Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Books, movies, art, theater, conservation, and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline. 
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It just occurred to me that since a lot of "scale of 1 to 10" or 5-point scale ratings are represented graphically as a line of filled stars, there is a subtle suggestion that average is better than average. Here's how, schematically, Netflix and Amazon.com represent their customer ratings on a 5-point scale:
1: *.... A score of 3 looks pretty good, with 60% of the visual field filled in. Even a score of 1 doesn't look so bad. Nobody looks like a failure this way. Amazon.com's textual interpretations of these scores are more to the point:
1: I hate it A graphical representation that better reflects that "average means average" would look more like a gas gauge than a thermometer:
1: |....
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Robert Filman, editor of IEEE Internet Computing, is gainfully employed after a hiatus:
In seven months of not having to answer to anyone else's demands, you would have thought that I could have proved P not equal to NP, achieved world peace, or at least cleaned the garage, but somehow I never got around to doing any of those things. However, as countless self-help tracts have observed, you ought to turn every episode into a learning experience. I've learned that even without a job, the "to do" list never shrinks.
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