When in doubt, chuck it out. — George Demmy, Sr

When replacing, replace. — George Thomas

You owe reality nothing.

—Richard Hugo (a poet, and this works especially well with poetry, though I like to apply it whenever I like to apply it)

If you’re thinking “One more time won’t hurt” - it probably will.

Alternatively, when you’re in a grump, a handful of almonds (or nut of your choice) might help too. You may just need a protein bump.

Terry:

OT: “Degrees of Grey in Philipsburg” is one of my all-time favorite poems. :-)

Rule of thumb? The distance from the tip of your thumb to the first knuckle is about one inch.

in Texas Hold ‘Em, if you want to know the percentage of the time that you’ll win a hand which needs to hit certain cards, count the number of cards that would win the hand for you (e.g. with four to a spade-flush, it would be 9, for the 9 remaining spades). If two cards are left to come, multiply that number by four. If only one card is left to come, multiply by two.

This won’t give you an exact result, but it’s a good estimate for figuring whether or not you should call a bet.

Merlin, was the book you mentioned Rules of Thumb or Rules of Thumb 2 by Tom Parker, circa 1980’s? If so, Amazon and Abebooks still have cheap copies available.

From the introduction to Rules of Thumb 2:

“A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical formula and a shot in the dark.”

GH

Hey, small world. I was the editor that found and published Tom Parker’s “Rules of Thumb,” “Rules of Thumb 2,” and ‘Never Trust a Calm Dog” [Rules of Thumb 3].

Get enough going on about this and I might be able to talk him into doing a print on demand Rules of Thumb omnibus.

No way, Vanderleun! I totally had I & II and adored them both.

The amount of time you’ll wait in line at the bank is equal to the number of people ahead of you * 2.6

(Or something like that—it’s from memory)

George Polya’s “How to solve it” is a great book full of heuristics for solving mathematics and geometry problems, if there’s an inner math geek in you waiting to get out.

John Gall’s “Systemantics” (or in later versions “The Systems Bible”) is similarly full of systems related observations and short but biting notes on how systems behave.

My current favorite, from the original RULES OF THUMB,now that I have to try and get my 10 year old stepson to do piddling little chores on the weekend when he has friends over is:

HIRING BOYS

One boy’s a boy. Two boys, half a boy. Three boys. No boy at all.

I literally have, since I have all the books still, thousands of em.

My dad had those books. Loved ‘em. Gotta wishlist them now!

I still remember two, one practical, one (hopefully) not:

1) Your fist held at arm’s length will cover 15 degrees of sky, or one hour of daylight. So to figure the number of hours until sunset, sight the bottom of your fist on the horizon. That’s one hour. Put your other fist on top of that for the next hour, your other other fist (if you don’t have three arms, just use your first one) on top of that one for the third hour, etc., until you get to the sun. Instant clock, Mark Trail style.

2) If a helicopter is bigger than your thumb held at arm’s length, you can bring it down with ground fire.

Gerard: Are they officially out of print, or do you know of an easy way to pick them up?

They were up there with The Book of Lists and The Modern Man’s Guide to Life as my best-loved reference/triviata/how-to books.

Yours and the two mentioned above were very influential on whatever tic caused me to be interested in a lot of the stuff I obsess about here. :-)

Yup, they are well and truly out of print. The then publisher — Houghton Mifflin — failed to support Parker adequately after I left the publishing house.

I won’t even get into the really brilliant project we accomplished but they never published because it was, well, just beyond them.

However, this mention of the books has brought them back to me strongly and I’ve been in email correspondence with Parker who has the material and who did the brilliant drawings for all of them, so maybe…. just maybe…. we will be able to get something going again in this medium.

Which reminds me, have you ever seen (and seen is the operative word here) Parker’s amazing “IN ONE DAY:The Things Americans Do in a Day?”

Each page has facts about the scale of items in the United States and an illustration to go with it.

Example: “In one day, Americans drink enough soda pop to fill a bottle three times the size of the Statue of Liberty.”

Illustration: Statue of Liberty overshadowed by a gigantic coca-cola bottle.

Gerard,

Haven’t seen the “In One Day” book myself. Is it aimed towards kids? I ask because my 4-year old really loves “In the Next 3 Seconds” by Rowland Morgan (http://tinyurl.com/3k5gh), which covers various things that will happen in the next 3 seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc…and this sounds like a natural companion.

I’m not sure if this is a “rule of thumb,” it’s more “corporate wisdom.”

If the executive in your meeting didn’t write down your point (or had someone write it down), then they really don’t give a crap what you said, even though they pretended that they did.

I have empirically tested this for several years and I think it’s a universal truism. There might be the one exec with a photographic memory out there to prove me wrong, but I haven’t found him/her yet. :)

Captkurt, I’m sure kids would enjoy In One Day immensely, but Parker did it for grown ups at the time. It originally evolved out of a series of covers he did for AMERICAN DEMOGRAPHICS magazine, but those happened because Parker has the kind of mind that naturally asks interesting questions and the skill set to get the answers and illustrate them. IN ONE DAY is another book that is out of print but it wouldn’t do much good to bring it back unless you did it over. Still it would be interesting to see how the numbers in the book have changed since the mid 80s when we brought it out.

Here’s a few from that time found at a site that has listed many more of them along with some background:

Do Unto OthersProject-Church of the Science of God

IN ONE DAY….

Americans lay about 2,750 acres of pavement, enough concrete and asphalt to make a bicycle path seven feet wide stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

A monumental accomplishment, but it happens every day.

American drivers use 313 million gallons of fuel—enough to drain 26 tractor-trailer tank trucks every minute.

We bring into the country 2,000 exotic birds that have ben captured in the wild. (One-fourth of the birds are dead on arrival, or die before they find an owner.)

Americans throw out 150,000 tons of boxes, bags and wrappers. It takes 10,000 tractor-trailer trucks to haul that mush junk to the dump.

We sack, compact and waste 200,000 tons of edible food. Junk 20,000 passenger cars (A bumper-to-bumper line 50 miles long) and 4,000 trucks and busses (In N.Y. city 20 vehicles are abandoned daily)

Americans driving on unpaved roads stir up 81,000 tons of dust, enough to cover a football field to a depth of 48 feet.

We use 450 billion gallons of water for our homes, factories and farms, enough to cover Manhattan to a depth of 96 feet.

I’d love to do the book over and compare then to now. After all, it has been almost 30 years since he started the project. That would really be instructive. In many ways it will show how far we’ve advanced or slid back on a lot of levels. Parker’s a genius at making stats come alive.

humm, seems like there are a few of these books kicking around the backrooms at Amazon:

Amazon.com: Used and New: In One Day

Hey, it’s really neat to stumble on this. I wrote and sent in a few computer programming rules of thumb for the original book, in response to the original request in Coevolution Quarterly - besides the couple under my name, I was one of many who sent in the Fred Brooks time allotment rules, and the “10 debugged lines/day” rule. I was then an arrogant 22 year old living in Tonga in the South Pacific and it was something to do.

I’ve looked back at them and despite having only 6 years pro experience when I wrote them, and despite all the changes in computer hardware, languages and software over the last 20+ years, many of the programming rules hold up very well. “Write as much of the program as possible in the highest level language available” is still good advice - I used that as developer guidelines on my last project, Scora antispam software (linked).

My comment may seem like spam since it is posted so long after the the original post, but the whole “if you don’t know what you want, you probably need a nap” thing is something I know all too well…just chimin’ in.

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