Conversations with My Daughter #2: Career Track

It was a quiet morning at the McLeman household when I decided to give Riley her daily "workout." This consists primarily of me giving her a rattle and seeing if she can grasp it well enough so that it doesn't fall out when she moves her hands. Inevitably, I am drawn in to the adorableness of her miniscule digits.

Me: Aw, look at those cute little fingers. I can't get over how long they are. You're going to make Daddy proud as a pianist some day. Or maybe a basketball player!

Riley: Sigh, not this again.

Me: What?

Riley: Oh, it's nothing.

Me: Come on, you can tell me.

Riley: Well, to be honest, this whole pianist/basketball thing people keep going on about is utterly ridiculous.

Me: You know, your fingers are quite long. Prepared for this inevitable conversation, I even did some research. The average middle finger length for newborn girls, 0-3 months old, is 2.9 centimeters with a standard deviation of 0.4cm. Your middle finger measures in at 3.6cm, putting you at 1.75 standard deviations above the mean, or in the 96th percentile!

Riley: Only if we assume that finger lengths are normally distributed, a plausible but not completely justified hypothesis. But I digress -- I'm not denying I have long fingers. I just question the conclusions you're drawing from this information. According to Wikipedia...

Me: Wait, you use Wikipedia?

Riley: Well, it has its drawbacks, but I find that if one is willing to do some extra verification on those occasions that the answer you seek is critical, and stay away from articles with the more overzealous editors, then it serves my needs nicely.

Me: I wasn't really questioning the decision to use Wikipedia in particular, but rather how you managed to...

Riley: Anyway, according to Wikipedia, there are about 1,000 people of sufficient noteworthiness to merit inclusion on their list of concert pianists. Let's assume that you need to be at least that famous to be able to make a living out of pianisting--

Me: I hardly think pianisting is a word.

Riley: Let's call it artistic license, then, shall we? In any case, let's be generous and say that 10,000 people in this world make their living as a professional pianist of some sort, be it classical, jazz, dancing on giant ones with Robert Loggia in F.A.O. Schwartz, etc. A mere 10,000 out of the 6.7 billion people in the world, a whopping 0.00015% of human beings on this planet, are good enough at the piano as to make a living at it. Being in the top 4% just isn't going to cut it.

Me: Ah, but there's more to being a pianist than just finger length. They say there's a correlation between mathematical and musical genius.

Riley: So, what, I've inheriting your "genius" now? And have you heard yourself singing on Rock Band? You've likely nullified anything Mommy passed down to me on the musical side of things.

Me: Mmm. Tough but fair.

Riley: Similarly, there are, in addition, about 250 players in the WNBA. I suspect that this is the world's largest professional women's basketball association, so it's being more than generous to call it another 10,000 women making their living playing basketball. Statistically speaking, I thus have an estimated 0.0003% chance of falling into one of the professions you've repeatedly prognosticated for me at the age of one month old.

Me: You know, I bet those long fingers will get you holding a pencil and doing some math all the earlier...

Riley: For that matter, statistically speaking, I'm probably most likely to work full-time at Wal-Mart.

Me: Oh, ha ha. Very funny.

Riley: I'm just saying.

Me: Time for bed.

While I'm at least reasonably confident that she was just messing with my head (she's quite the smart alec, as you've no doubt discovered), one can never be too sure. I went on a search and destroy mission following the conversation -- there are no more smiley faces anywhere in the apartment, and there never shall be again.