I just realized how much I enjoy books and movies that have measurement themes, and some human drama around them, like: "Money Ball" - about performance measurement in baseball, pitting expert opinion against quantitative methods for judging talent; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Englishman_Who_Went_Up_a_Hill_But_Came_Down_a_Mountain , which pits expert opinion against communal pride and capacity to literally move mountains; "Longitude", about astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and pits working class ingenuity and craftsmanship against upper class authority; and, "Time Lord" - about the creation of standard time zones, pitting local business prerogatives against international interests and standards. What similar books or movies have you come across with similar themes? What's the human challenge in it? Thanks.
Cool question. "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" has long passages on classical/scientific/objective vs romantic/subjective thinking. The central character's breakdown trying to resolve the two is one of the major plotlines.
Wonderful suggestions, Joachim and Mitchell. I loved Persig's books and should rediscover it since absorbing it long ago. I'll check out the work about Gauss and von Humboldt, who helped beat most everything after them into a normal distribution, right? Thanks for these...
There's even a movie on 'Die Vermessung der Welt'. I wonder if there were an English version.
The baroque trilogy from Neill Stephenson is a complex plot featuring a huge number of philosophers and scientists of that time (Newton, Huygens, Leibniz and others). While much space is dedicated to the Leibniz-Newton debate, I remember that there was also some mentioning of the problem of determining longitude at sea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Problem_of_longitude). This also makes perfect sense, since the novels are about pirates to a good deal. Plus, lots of other drama. So, if your question is about books on science AND drama, the baroque cycle is a perfect choice.
More movies and books, from Michael and Martin. Great to hear about these, and from you. Thanks.
Living by myself this summer, for a while, and just connected with this common thread running through some favorite books and movies... And on a more serious note, I've been enjoying realizing that so much of standard measurement - time, weight and space have not always been the seeming stable things we take so much for granted. There were times when people and nations argued forcefully for decades over changes introduced through new measurement standards and technology and their applications to things measured. Performance systems in health care have been going through sea changes in the last decade, and the notion of credibly measured health care quality, and quality of care have been revolutionary struggles to first get them recognized, then used, and now, serving as a basis for payment based, in part, upon measured performance. This change has been confrontational and clearly disruptive to traditional sources of policy management in healthcare, and this dimension, of struggle and conflict management, has been missing in action in the training and development of new measurement and analytic professionals trying to work in these now altered health care systems. It's been a challenging, and, at times, rewarding ride, and looking back on other similar historic system changes is valuable, and maybe instructive.
Performance measures are a delicate issue, indeed. Do you know the TV series The Wire? The gap between performance measures and quality is a recurrent theme, as well as the impossibility to have cost reduction and quality improvement at the same time.
And on the more funny side of things (from Pulp Fiction):
Vincent: But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
Jules: What?
Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean they got the same over there that they got here, but it's just...just there it's a little different.
Jules: Examples?
Vincent: All right, well you can walk into a movie theater in Amsterdam and buy a beer. And I don't mean just like in no paper cup, I'm talking about a glass of beer. And in Paris, you can buy beer at MacDonald's. You know what they call a...a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
Jules: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
Vincent: They got the metric system, they wouldn't know what a Quarter Pounder is.
They call it "Le Royale"! It's amazing that cars made here can be maintained overseas. Cultural differences are so much a part of system change challenges. Each has its own protocol for authority and ways to deliberate, which makes me wonder whether the unspoken assumption of the existence of a global, uniform scientific set of standards and methods is real. Perhaps as an ideal, but in implementation, invariably there's variation. Like the quote from my presentation on improving measurement in AMI quality, (from a Dutch scientist named van de Snepscheut ) "In theory, there's no difference in theory and practice. But in practice, there is".
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247161493_Sharpening_The_Quality_Measurement_Blade_-_Slides__Data?ev=prf_pub
Data Sharpening The Quality Measurement Blade - Slides & Data
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