Random Abilities

As I get home from work today, my friend calls me. After shooting the breeze, she asks me for my opinion on how to implement a statistical procedure for her job. Without getting too technical, I was able to help her solve her problem by saying that the statistical formulae used for large numbers are viable with a minimum sample size of thirty.

I have no idea why my friend asked for my opinion on statistics, aside from me being a generic nerd. I am not in a math-related job. I never studied it in college. In fact, the only statistics I ever studied were in my junior year of high school.

Quite frankly, she got damn lucky. Of the entire year of statistics that I took 8 years ago, I remember two things: the smallest sample size for the large formula is 30, and the average IQ score is 100 points, with a 15 point standard deviation.

There is no reason that I should remember those things. They're random and useless to me, but they stuck in my head. I should have every reason to believe that I will never need to know or make use of those things for the entirety of my life. But here I am, on January 25th, 2012, having just made use of my random, useless knowledge.

This kind of thing is common. If you live long enough, the odds that you will come across a situation where your random abilities (whether they be retained knowledge or physical feats) will be useful get better and better.

In writing, this is a tricky subject. The more eclectic a person's talents are, the more it seems like the author pulled it out of his ass. This is compounded when the situation is increasingly dire. My knowledge of statistics should never be able to save a person's life. But it could make one situation more convenient on some random day.

I like to believe that all of my characters have some random abilities, and that in any given story, the day that their particular ability is useful may or may not come. If it does come, it may or may not be particularly useful. It is the kind of fact that I as the author know, but my readers may not if it doesn't come up. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that, if I can identify a random ability in my characters and identify how and why they have it, then they must have a background and some depth to them.