A New Leaf

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you are probably aware of the precipitous decline of print news circulation over the past decade, almost universally attributed to the ubiquitous and free news any joe with a mobile phone can access nowadays. Here’s a rather stunning visual.

Some unsurprising trends: the Los Angeles Times is an absolute horrorshow. Not shown: the Boston Globe disappearing off the bottom of this chart, in a two decade decline from 521,000 in 1990 to 264,105 this year.

Sad to see the LA Times doing such a dreadful business – I think they have the best online design of any major news outlet. Certainly better than my local paper, and a lot less blood-red-awful than that other media loser, the lowest-rated cable news provider, CNN.

I love McSweeney’s defiant response:

Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there.

…just $55.

“Why?” is a natural question to ask of any blogger, or for that matter, any writer. The answer is “To be read.”

In the pre-interweb business of writing, there is this unfortunate hurdle between question and answer called “publishing.” For a novelist, the process is an onerous trudge through the world of editors and publishers, only rarely ending in an item even available to be read, let alone commercial success. (Congratulations, by the way, to my dear old friend Jael Maack on the sale of her debut novel, Simmer.) An academic writer fences with anonymous peer reviewers and journal editors. A screenwriter grovels for attention from producers and film agents.

A blogger faces no barrier to publishing, except having a working internet connection and perhaps a functioning mouse with which to click the “Publish” button. Anything can be broadcast across the Tubes, and everything is; the marginal cost is not much more than zero. One trade-off is quality – I, blogger, have no editor (other than the red dotted lines warning me of mis-spelled words), no exogenous critical authority.

As for the problem of how to be read, the key trade-off is marketing – who even knows that I have written something, and thus who will read it? Novelists are to a greater or lesser degree provided with marketing machinery by the publisher. Academics have a built-in readership in the journal subscriber list. Screenwriters’ success is rewarded with a film, distributed and marketed by a whole separate set of interested parties.

For a blogger, readership is established via two mutually reinforcing channels: the Subscriber and the Hyperlink. Subscribers are readers who visit the blog as a starting point – they include the stream of entries in their RSS feeds, or save the URL in their browser’s bookmarks. They visit often, at least as often as new posts appear. They post links to your blog on their blog, attracting Hyperlink readers.

A Hyperlink reader is someone who reads a blog because it is a destination – the end-point of a journey that began somewhere else, on some other site. Some of these Hyperlink readers become Subscribers (hence the bit about these being mutually reinforcing).

My Brush with the Vast Pool of Readers on the Interweb

Another difference between interweb and pre-interweb writers is the availability of statistics to prove the existence of readers, which somehow justifies the whole enterprise. It is only because of my “Blog Stats” that I was even made aware of my own brush with that vast pool of interweb readers.

• April 17, 2009: Published Conjecture – an observation made on the commuter train one evening.
• August 3, 2009: Popular local blogger Jason Kottke publishes The Hot Waitress Index, a Freakonomics-style post on various odd every-day correlations with the macroeconomy, including the prevalence of hot waitresses.
• August 3, 2009: I send an email to Jason (who does not enable comments on his blog) alerting him to my related piece.
• August 4, 2009: Jason updates his post with a link to Conjecture.
• September 3, 2009: Daniel Finkelstein, in his blog for the TimesOnline (UK), includes Conjecture as number 3 in his list of 10 strangest ways to measure a recession (he reused a lot of Kottke’s links, with attribution).

Weekly visitors to "A New Leaf"

I have to admit, I have some deep sense of satisfaction from this episode, as if I made some meaningful contribution to the interweb. And, of course, because I was read.

As some folks at work began sending emails around with music recommendations, I indulged in a bit of iPod introspection. It turns out that I’ve been stuck on The Cure lately – “Love Cats” just cracks me up. “So wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully… pretty.” [chuckle]

In that same thread, a friend pointed out 8tracks – a site for uploading and sharing playlists of music. In order to be street-legal, it has some bizarre restrictions (playlists must have at least 8 tracks with no more than 2 songs from any particular album or artist; the second time someone else listens to the playlist the songs play in random order, etc.) but is otherwise unencumbered. Don’t bother with old DRM-laden iTunes tracks, however – I had to re-buy a couple of tracks in order to get the more recent DRM-free versions.

Without further ado, please enjoy my first creation: 3 Decades, 54 Minutes. (Warning: some non-kid-friendly lyrics here and there, cf. “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails. I was going for musicality, and I frankly love every one of these songs, but they aren’t for everyone.)

Billion Dollar Gram

Billions of dollars are hard to imagine. Expand your mind, then, with this remarkable illustration which manages to put these vast sums in perspective. Especially well done is the careful layout of fortunes, encouraging comparisons between unrelated items. For example, the internet porn industry is roughly the size of foreign aid given by large countries. And “Feed every child in the world for a year” is slightly less than the sum of “Beijing Olympics” and “Video Games Market.”

Some numbers seem startlingly small, in the grand scheme of things: “Save the Amazon” at $21 billion is only a bit bigger than “Yoga Industry” at $18 billion.

But the headline comparison, in my mind – even more important than the enormous looming yellow square representing the losses associated with the financial crisis – is this:

• $465 billion: Feed and educate every child on Earth for 5 years.
• $3,000 billion: Iraq war estimated total.

Of course, this seems like an absurd trade-off until you see the “Iraq War (predicted cost 2003)” is “only” $60 billion. The lesson, it seems, is that the predicted cost of a war could be off by a factor of 50. To say nothing of the trade-offs made with human lives, war is a risky bet for a government to take; perhaps riskier even than bank bailouts and stimulus plans.

It is my most heartfelt private crusade: never use Starbucks’ absurd size terminology. Ever. Even though you buy their (admittedly very good) coffee several times each week, it’s a medium, not a grande. My only slip-up was some weeks ago, before a 6:00 phone call. Never again!

I posted a few months ago about my initial impressions of the Kindle 2. Since then, I’ve read the Wall Street Journal most weekdays on the train to work, a small part of a computer programming book, and 37% of a long novel (The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson).

e-Book readers don’t keep track of pages. The advantage of this is they can change the size of the text on the fly, re-paginating everything in the process. Note that this advantage is lost on PDFs, which have fixed page layouts. To increase the font size on a PDF, you have to zoom in then scroll around the page to see all the words. In other words, a bother. Since novels usually have very simple layout and typographical requirements (a single typeface, flush left/ragged right, the rare footnote), pagination can be arbitrary without sacrificing any readability. So I don’t see the Kindle’s lack of native PDF support as any big deal.

All this to say, I know that I am 37% of the way through my book because that’s how the Kindle shows progress. Instead of sitting down and thinking “I’ll read 20 or 30 pages before bed,” it becomes “I’ll read 1% before bed.” This is especially satisfying with respect to long books, where a single page feels like infinitesimal progress. I think this would also appeal to those of us for whom finishing many books is more interesting than finishing many pages. The best case, of course, is to finish many books each consisting of many pages. The percent-based progress bar helps here, as well, since it removes the intimidation factor of so many sheafs bound up together.

One (bad?) habit of mine that the Kindle suppresses entirely: looking ahead to see how many pages I have to read until I finish the current chapter.

I chose the Wall Street Journal as my Kindle newspaper because [a] I already read the New York Times online during my lunch hour and [b] the WSJ has a pay-wall online (except, oddly, when you link to a story from a Google search). The subscription costs $15 per month, conveniently and silently billed to the credit card tied to my Amazon account. It’s been nice to have – auto-wireless-delivery really must be the future of periodicals – but I think I won’t continue the subscription. I just don’t get enough out of it that I don’t get from reading the Times for free.

My brother bought the Sony Reader – similar to the Kindle. It has some nice features – small size, native PDF support, cool design. It could be the e-reader for you, especially if you live in a place without Sprint cellular network coverage (the Kindle’s connection to the outside world). If you live in the US, though, I think you’ll find that the Kindle’s wireless delivery (“WhisperNet”) is too good to pass up.

Someone else's Kindle

One memory I have of freshman year in college is Jim’s first English assignment (everyone’s first assignments were momentous that year), for which the notoriously difficult-to-please professor asked everyone to write an essay on “What is Reading?”. No – I remember now – it was not his first assignment, but the paper he had to write in a single night in order to stay in the class he’d already registered for, due to an over-booked roster. I have no idea what he wrote, but it had something to do with interlocutors.

My Kindle arrived today (together with a handsome leather case, not shown), and I think it will change the answer to that question, but not very much.

First impressions: It’s an attractive device, and feels “solid” – the buttons aren’t flimsy, for example. It will disappoint you, however, if you expect it to behave like a computer – response times are long for things like scrolling through a menu of options. It seems clear that the designers were mostly concerned about two experiences: buying things to read, and reading those things. The rest of it (annotations, searching, etc.) takes a bit of patience.

Shopping on the Kindle is a snap – browse categories, type a search term, click buy, start reading. Quite impressive. Everything is delivered wirelessly over the Sprint cell network (which my Kindle says gets 5 bars here at my desk), without the need to sign up for or pay for any kind of wireless service. Entire books are downloaded very quickly (~20 seconds). You can delete the book from the device (not that you need to, seeing as it can store hundreds or thousands of volumes), and then re-download it later from your Kindle, computer, iPhone, or second Kindle.

Reading, the raison d’être of the Kindle, is equally smooth. Click the “Home” button, select a book, start reading. It appears that the Kindle book format allows for many different typefaces and typographical treatments. Re-size the text to suit your liking. At the most read-able text size, there is about a half-page of text on a screen, compared to an “actual” book. Turning pages takes about three-quarters of one second from button-press to new display. The table of contents is a button + click away. The screen itself is easy to read in both low-medium light and full-on sunlight, and does not induce eye-strain at all (there is no backlight). Integrated dictionary.

What is reading, indeed? Some things that reading on the Kindle is not: skimming, flipping through, jumping around, multi-chromatic. This is fine when you read a novel – a completely linear task. Start at page one, keep going until you finish. But with books like programming tutorials or references, I think the Kindle will not offer the best experience because using a book in a non-linear fashion is slow (page turn, page turn, page turn… or menu, scroll, scroll, click, scroll, scroll, click on “index”…).

But that’s okay! The Kindle doesn’t have to (and won’t) make books obsolete. The Gutenberg analogy only goes so far. In that case, illuminated manuscripts became relatively worthless – except for aesthetics, printed texts were superior in almost every setting and in almost every way. With e-books, though, only some settings and book types are improved. In my case, the Kindle will lighten my daily commuter bag about 2-3 pounds, and save me about $10 per book. But it won’t replace textbooks.

Those are my thoughts. So far very pleased.

The anti-Twitter backlash is happening, followed closely by a wave of Twitter-ridicule.

I like Twitter for several reasons, including the fact that I can choose to follow or un-follow whomever and whenever – spam does not exist in this dojo.

The 140-character limit enforces a kind of pithy “cleverness” – a potential drawback. That is to say, choose your follows carefully, and don’t hesitate to weed out the poseurs. In the end, though, your Twitter feed is likely to look something like the high school “quote of the day” lists, where you keep a running list of out-of-context utterances. “That mayonnaise sandwich would make a good flip-flop.” Ha ha ha!

Whether you’re a Twitter-hater or -lover or -indifferent, you’ll enjoy a new meta-Twitter comedy blog called “Keith Starky Explains Twitter”. Written by a “leading researcher in the field of Advanced Sparse-Tree Social Networking Systems,” the blog is “part of his ongoing research in humor propagation and fluid reputation dynamics.” In it, he “explains” selected tweets, one at a time.

The central conceit of the “tweet” in this case is the idea that Ninjas, which are black-clad martial artists who employ tactics of stealth to both defeat their opponents and avoid waking people up at night when they go to the bathroom, could partake in some of the worldly pleasures of the non-Ninja world (e.g., crunchy snacks) if that non-Ninja world consisted entirely of people wearing noise-canceling headphones³. Henceforth we refer to this world as Headphone-World.

Also worth reading: McSweeney’s Understanding Twitter.

Twitter seems to be, first and foremost, an online haven where teenagers making drugs can telegraph secret code words to arrange gang fights and orgies… In order to become a “follower” on Twitter, teens first must flash their high-beam headlights at an oncoming motorist on the highway. Then, if that motorist flashes his or her high-beam headlights back in reply, the teen must kill the motorist in order to be initiated into “following” the online gang.

I’m doing a little rising from the dead myself today, fighting intense fatigue at the strange hours of my travel east. There’s also something a bit supernatural and/or miraculous about arriving somewhere before you leave.

Yesterday was our last in Bangkok. I insisted on a trip to the Jim Thompson store (no time for the House). I had never heard of him – his story is interesting (it includes a mysterious demise, or I should say concludes) and his merchandise is really quite stunning.

I also insisted on a massage, anticipating this long day of flying. It was also quite stunning, emphasis on stun. Some of it I wouldn’t wish on an enemy.

Now, to pass along some general interest inter-net things for your amusement. First is an infographic from Good Magazine showing you how water consumption can vary widely depending on choices you make like whether to have the steak or chicken. According to my calculations, eating a pound of beef uses as much water as taking a 65-hour shower.

The second is something called Layer Tennis. On Friday afternoons, Coudal Partners (a design firm) gets two talented designers to “compete” using graphics passed back and forth, changing every 15 minutes, posted live as the “volleys” are completed, the whole “match” often using a guest commentator and a twitter feed. See the latest one here. To navigate through the volleys, use the [1] [2] [3]… links just below the image on the right side of the page (where it says “View Match”). It’s not for everyone – the players often make heavy use of internet memes past and present (e.g. the Fail Whale makes an appearance in the lastest match). I think it’s remarkable when you remember that each iteration represents only 15 minutes of work.

That’s all I got for now. To conserve water, I’ll opt for an airport shower instead of Bul Go Gi.

Earlier this month, a Harvard law professor had the following insight:

This evening’s New York Times was worrisome. An inset box showed that the S&P 500 had fallen 4.25 percent for the day, wiping out roughly a year of investment returns. A few months ago this would have been the top story. Today, however, it did not even make the front page. There were no articles talking about the collapse of the stock market unless you clicked into the “business” section. Investors in the U.S. economy being destroyed isn’t news anymore.

Combine it with this factoid from Harper’s Index (which, by the way, has a full 25-year searchable list available here):

Number of times in 2008 that the S&P 500 closed up or down 5 percent in a single day: 17

Number of times between 1956 and 2007 it did this: 17

This means that the stock market is more volatile than usual. It may seem like a trivial or obvious statement, but it there are some interesting things to know about volatility.

Volatility means how much something (in finance: a price) fluctuates — variance over time. Looking back over time, people often calculate volatility as the standard deviation of the past year of daily returns, or something similar. Reported as a percentage of the mean, it gives us one way of measuring risk.

Another way of measuring risk is by calculating the implied volatility of an option, the details of which I’ll skip for now. In simple terms, this second method of computing risk uses the price of an option and figures out what risk must be present for the price of that option to make sense. By making this same calculation over and over again for the same set of options, you get something to chart… and when you have something to chart, you can buy and sell it.

And so we get the VIX Index, where “VIX” is the ticker symbol for the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index. From Wikipedia:

The VIX is quoted in terms of percentage points and translates, roughly, to the expected movement in the S&P 500 index over the next 30-day period, on an annualized basis.

You can see a real-time chart of the VIX on Yahoo Finance. If you take a look at that chart, you’ll see that this measure of risk reached its highest point ever — about 80 — in October or November of 2008. What this means is that in late 2008, the market expected that the S&P 500 index (a set of 500 large companies representing a range of industries in the US economy) to move in one direction or another (we know they meant “down”) about 80%/sqrt(12) = 23% over the next 30 day period. Since then the VIX has dropped to around 40, half of where it was, but much higher than in previous years.

All this to say, keep an eye out for more than just the level of the stock market — look at volatility as well. A risky investment is less valuable than a less risky investment, all things equal, even if they both have the same expected return. So, as the panic subsides, and volatility drops, we should begin to see prices rebound.