places would tend to be high.
In 2008 such places did, of course, already exist--even if the extreme, gradeless ideal, as outlined above, hadn't yet been quite perfected. But Yale had become close to being to the black hole of American society. It sucked in money, power, and the dysfunctional elite, with a tremendous "whoosh." All was then reduced to either matter or perhaps to anti-matter (with Yale, who could say), and then the whole mess was spat forth again, like well-chewed tobacco, in order to re-create the America's social, economic, and political universe.
CONTINUE
DS Gaus Corporation