There are millions of blogs out there. Many, if not most of them are not worth your time in reading; however, there are a few (I like to think that mine is one of them) which offer interesting information or thought provoking commentary.

Take a few minutes and check out the blog "It Is a Numeric Life" (available at http://numericlife.blogspot.com/). It's run by a medical school librarian who has a fascination with statistics and numbers, and he always offers something interesting, noting that "Numbers simply make you feel better." Well, sometimes - numbers from the IRS or most of my other creditors don't make me feel any better, although I understand his point.

This past Saturday's post on "It Is a Numeric Life" reported the recent statistic that we have more TV sets than people. You can read the short article (and my comment, among others) at http://numericlife.blogspot.com/2006/09/we-have-have-more-tvs-than-people.html. In short, it says that there are 2.73 TV sets and 2.55 people in the typical home, and that the average person watches 4 hours, 35 minutes of television each day.

I found this interesting when compared to my own life. Agnes and I have three television sets in our home: a huge, HD plasma monster hanging on the wall of the rec room, a TV-DVD-VCR combination in our bedroom, and a mid-sized flat panel set in the guest room. This gives us a ratio of 1.5 TV sets per person, slightly ahead of the statistical average of 1.07. What's interesting to me, though, is how little we actually watch those three TV sets. We watch very little broadcast, cable, or satellite television; we mostly use the TVs for watching DVD or VCR movies and dance instruction videos. I watch more "regular" TV than Agnes does, but it doesn't amount to more than a half-hour or so per week, generally in chunks of a few minutes while I'm changing clothes or folding wash, and is limited almost exclusively to CNN Headline News or the History Channel.

In spite of what our TV set-to-person ratio might lead you to believe, while at home we prefer reading and listening to music to watching the ol' tube. In that regard, I agree with one of my favorite philosophers, the great Groucho Marx, who once said, "I find television to be very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go into the library and read a book."

Life's too short to spend it watching TV, except as a way to learn more about the world around you.

Have a good week. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo