raghu wrote: > ... what is up with this modern fetish of > comparing and ranking everything, no matter how complex or > unmeasurable? Like for instance rankings for the top colleges, most > business-friendly cities, best automobiles? Is Yale better than > Princeton because US News says so? Is New York better than London? Is > vodka better than tequila?
It is self-evident thatYale is better than Princeton because it is superior by its very nature. ;-) But some rankings are important. It depends on your goals. If someone consistently posts many more lines of text to pen-l than anyone else, for example, that suggests that there may be a problem of over-posting. We don't want to reify rankings, but sometimes they are illuminating. -- Jim Devine / "The trick for radicals has been and will be to make of earth a heaven, but without blind faith." -- Mike Yates.
