Thoughts without Jack.

We measure poorly.
When you want to build a window in an existing space, you measure the size it should be. If you and your tape are accurate, the window fits.

But, when asked:
How old are you?
and
What is the temperature outside?
we answer with an age in years and we answer with a degree of Farenheight. Neither of those are really the answer. No great revelation there. The thing is, why haven't we made more accurate measuring tapes to properly answer these questions?

Age. I still can't grow a beard. The other day I saw a high school sophomore who was sporting a full-on bushy 'stache. I contend that science could prove that his genes were built to run so much faster than mine that, regardless of an eight year difference in his favor, he is likely to die sooner than I. People say "you look great for being 55," and "he's 49 but you'd swear he's 70-something." Number of revolutions around the sun is not an accurate measure of where you should be. We're just comparing you at a certain numbered age to what we perceive as the average of other people who share that same number. Sure there should be some similarity, but it just isn't an accurate device.

Temperature. This has become so much more real. Living outside changes your perspective. I am skinny and tall. I'm hard to heat. But I'm hardly ever cold out, because I dress properly. How it feels outside is what we want to know. The level of mercury in a tube hardly describes the situation. Barometric pressure, the amount of wet, the amount of direct sun, the color of the ground you'll be on, the wind, how many trees surround you, these are just as important. Most of you don't even need to care what the weather is like, stepping from apartment to car to work to car to gym to bar to apartment. If you are outside you'll be playing an outside sport and working at a certain level. The only thing knowing the degrees is worth is for meeting someone from somewhere else to brag about some unprecedented arrangement in the degrees which you only learned from the weather channel anyway.

Just because we found a way to easily measure it doesn't mean it tells us anything.

note: reading back through on preview, i noticed that i said temperature, which is in fact what we measure as well as what we ask. we hardly never need to know the temperature without anything else, so i think we simply ask and answer the wrong question to no ones improvment of situation.