Log Scale

I hate to bring us back to eleventh grade, which at least for me was miserable, but I want to talk about logarithms. (Sister Claudette would be pleased that I remember what they are.) Specifically, I’d like to talk about logarithmic scales of measurement, of which the Richter scale for the measurement of ground movement is the best known. For every digit increase in the scale, the actual amplitude of ground movement is amplified by ten times. Thus:

• Magnitude 1 = 10^1 = 10
• Magnitude 2 = 10^2 =100
• Magnitude 3 = 10^3 = 1,000
• Magnitude 4 = 10^4 = 10,000

And so on. As the amplitude increases, the likelihood of occurrence decreases. Magnitude 1 earth movement is almost constant, completely imperceptible without advanced instruments. A Magnitude 9, like the Alaskan Good Friday Earthquake of 1964, happens three or four times a century.

I think talent works that way, too.

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Half of every profession is below average. And that’s the proportion of the people who’ve actually trained and been accepted into that profession! The rest of us know very little, and probably ought to admit it.

James Elkins, in his remarkable book Why Art Cannot Be Taught, says this:

Out of a thousand art students, maybe five will make a living off their art, and perhaps one will be known outside her city. That’s not a condemnation. It’s the nature of fame, real quality, and genuine influence to be rare.

This fact of logarithmic levels of art has been on my mind for a long, long time. It first occurred to me on a weeks-long bike camping trip. We stopped in at some nondescript grocery in a nondescript Missouri town; some kind of bland retail music was playing. But I’d been on a music-starvation diet for three weeks by that point, so it caught my attention. In particular, there was one syrupy, abysmal arrangement of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” every bit as awful as you might think it could be. But it struck me that all of those players were remarkably skilled, even though doing undemanding work. They’d been given their sheet music twenty minutes earlier, probably; had run through it once; and then recorded an errorless take and moved on to the next. Each of those musicians, in a lay environment, would be by far the best musician we’d ever met. And no one would ever know their names.

I once thought I was going to be a professional bowler. I was wrong, though I didn’t know it at the time. So let me put forth a Richter scale for bowlers:

• Level 1 — has bowled once or twice at a birthday party or a drunken Saturday college night
• Level 2 — likes bowling enough to have joined a league and bowl every week.
• Level 3 — has made a conscious decision about which bowling ball might suit their game, and practices once in a while outside of league.
• Level 4 — bowls in more than one bowling center, and thus learns different conditions.
• Level 5 — has enough variability in strategy and equipment to be able to reliably score 200 or more on most conditions.
• Level 6 — is reliably top ten in their city. Has joined the Professional Bowlers Association.
• Level 7 — is reliably top ten in their region. Participates occasionally in professional tournaments that come through their area.
• Level 8 — reliably cashes in professional tournaments.
• Level 9 — has won a professional tournament, and no one would be surprised if they won again.
• Level 10 — has won five or more professional tournaments, might be mentioned in Bowler of the Year conversations.
• Level 11 — has won twenty or more professional tournaments, might be mentioned in barstool arguments about “the best bowler of all time.” (There’ve been about 1,900 professional tournaments in the past 60 years. These fourteen people have won about a quarter of them.)

I was at about five and a half on that scale. Which means I would probably have been the best bowler you’d have ever met. And I was infinitely far away from Level 9, which is kind of what I thought when I said “professional bowler.”

I know so, so many people on the middle ranges of their various scales. People with remarkable talent and dedication, years of experience, accumulated wisdom. The logarithmic scale shows just how many of us there are, and explains why we’ll go unnoticed beyond our neighborhood.

More tomorrow.