When will we stop calling media on the internet “new media”?

To which I replied:

Shortly after “new york” reverts to its rightful name, “york” ;)

After a few back and forths, Carla and I agreed that perhaps instead of “new media,” we should just say “mannahatta” — the original Lenape Indian term for New York.

After all, it makes just as much sense to use #mannahatta as a catch-all for media on the internet as it does to say “new media.” I worked for what would become HarperCollins’s “New Media” department over 20 years ago!

Thus, in the name of all that is Right and Just, I declare that henceforth, the term for media on the internet is #mannahatta. It’s obsolescence-proof since it doesn’t include the term “new.” Just think of all the old “new” things that just seem silly today. The literary school of new criticism was old by the late 1960s. New Coke died in the 1980s. My once-new Prius is now the shameful progeny of a dinosaur of a car company. So if you want to talk about online media, shun the new, and just say #mannahatta.

40 years from now, when people are talking about “new mannahatta,” you’ll be able to tell them you remember when…

Although it will live forever on my server in a folder called “MysteryProject,” its public name is The Daily Monthly, and it’s now live.

The idea behind the site is pretty simple. Each month, I pick a new topic, and I write about it with the same care and attention I gave Cognitive Daily. I hope the site will appeal to a somewhat broader audience than CogDaily, and accordingly, I’ve adjusted the tone just a bit (don’t worry, it’s still going to be intelligent, thoughtful writing).

The posts will be a little more personal than CogDaily, and a little more journalistic. I’ll be conducting interviews and visiting the people and places I describe, just like a real reporter. But I’ll also do some reading and explaining of technical research papers, just like I did for CogDaily.

The first month’s topic is AIDS in America, and I’ll be following the story of Charles Roth, a long-time friend of mine who I just learned has been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. I’ll also tell the stories of some dedicated people who are researching, treating, and trying to prevent HIV/AIDS. At this point, you might as well just head on over there. And make sure you check back every day.

But what exactly is it? I’m not going to tell you right now; I want to make a splash when the project launches. That said, I’m prepared to give a bit of an update that may help you get a sense of what’s coming.

• The project launches on February 1. There, I’ve committed to a date. Expect announcements here, on Twitter, and wherever else I can think of that doesn’t cost me any money. Yes, I know, that’s very soon!
• The project is independent. That doesn’t mean I won’t be working with other people, it means I won’t have a “boss” or anyone else controlling financial or other strings.
• The project involves a blog. At this point, in fact, it’s just a blog, but I do hope it will grow into more than that. It’s also different from any other blog I’ve seen. That doesn’t mean something similar doesn’t exist, just that I haven’t seen it.

This is something I’ve been thinking about off and on for almost a year, so it’s a pretty well-considered idea, but I’ve only gone into heavy preparation mode for the past week or so. I’ve downloaded Wordpress templates, set up a domain, prepared a site, contacted people who can help me with background information I need, and done a lot of other behind-the-scenes legwork.

Everything is coming together quite nicely, except for advertising. Most sites that allow you to sell ads on your site want to see an existing site. They need circulation numbers to provide to advertisers, and so on. That’s fine, but I need some sense of where ads will go, how big they’ll be, and what kind of code snippets I’ll be needing to place on the site. In the unlikely event that the blog is an instant sensation I’d like to cash in be in a position to recoup some of my investment of time and resources.

All that’s left is to finalize the site’s design, write background material, “about” pages, and the like, and write the first post. That, and deal with any other unexpected glitches that arise along the way. I’m really looking forward to this launch. I hope you’ll like it as much as I think you will.

Each of the presenters gave a nice, thoughtful, 5-minute talk about their views on the issue, but what everyone was waiting for was the fireworks when open discussion began. For a while the discussion was tame enough, with everyone exchanging platitudes about how they view the issues. But then things got a LOT more heated. I’m going to describe this as accurately as I can reconstruct, and please excuse (or correct) me if I get it wrong because it has been reframed in many different ways by many different people. I’m going to leave out names for now, but I think most people close to the situation know who’s being discussed. Even though I’m presenting this as a dialog, remember that it’s just a reconstruction, and so the quotes are paraphrases at best.

MALE: I have found that the best way to have serious discussions online is to make a set of ground rules about how discussions are carried out. There are certain blogs I don’t even visit any more, such as PZ Myers’, because the discussion is so vile that all dissenting voices are immediately drowned out. The bloggers I admire, such as John Wilkins, have a simple rule that is quite effective: “This is my living room, and I ask that all visitors treat it with respect. In other words, don’t piss on my carpet.”

FEMALE: I just can’t agree with that. I spent many, many years working in an institution dominated by a white, male patriarchy. Whenever I tried to express my opinion in that setting, my voice was quashed. The same excuse was given: “don’t piss on my carpet.” In other words, in the name of “civility,” all dissenting voices were repressed. I suffocated in that environment, and now that I have my own blog, I’m going to say exactly what I want, and I don’t care how “civil” people think I’m being.

MALE (turns to face FEMALE. Raises voice): I’m extremely offended by that comment. Don’t you accuse me of being an oppressor. I am a Jew, and I’ve experienced the vilest sort of oppression for my entire career. Don’t you tell me how to behave! (There was more, and by the end of this tirade, he is almost shouting directly at the face of FEMALE).

At this point the moderators tried to take charge and settle things down. The discussion continued for a while at a not-so-elevated pitch, with some people coming to the defense of MALE and some to the defense of FEMALE. Finally, after the official session had wrapped up, MALE stood and launched another tirade at FEMALE before storming out of the room.

Now, here are a couple accounts that have been circulating the web of the incident. First, a cartoon:

And second, the account from Henry Gee’s blog:

I am at a session at ScienceOnline2010 all about striking the balance between enforcing civility in blog comments, and fighting off trolls. I make the point that civility can be encouraged by laying out ground rules – as John Wilkins says on his admirable blog, Evolving Thoughts – and I hope he won’t mind my quoting it in extenso :

‘This is my living room, so don’t piss on the floor. I reserve the right to block users and delete any comments that are uncivil, spam or offensive to all. I have a broad tolerance, but don’t test it, please. Try to remain coherent, polite and put forward positive arguments if engaged in debate. There are plenty of places you can accuse people of being pedophilic communist sexist pigs; don’t do it here.’

Much to my amazement I am criticized very sharply for expressing what I thought (and still think) to be a perfectly reasonable view. The counter-argument is that the enforcement of ground rules is an act of white male patriarchy and acts to exclude certain subsets of society from taking part. I think this is tosh, actually, but some otherwise intelligent and articulate people seem to believe it. Are such ground rules inherently discriminatory, or are they fair?

Hmmm… Neither of these accounts actually matches my admittedly imperfect recollection of the events at the session. Now, frankly (and ironically) I thought MALE’s comments and demeanor at the session in defense of civility were rude and unnecessarily confrontational, and if he had acted in such a manner in my living room, I would have asked him to leave. But I don’t think he ever told FEMALE to “shut up” or described her as “you people” as he did in the cartoon. Many of the comments I’ve seen flying around the internet suggest the cartoon wasn’t accurate because the cartoon character wasn’t shouting. Perhaps, but it also made no acknowledgment that MALE was himself a member of an oppressed minority.

Gee’s account (okay, it’s now quite clear that MALE is Gee, isn’t it?) omits the fact that Gee himself was quite incivil in making his point, perhaps buttressing FEMALE’s suggestion that sometimes incivility is the only way for oppressed people to be heard.

So what’s the answer? Should incivility be tolerated as a way for previously-unheard voices to be heard? On blogs I think the answer is quite simple: it’s up to the blogger. In that sense, Gee is right. Don’t like the rules on Blog A? Visit Blog B instead. But Blogger A (or B, or Z) has a perfect right to her own set of (or lack of) rules, which Gee may not agree with. And bloggers have all sorts of reasons why they might choose to censor, disemvowel, or otherwise moderate comments: they might want to generate traffic, be a place that’s safe for children, or just be a place where no f-bombs ever sully the exalted air.

But in a conference room, or in an online forum, or in any public space, the answer is not so clear. When Martin Luther King called for civil disobedience as a way of spreading the message of the civil rights movement, he asked that those who broke laws do so non-violently — that’s the “civil” part of disobedience, right? Is there an online equivalent? Is even King’s non-violent strategy always the right strategy? Aren’t there some actions which require an incivil response — genocide, insults to one’s parents or offspring, and so on? For Gee, the line appears to be crossed whenever someone suggests that “civility” isn’t always a good thing. Then, the gloves are off!

I’d draw the line, um, somewhere else. But in many (most?) cases it’s nearly impossible to come to an acceptable compromise that works well for everyone. Supporting freedom of speech and freedom of assembly implies allowing neo-Nazis marching through our neighborhoods too. Allowing cursing and ad-hominem attacks in an online forum implies that some benign conversations will needlessly be elevated to bitter, all-out brawls. I suppose that’s why discussions about civility can become so incivil.

These days, a lot of that functionality is duplicated by Twitter, so if you really want a blow-by-blow account of what I’m thinking about (as filtered by my personal privacy norms), go there.

I do use this blog to explain the thinking behind my other projects, like Cognitive Daily and ResearchBlogging.org, and I’m planning on using it a bit to give you some background for the Mystery Project to be named later.

You’ll see much more politics and opinion here than on CogDaily, and a little more snark. Sorry, that’s just who I am when I’m not in “science writer” mode. Still, I try to avoid idle rants. Expect posts to be reasonably on-topic and reasonably well-thought.

So that’s about it. Welcome. Hope to see you around, and I especially hope you hang around long enough to find out about the Mystery Project (it shouldn’t be much more than a couple weeks!).

Now, it’s time to say goodbye to that. We are permanently closing Cognitive Daily, and this will be our last post.

While we won’t be here, we’ve seen a number of exceptional psychology blogs join us in sharing the science of psychology with the world, and we encourage you to visit them. Rather than single any of these blogs out, we ask that you visit Dave’s ongoing project, ResearchBlogging.org. There, by clicking on the “Psychology” and “Neuroscience” channels, you can find nearly 100 blogs that regularly discuss peer-reviewed research in the same fields we’ve been covering here. You can also follow dedicated psychology and neuroscience RSS feeds, or the @researchblogs twitter feed, to get an even broader view of what’s going on in the world of science.

We’re grateful to many, many people who have helped make Cognitive Daily great. There are too many to mention by name, but without the many scientists who provided the raw materials, the bloggers who’ve helped share ideas, and the administrators and techies who’ve made it all work, this blog simply couldn’t exist. And, of course, without our readers and commenters, Cognitive Daily probably wouldn’t have been around for more than a few months. You’ve inspired us, motivated us, corrected us, disputed us, informed us, and responded to more polls and surveys than we ever imagined possible. We hope you’ll continue to find Cognitive Daily useful; the archives will remain here for all to see.

What will we do with all that time we’ve freed up? Greta plans to continue her work as Professor of Psychology at Davidson College, teaching and mentoring students, conducting research, and sharing her love of music, literature, and art. Dave will continue as editor of ResearchBlogging.org and weekly columnist for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, and he’ll maintain his personal blog, Word Munger and his obsessively-updated Twitter account. In addition, Dave’s planning a new project, to be unveiled within the next few weeks. Look for more information about it on Twitter and Word Munger.

Thanks again for being a part of Cognitive Daily. It’s been an amazing ride.

It is if you use the optimistic “accounting system” proposed in this article. Here’s how it works, says freelance copywriter Mary-Jo Dionne:

Every time I get paid, I instantly pop 10% into my shopping/mad money account; 20% into a business expenses account; and 30% into a taxes account. I’ve learned to live on the remaining 40% only–this is what I use to cover mortgage, retirement, bills and real-life stuff.

In Dionne’s world, the money she spends on shopping, business expenses, and taxes is “saving,” while the money she saves for retirement is a “living expense.”

I suppose this arrangement works for her, but in the real world, if you’re a freelancer, that means you’re actually a small businessperson. When you get paid, you don’t get to count your revenues as profit until you’ve paid all your expenses, including taxes. So really Dionne should only count as “income” the 40% she uses for “real-life stuff” and the 10% she “saves” for “shopping/mad money.” Of this income, we don’t know how much she really saves — that would be the portion that presumably goes into her retirement account. I doubt that adds up to 60% of what’s left.

Could someone really live on 40 percent of their true income? I’m pretty sure I could. I could live in a quarter of the space I’m in now. I could take public transit or ride my bike instead of making car payments. I could cook for myself more often instead of going out. I could buy cheaper wine or forgo it entirely. I could cancel satellite TV. I could cancel my vacation plans.

But what would be the point? After I’ve saved a reasonable amount — say 10 or 15 percent for retirement and unexpected expenses — any additional savings would simply go to amassing wealth. Anyone with a reasonable income who saved 60 percent of it would be quite wealthy in 20 years. What then? Would you spend it all then? If so, why not spend it sooner? Why not enjoy your income for your whole life, rather than deferring it and blowing it all at once?

A game report is based on the inverted-pyramid style of journalism I was taught in high school. You lead with the newest/most important information and add progressively less newsworthy details at the end. The game-winning touchdown starts off the story, which “ends” somewhere in the third quarter. Fry gets this part of the argument right:

Today my audience is much more likely to have watched the game, can get a recap on SportsCenter once an hour during the morning, can see the highlights on demand from a team or league site, and can watch a condensed game on the iPhone

Given that most of your readers, if they didn’t see the game, have at least seen some highlights and know the results, it doesn’t make much sense to lead off your news story with what now turns out to be the least relevant detail. So why do old-skool game stories still get printed?

I’d say it’s because people still want to see a record of what they witnessed (or heard about). By seeing it in “print,” they can validate or debunk the rumors, and reinforce what they saw as pivotal moments in the game.

That said, the standard game story format completely sucks. It’s much better to tell it like a real story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Clearly people don’t need the story to lead with the “news” — even the news isn’t news twelve hours later. The reason they read the game story is to relive the event. A great model would be the site televisionwithoutpity.com, which simply offers extended, often snarky recaps of last night’s TV shows. Add a little reporting (”Smith’s back injury isn’t likely to keep him out of next week’s big game”) and you’ve got yourself a twenty-first century game story. It should be LONGER than a traditional sports story, offering MORE details, but in chronological order, so readers can remember what the experience of watching the game was like (or see what they missed).

Oddly enough, in a Web 2.0 world, the best thing to enhance the audiovisual experience of the game itself just might be a lot more old-fashioned narrative.

Actually, I only ever manage to write two of them. My editor comes up with the other two, in addition to editing mine. Why are there four headlines? I’m not sure — that’s just how SEED rolls. But even if I only have to come up with one, as I’ve done for the hundreds of CogDaily posts I’ve written, I don’t like it. In fact, ScienceBlogs wants me to come up with two headlines for those as well — a “headline” and an “excerpt,” which appears below the headline on the ScienceBlogs home page. I never bother with the excerpt, so the software automatically inserts the first 15 words or so of my post, which may or may not help a reader decide whether to click through to read the whole thing.

After tweeting about my headline-writing frustration, I got about a half-dozen replies and retweets, which for me on Twitter is practically an avalanche. Noah Gray (@noahWG), who’s an editor for Nature, said “You’re kidding right? That’s all Twitter trains you to do!!!” I replied that I didn’t think so. In fact, I think of a tweet as a mini-article with no headline.

Then I thought about it a little more and realized that my least favorite kind of tweet really is more like a headline: It’s the tweet you make when you’re pimping your own writing. Just like a headline, the tweet becomes a sales pitch: “Read this article. Please. And click on some of the surrounding ads while you’re at it. Also, believe that I’m an intelligent, thoughtful person. Invest some of your intellectual capital in me. Aren’t I swell?”

Bleh. I hate that stuff.

But why do I hate it? It’s not that I don’t understand the importance of a headline. Tens of thousands of people see the headlines for each post I write, but only a fraction of those people actually click through to read the post itself. The better the headline, the more clicks I get, and the more I get paid. Heck, the headline is probably more important than the article itself.

Not only that, but in this age of search engines, a well-crafted headline can draw even more page views based on how many people search for the words in your headline. Write a headline that captures the current internet buzz, and you could get hundreds of thousands of hits.

And think about this: Often when your story gets posted onto Digg or Reddit, the poster doesn’t bother to change your original headline. If your story is going to get the tsunami of traffic that a listing on the homepage of one of those sites brings, it will to be on the strength of the headline you write. Ditto Stumbleupon, Facebook, and, yes, Twitter.

I realize, too, that most people understand that a headline is basically a sales pitch. It’s not beneath a writer’s dignity to put her story in the best possible light. It’s expected. A perfectly-phrased headline isn’t like a salesman sticking his foot in your door, it’s more like a really great movie trailer, exciting and inspiring you but not giving away too much. Just as I like a good movie trailer, I love to read a great headline.

But particularly for science writers, there’s also a responsibility involved in headline writing. “Do vaccines cause autism?” might draw more clicks than “No evidence that vaccines cause autism,” but since many more people read the headline itself than read the article, it’s irresponsible to run a misleading headline. Even if your article debunks the antivax hysteria, a headline like that would probably do more to perpetuate the myth than not running the story at all.

A headline, especially for a science writer, must always balance the need to adequately promote the work with the need to accurately portray it. Meeting that second goal might actually mean less success for the science writer.

For me, the act of writing a headline is a near-daily reminder of this dilemma. And that’s what makes coming up with a headline my least favorite part of the writing process.

TAKE 1 10MG TABLET PER

That’s it. So my question is, per what? Day? Hour? Week? Zodiac sign?

Would it kill them to indicate the period for which the medication is intended? If there are a limited number of character spaces for the instructions, there are many words I could suggest deleting before that critical bit. “10MG” is clearly redundant since there’s only one size pill in the box. “TABLET” can go too. Heck, you can even eliminate “TAKE” since it doesn’t actually give any information: “1 PER _____” would suffice. But you’ve got to specify what goes in the ______.

Next rant: Restaurant menu spelling.

Update: Finally found the real instructions — much more complicated. Really the “brief” instrux on the label should read: SEE DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS INSIDE.

One of the advantages of having a teenage son is that you get to send him to the service station to get the car inspected. You just hand him a check with the amount left blank and have him show you the receipt when he gets home.

But I was surprised last week when Jim came back with a receipt for just $13.95. The receipt was clearly marked “SAFETY INSPECTION ONLY.” No emissions inspection was done at all.

What’s the point of that? Isn’t the main reason we have to pay for emissions inspections to keep pollution down? Apparently only for cars that don’t pollute very much. You see, for cars earlier than 1996 model years, the state of North Carolina doesn’t require emissions inspections.

I did a little Googling and found out that several states don’t require emissions checks for older cars. Why? Because it’s “too expensive.” Apparently owners of clunkers balk at spending $30 per year getting their emissions checked.

I hate to break it to these folks, but THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT!!!!!!

You get old cars inspected because THEY CAUSE MOST OF THE POLLUTION. Not inspecting these cars means they’ll keep pouring carcinogens and allergens into the environment until they get too expensive to fix. If we keep inspecting them, then we can identify the really bad ones and get them off the road SOONER.

By the way, the Voyager has always passed its emissions inspections with flying colors. As soon as our teenagers head off to college, though, this baby’s headed for the junkyard.

But now, thanks to their complaints, the Obama administration has done something about it. Instead of forwarding conspiracy-theory emails to the White House, now you have to fill out a web form, which explicitly instructs users not to enter any identifying information about the lunatics who sent them the email in the first place.

So, right-wing wackaloons, you are now once again safe to spread your rumors, unfounded accusations, and plots to overthrow the government via email. Planning an abortion clinic bombing? No prob! Send an announcement to everyone on your email list! There’s no way the government can possibly figure out who you are!

Apparently right-wing wackaloons are apoplectic because the Obama administration is encouraging people to send them the delusional emails they receive. (The administration “says” they are only asking for the emails so they can defuse ginned up “controversies.”)

Why are the crazies so mad?

Because Obama might be making a seekrit “ENEMEEZ LIST.”

This is news?

Yes, wackaloonz, it’s true: IF YOU SEND SOMEONE AN EMAIL, THEY HAVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS. They know who you are, and they can send your email along to anyone else. So whether you’re seekritly plotting to overthrow the guvmint, or you don’t want your wife to find out about your Argentinian mistress, or you just don’t want people to know your political views, DON’T BROADCAST IT ON EMAIL!

That is all.

There was one small problem.

I use Apple’s automatic Time Machine software for backup. Even though I was backing up all the same information, the new computer didn’t want to use my old backup files. When it tried to back up, it found there was no space on my external 500GB backup drive.

No problem, I figured. I could just copy the old backup on to my new spacious 640 GB drive temporarily, until the new backups were running smoothly for a week or so, then delete those files. BUT…

There was one small problem.

There must have been a few corrupt files, because copying the files to the new computer failed.

No problem, I figured. I still had the old computer, with a “backup” of all my old files. I could safely delete my backups from the backup drive, and if something dreadful happened during that process, I’d have my old computer to use for a disaster scenario.

So I drag about 95 percent of the contents of my backup drive into the trash (I keep a few other files there besides the automated backups). BUT…

There’s one small problem.

The Mac doesn’t count your files as truly gone until you actually “empty” the trash. My backup software still doesn’t believe there is enough room on the backup drive. Now, I have a confession to make. I hate emptying the trash. It just seems so … final. What if there’s a file in there that I need? Even though my backup software keeps old versions of files, it’s always seemed easier to recover files by sifting through my trash bin. So there is probably already at least 20 GB of data in the trash bin, in addition to nearly 500 GB of backup. There’s no way to specify which hard drive’s trash to empty. I’ll have to empty it all. Of course, I still have my old computer, with its unemptied trash, so I decide to go for it. It’s about 11 a.m. Monday. I select “Empty Trash” from the “Finder” menu. BUT…

There was one small problem.

It turns out, 500 GB is a lot of trash to empty, even for a brand-new 24-inch iMac. First the computer has to “Prepare” to empty the trash. It slowly counts upwards — 100 thousand files to delete, 200 thousand, more. This is really taking a long time. I decide to go use my other computer for a while. An hour or so later I return, and my computer is still counting upwards: 1 million, 1.1 million, more?

In four hours, I return again. Still counting upwards: 2.7 million, 2.8 million, with seemingly no end in sight.

At 4:13 p.m., my computer finally finishes preparing, and actually starts emptying the trash: 3.1 million files! By this time, I’m posting regular updates on Twitter.

Several people tweet back — Phronk: “I’m amazed that: 1) You’ve collected that much garbage; and 2) Your hard drive even holds that many millions of files.” Jmlynch: “if it was a windows machine it probably would have crashed by now ;)” Actually I think Windows computers automatically empty trash and don’t automatically backup, so I wouldn’t be having this problem.

It’s about this point that I realize I could have simply reformatted my backup drive, saving the few extraneous files I needed. I could still do this even now, but now I’m on a mission. Will it really work? Will my computer successfully erase my backups to make room for — more backups?

At 11:16 p.m. I tweet that I have 2.5 million files left to delete. Every once in a while the computer alerts me with a warning that it’s unable to empty the trash because some file like “bootX” is locked. Fortunately there’s a “continue” button and it seems to resume emptying. I go to bed, making sure to set my computer to stay awake all night and continue emptying.

I wake up and go for a run, forgetting momentarily about the momentous event occurring in the office. Finally at 8:55 a.m. I check again. Still emptying, and I tweet that there are now just 727 K files left! Brlittle reminds me that I could have just reformatted the hard drive. Yes I know, and Lewis and Clark could have just sailed around the Cape, but where’s the adventure in that?

I shower and check in again. 250 K files left, but I’ve got errands to run. I’m torn between staying and watching this epic struggle unfold, or just checking in when I return. I decide to go. I can’t let emptying the trash totally consume my life (as if it hasn’t already).

At 9:53 I’m at Panera on my laptop. Msanford tweets “If you’re on a #Mac, you can open a Terminal window and `rm -r ~/.Trash` which will empty any size Trash in about one second.” Holy shit! This is like learning that Lewis and Clark could have just teleported to Oregon!

At noon I return home and check to see if the files have really been erased. I’ve got 350 GB of free space on my backup drive! Success! — And I did it the hard way — it must have taken at least 24 hours! I notice another 10 GB of files I can go ahead and delete. What the heck, this is nothing. They’re gone in 20 short minutes.

The moment of truth comes when I test my backup software to make sure it really works. A window opens with the dreaded dialog: “Preparing…”

This could take a while.

In fact, I’m so inspired by the lists that I’ve decided to read along with both of them.

Jim’s teacher hasn’t assigned the list for the entire year, but for the summer he’s been assigned Genesis, Exodus, and Luke (King James version), as well as Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I’ve read Genesis, but I haven’t read any of the other works straight through.

Nora already has her entire year’s list:

The Devil in the White City (Erik Larson)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Great Gatsby
The House of Seven Gables
Longitude (Dava Sobel)
The Known World (Edward Jones)
Going After Cacciato (Tim O’Brien)
Nickeled and Dimed (Barbara Ehrenreich)
Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Charles Seife)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
Waiting for Snow in Havana (Carlos Eire)

The last two are her summer reading books, so I’m going to start with those — I’m going to try to read the books at roughly the same time the kids do, so we can talk about them and I can record my (and their) impressions of the books here. Should be an exciting adventure; I’m really looking forward to it!still doing some testing

Banks, W., & Isham, E. (2009). We Infer Rather Than Perceive the Moment We Decided to Act Psychological Science, 20 (1), 17-21 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02254.x

He was a hero because he helped women who were facing death recover gracefully.

He was a hero because he helped expectant mothers and fathers grieve for the children they couldn’t have.

He was a hero because he helped prevent women from becoming infertile due to complications in their pregnancies, and gave them the chance to bear healthy children in the future.

He was a hero because he, like thousands of other doctors around the world, answered late-night calls to help people he had never met, perhaps disrupting family meals, gatherings, vacations, or just a good nights’ sleep.

He was a hero because he provided high-quality medical care even when it wasn’t easy or convenient for him to do so.

That should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

In order to safely remove an already-dead fetus from a woman’s womb, he had to be willing to face death himself.

In order to abort a fetus that couldn’t survive more than a few days outside its mother’s body, he was shot twice.

In order to remove conjoined twins, one of which was already dead and one of which probably would never survive and would certainly never be healthy, he and his family had to live locked in a gated community.

Because of forced-childbirth terrorism, it was estimated that there were only three (or fewer) doctors in the U.S. willing to do what Dr. Tiller did. Now there are two.

A doctor shouldn’t have to be this kind of hero.

For more on what Dr. Tiller did, see here, here, here, here, and here.

They say science journalism is in a crisis mode. Many newspapers are cutting their science sections, and even the venerable Scientific American is struggling to find a business model that works in the age of the internet. So why on earth would I decide now is the time to start charging for a bit of rather home-grown science journalism?

Honestly, I don’t know. And I have no idea whether this idea will work. What I do know is that I’m unsatisfied with most science journalism produced these days, whether or not the whole business is in crisis mode. I also know that my experiences working with the traditional science journalism establishment have been unsatisfying. I don’t like deadlines. I don’t like selling ideas before I write them. I don’t like chasing down sources for interviews. I don’t like dealing with editors. I don’t like other people telling me what to write. Maybe that means I shouldn’t even try to be a “science journalist.”

But still, I’m also unhappy with the level of depth attained in a single Cognitive Daily post. Initially Greta and I started the site as a way to keep notes for a much larger work — a book, in fact. But all my issues with the science journalism world also apply to the world of trade book publishing. We’ve gone back and forth with several agents, even signed a contract with one, but in the end we simply didn’t want to be told what to write.

In the course of preparing sample materials for agents, however, I’ve found that I very much do enjoy the actual process of writing longer pieces. The problem is, a blog isn’t really the place to showcase a longer work. My eureka moment came when I saw how much Greta loves to read books on her Kindle. Here’s the perfect medium for sharing a larger work — and it’s even something people readily pay for. Why not give it a shot? Even though we don’t have an entire book to sell, just some sample chapters, we don’t actually need a whole book. The chapters can stand pretty much on their own. Since there’s no printing press, there’s really no reason you have to sell a book-sized chunk of writing all at once. You can sell it a chapter at a time.

There are also some interesting possibilities for synergy between the chapters and the blog. You can work interactively with readers to answer the bigger questions brought up in the comments section of a blog. Then you can put all that in your longer report, and sell it on Cognitive Monthly. It just might work.

I didn’t want to limit the project to just the Kindle platform, so I looked into other forms of digital publishing. Lulu.com offers exactly what I need — a way to charge people to download PDFs. As a bonus, they automatically transfer the PDFs to iPhone format. Yeah, I’ve covered all the hot personal technology devices!

There were a few technical glitches along the way, number one being the fact that there’s no easy way to go from Apple Pages to HTML, required for the Kindle (you have to take a cockamamy path via RTF and TextEdit). Lulu has its own set of hoops to jump through. Greta, who’s been very involved throughout the process, wanted to edit the final version, which meant editing two different versions of the file, then re-uploading each to its respective online distributor.

Next, we had to set a price. Obviously we can’t charge a book-level price for a chapter-length report. $1 is as cheap as you can go on either Lulu or Amazon, but that seemed a little low — almost like we weren’t placing any value on the product — so we settled on $2. On Lulu, this translates to $1.60 for us. On Amazon, only $.70. But we figured Amazon, plus the Kindle, might generate more impulse buys, so it’s probably worth it to be there. If we sell a few hundred copies a month between the two sites, it’s a worthwhile experiment. If we sell over a thousand, about 1 percent of the monthly visits to Cognitive Daily, it’s almost a sustainable career. Plus, 12 issues corresponds roughly to the length of a book. If a book is worth $24, then surely a chapter is worth $2.

I don’t expect to sell that many right away. As Bora Zivkovic notes, there’s a built-in tendency to expect to get stuff for free online. But that’s changing. We pay for music. We pay for movies. Now we’re starting to pay for books using devices like the Kindle and iPhone. Even newspapers and magazines are starting to move to Kindle. But why pay for a subscription if you don’t want to read every article? Doesn’t it make more sense to read just the articles you’re interested in? If the answer to that question is yes, then we might actually have a business model. In any case, it certainly seems worth it to try.

The other nice thing about an online monthly is that it never goes out of stock. Most people will decide not to buy this month, but maybe next month’s topic will seem more interesting to some people. If they like that article, they might decide to buy the back issues. Month by month, assuming we have a good product, sales should grow faster and faster, because there are more and more articles to buy.

Right now, neither Amazon nor Lulu offers a “subscription” model for mere mortals, but that would be an awesome next step. I could see a lot of people who might balk at $2 per month decide that $12 per year isn’t a bad deal, and I’d take that guaranteed payday over the iffy month-to-month prospects. Amazon also has a weird quirk. You set your price, and get a 35 percent royalty based on that price. But then they can turn around and sell it at a “discount,” which they did. The book now retails for $1.60 at Amazon. Fortunately, our royalty doesn’t decrease based on our adjustment. Clearly it costs them much less than the $1.30 they’d make at full-price to sell the book. I’d rather they not sell at a discount and just give us a bigger royalty, but I suppose if their discounts get too obscene, we can just increase our suggested price on Amazon. I’d rather people buy it from Lulu, where we make $1.60 per book.

One very unnerving aspect of the whole process is the way you can watch your sales roll in, in real time. In some ways, I’d rather just get a report once a month or so, so I don’t obsess about it. This is a long-term project, and its success is best not measured on a day-to-day (or hour-to-hour) basis.

I really hope this thing works, not just because the money would be nice, but also because it is a model that other writers and creative people might be able to follow. You could produce anything this way — a serial novel, a play, a TV soap opera, a record album — whatever you want. Creative people would be freed from the overlords who’ve controlled the means of distribution for centuries. Either that or I’ll sell 20 copies over the next four months and have to figure out something else to do with my life.

But at her school the break extends to the Monday after Easter, and that might have been one day too long. My evidence? Behold:

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. Nora decided to rearrange the kids’ entire book collection — by color. Here’s the second bookcase:

This has created some odd combinations and separations. The Harry Potter books, for example, are all over the place:

The other four are a little closer together at the bottom of the other bookcase. The Oz books are similarly randomly distributed.

Even the uniformly-pigmented Little House books were split across two shelves:

Don’t ask what Nora’s thinking was here. Let’s just call it “creative liberties.”

Both kids agree that this is an entirely reasonable organization system. “It’s just the place we put the books when we’re done reading them,” Jim said. I have to say, in some ways, he’s right. Most of my books are simply stacked up in no order whatsoever. At least this looks interesting — and at least these books were read.

Now, see what remains:

This photo, perhaps, offers a better glimpse at the scale of the disaster:

The cinematographer in the foreground didn’t move once as I took this photograph of the scene. Perhaps he was paralyzed by guilt. Perhaps he had lost his job in the economic crisis and didn’t know what to do next. He just stood, leaning slightly back, as if he had been hastily assembled out of prefabricated plastic components, then abandoned.

Not far away was yet another relic, which in better times had been a sparkling new museum:

Now, just a battered shell of the monument remains:

I made this video to document the sad remains of the once-proud edifice.