David Lynch and The Square Root of One Per Cent

Just watched a documentary on David Lynch entitled, fittingly enough, Lynch. One observation: great hair, sketchy teeth. Also watching said documentary induced a tangential epiphany -- how Lynchian, that -- regarding why I was not appointed as Deputy Director of the OMB and my fellow Lancer-89er, Rob Nabors, was. Aside from him knowing about budgets and stuff. And being smarter than me. It was more particular than that, less obvious. To wit:

There was a part in the movie where they were talking about the Maharishi Effect. Turns out Lynch is a huge TM freak. Loves it. Thinks it'll usher in the Millenial Age o' Peace. And, shoot, he's probably right. He's right about Laura Dern. So anyhoo, the so-called Maharishi Effect is where somebody (the Maharishi?) posited that if the square root of 1% of the world population did transcendental meditation at the same time or something, that'd be it: no more wars, ever.

So this sounds preposterous to me -- not that it wouldn't work to have a whole bunch of folks meditate instead of shoot each other. It so totally worked on that far-out Coke commercial back in the day, and that was just a bunch of folks hepped up on high fructose corn syrup.

No, it's just that it seems like a pretty small number. After much noodling, here's my rough calculation on that:

World Population = 6,602,224,175

1% of 6,602,224,175 = 66,022,241.75

Square Root of 66,022,241.75 = 8,125.41(ish)

So yeah, never work. You'd need, like, way more people than that. Plus it's all a Ponzi scheme anyway. (Editor's Note: I don't exactly know what a Ponzi scheme is, but it sounds cool and nefarious and like something where you just slap up a rudimentary website and put footnotes on it and, oila!, you've debunked the whole TM movement.)

But far more importantly, here's why I not only couldn't work at the OMB but why I'm not cut out for this Naborsian high achievement stuff:

When I heard it was the square root of 1%, I was like...Let's see: 1% x 1% = 1%, right? Easy. Not only is that logic faulty, it's predictably faulty. There would so totally be an option on the SAT for some dumbass like me who said the square root of 1% of the population is 1% of the population.

Which is why I never went to Notre Dame and why I never worked on Capitol Hill and why I never really even considered the possibility of such things. I've just been kinda eyeballin' my way through life.

That's fine if you want to slap up a few blog posts here and there. It's even fine if you want to make weird movies that nobody really gets and have an adjective named after you (not a bad fate, in the grand scheme: where do I sign up?).

But if you want to save the world -- and really save it, not just sit around sucking cokes and/or meditating transcendentally -- it helps to know how to dot your t's and cross your i's. And it probably wouldn't hurt if you knew how to work one of them fancified math calculators too.