This Carl Bialik column is not a direct assault on the existence of numerology (although such an assault would be warranted, and welcomed, by us, so anybody out there, just go for it), but it does contain subtle reminders that numerology is totally made up.

Beverly Kay, a numerologist in Mequon, Wisc., doesn't buy fears of 13. However, she says her work reading meaning into clients' birth dates and names is consistent with math. "This is scientific," Ms. Kay says.

Stop lying, Beverly Kay. That is so dumb. Stop making things up. I just read RZA's new book and while I enjoyed it, message to RZA: Too much numerology. Numerology is totally fake and made up and based on nothing except the ease with which it can be employed to fool uneducated people. So stop with it.

On the other hand, the same article totally makes you wish you were friends with some mathematicians.

Thomas Garrity, a mathematician at Williams College, has always had a particular fondness for the number 9. The number 51, however, doesn't make his favorites list.

"This might stem from childhood, when I regularly thought that 51 should be prime, even though 51=3x17," he says, taking a trip down mathematical memory lane.

Haha, wonderful! Tell us another one, UC Berkeley mathematics professor George Bergman: "Today, when Bergman parks at a commuter rail station, he finds it 'amusing' to get the spot numbered 233 (a Fibonacci number), 235 or 238 (atomic weights of uranium isotopes), 245 (the course number of a course he's taught) or 256 (two to the eighth power)."

If you are a (sexxxy) mathematician, email me and let's be friends.

By Mediaite's tally, 32% of the more than 500 commenters on the story said they'd pay to read the NYT online. Let's call that one-third!

Now let's make some generous assumptions. Quantcast estimates that NYtimes.com gets about 15 million monthly US readers. (We asked the company how many comments they get; they haven't gotten back to us yet). Their weekday circulation is around 650k. So the question becomes: How many of those online users who currently pay nothing would pay, say, $5 per month (a number the NYT was floating in a survey earlier this year) to read the website?

Since one-third of the commenters on a story about the paper's staffing issues said they would, does that mean one-third of the total would? We are currently laughing derisively at that assertion! These commenters are people who not only are interested enough in the inner workings of the paper to read a story about its staffing issues—already a small minority—but also interested enough to comment on the story, which takes a certain level of commitment at the NYT's website. So we have a small subset of a small subset of the paper's online readers; namely, those readers most interested in the financial fate of the NYT. Of those, one-third say they're willing to pay.

Let's very generously say a quarter of online readers fall into the first subset, and a quarter of those fall into the second subset. Therefore, the number of online readers willing to pay would be 1/4 times 1/4 times 1/3 times 15 million, or 312,500 readers. If they all paid $5 per month, the NYT would make an extra $18.75 million per year. Which is nice and all, but would not even cover the interest payments on their subprime Mexican loan.

The NYT may in fact get more online readers worldwide, but then again, our assumptions here were already overly generous. In other words, the company's salvation will not be found in the comments section.

Statistically, when playing Russian Roulette you can place the six-shooter to your temple and pull the trigger twice before there's an actual mathematical likelihood of blowing your brains out. Likewise, with a mere one-sixth of our citizens officially living below the poverty line, two babies can be born in America before one of them has a good chance of being born into soul-crushing, life-destroying pennilessness.

Envy that, Bangladesh!

We're not the types who always parade around in stilts wearing an Uncle Sam costume with American flag briefs and reading the Bill of Rights into a megaphone at the top of our lungs in supermarket parking lots, but we must point out that we have some things to be proud of, here. Not only are we 84% penury-free; the majority of us even have jobs! Most of our wealthiest financiers are financially generous with at least one political party. Our stock market is still several points into five-digit territory. And we have far more honest priests than thieving priests—just like New York businesspersons not involved in the operation of a Ponzi scheme greatly outnumber those who are currently operating a Ponzi scheme.

So take comfort in the warm, soothing embrace of statistical probability, America. You're going to get through this recession alive. More likely than not.
[Pic via]

Nerds who love numbers so much they should marry them used to go into "quant" hedge funds and make like millions of dollars, but that business has fallen off, thanks to the work of algorithms devised by those same geniuses. The new way to make $125K right out of grad school: be a statistician. Moneymaking jobs are getting even more boring than "corporate lawyer," if you can imagine.

"I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians," said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. "And I'm not kidding."

Look, if the Poindexters have all the smarts and all the money, they cannot have all the sexy. It is just not fair. Leave the sexy for Arthur Kade. Do we need a supersexy master race of calculator-toting statisticians figuring out new ways to scam us online by telling us to wire money to some fictional character who will then give us a job, because we are unemployed? No thank you, we would prefer to be scammed by unsexy people.

We are also being scammed by inanimate Metrocard vending machines.

Do not lose hope, unsophisticated jobless suckers! We have a hot stock tip, just for you: a tattoo removal firm is holding an IPO. Get in now. This will be awsome.

Here's how the Globe describes its own balance sheet, roughly:

Real estate value: $48 million
Projected losses this year: $85 million
Total pension liabilities: $59 million

Mix those together mathematically and you'll see that a new owner could just eke out a profit if they were paid $100 million to take the Globe off the NYT Co's hands! Not that we are actually mathematicians. But perhaps these people are:

One group is led by Boston Celtics co-owner and Bain Capital executive Stephen G. Pagliuca and Jack Connors, the chairman of Partners HealthCare and a former advertising mogul. The other is led by Stephen E. Taylor, a former Globe executive and member of the family that sold the Globe to the Times Co. in 1993 for $1.1 billion.

If the original owners get it back, it would really help highlight just how completely the Sulzbergers got taken in this deal. And imagine, just a week ago the company was refusing to comment on "whether" they were planning on selling this paper. Jokers!
[Boston Globe. Pic: AP. Do not mistake our estimates for something "plausible!"]

Kalev Leetaru, the coordinator of information technology and research at the University of Illinois' Cline Center for Democracy, went back through seven years' worth data from the Drudge Report Archives—which has been taking a digital snapshot of the Drudge Report each time it's been updated since 2002—and mined it for clues as to how the elusive Junior Vasquez fan controls our media diet.

One of the many interesting datapoints unearthed by Leetaru's analysis is a curious drop in the total number of updates to the Drudge Report in 2008—an election year that should have seen a huge increase in the amount of stories, and therefore updates, that Drudge was covering. As a possible explanation for the drop-off Leetaru cites our reporting in March about the departure of Drudge understudy Andrew Breitbart from his operation. Breitbart left the site in mid-2008, and Drudge evidently had trouble keeping up the pace.

Leetaru saw another counterintuitive drop-off in updates during the Iraq War in 2003, which he explains by citing the overwhelming coverage that Iraq got in the news outlets Drudge relies on for stories. As newspapers focused their resources on Iraq and stopped writing about animal attacks, weather, and robot sex, Drudge had less to work with:

As major global events displace the news coverage that an aggregator relies on, that aggregator is forced to reduce its update cycle to accommodate the reduction in stories to link to.

As expected, Breitbart.com has been the chief beneficiary of Drudge links, netting 14,923 (or 14.5% of all links) since 2002, largely because Breitbart himself was doing the linking. Nice gig! The top newspaper beneficiary was the Washington Post with 6,471, nearly twice as many as the New York Times. And even though it was in existence for only two of the six years that Leetaru studied, Politico ranked 16th in terms of total Drudge links, catching nearly 50 in January of 2008 alone.

Leetaru also did a word analysis of Drudge's headlines—an undertaking that, given Drudge's facility as a headline writer, could serve as a guidebook for newspaper editors looking to save the industry—but decided not to filter out filler words and articles, so we only get the astonishing news that "to" is the most commonly used word in a Drudge headline. But the weird thing is the "Bush" outranked "a." Leetaru only charted out the Top Ten words; we've asked him for the full rankings and will let you know if he gives them to us.

[Via Politico.]

One day in 11th grade, Mr. Romaine got up and sketched out, on the chalkboard, the average expected debts and earnings of two theoretical people: One, who left high school and went to work immediately as, say, a plumber or something; and another who went to college, and started earning only after they graduated and paid off their loans. And hey, a SmartMoney editor (not Mr. Romaine) did the same thing in a New York Post editorial today, proving that college is a huge scam:

[College grad] Bill will have higher pay than [straight-to-work after high school] Ernie his whole life, starting at $23,505 after taxes and peaking at $56,808. Like Ernie, he sets aside 5%. At that rate, it will take him 12 years to pay off his loan. Debt-free at 34, he starts adding to the same index fund as Ernie, making bigger monthly contributions with his higher pay. But when the two reunite at 65 for a retirement party, Ernie will have grown his savings to nearly $1.3 million. Bill will have less than a third of that.

Art history sucks, Bill! And this is assuming that college grads can still get far better jobs these days, which, ha. A/C repair, people. It ain't going anywhere.
[NYP. Pic via]

The Post reports: It's time to get your fucking guns out, downtown party people:

Downtown Manhattan, the city's party mecca, has been hit by an alarming spike in vicious street violence.

Assaults in Greenwich Village lead the frightening upturn, with a whopping 43 percent increase so far this year compared with the same period in 2008.

Crime's also up in Tribeca and the East Village and the LES! Is it the angry poors finally seeping out of their own neighborhood and doing some reverse gentrification? Probably not! Police blame it on drunk party people—not a classic sign of a painful recession!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Take a look at the Post's scary crime chart , at left. The first thing you should note is that the figure for the East Village should be 27.7%, not 42.9%. [You can look these things up, too!].

Now, consider the very, very worst neighborhood on here: the shadowy streets of Greenwich Village. Yes, year-to-date felony assaults are up by almost 43%. What does that mean? It means there have been 40 assaults so far this year, 12 more than this time last year. That means that, on average, there have been about two more assaults every three weeks, in the entire precinct. Not exactly South Bronx 1985 numbers. Oh and look, in that same precinct, robbery, burglary, and grand larcenies are all down by double digits, and the murder count for the year is 0. Facts which did not find their way into the Post's public service piece about the "VIOLENT CRIME WAVE."

Although I did once see a dude get knocked the fuck out in broad daylight on 14th and 6th!

In conclusion you are still much safer walking around Greenwich Village than, say, trying to steal Col Allan's drink.
[NYP. Also Alex Balk has a theory on this stuff. Pic of typical downtown NYC crime via Flickr.]

The key info: "The salaries of all employees at The New York Times Media Group (with the exception of the IHT, which is working on other cost reduction measures), The Boston Globe, Boston.com and Corporate in New York will be rolled back by 5%, starting this April, and these employees will receive 10 additional days off to use before the end of the year."
[Another internal memo that we just received reveals that the company is laying off "100 employees on the business side of the Times." That's serious].

It's been clear to everyone for quite some time—including, we're sure, the paper's management—that the NYT just cannot continue to spend and operate as it historically has. Still, those same execs stubbornly waited and denied and stayed silent as things got worse.

The reason is that the New York Times regards journalism as a religious undertaking. There's nothing wrong with that per se, except for a bit of elitism. The problem is that they see their newsroom budget as the means to accomplish their holy mission, and that, therefore, cannot be touched. Before the recession hit, the company's financial mistakes included building an expensive new skyscraper, keeping its dividend too high for too long, and throwing billions down a black hole by buying back its own, now dirt-cheap stock.

More recently, it's cut its dividend down to zero, mortgaged off its own fancy new headquarters for cash, and borrowed $250 million from a shady Mexican billionaire at subprime rates. Its ongoing ad revenue decline make its quarterly reports bleak pits of despair. The company is looking to sell off assets, but it's a terrible time to be doing so.

Strangely, the newsroom budget has remained mostly unscathed through all this. But not any more. Like Conde Nast, the Times is starting out with 5% cuts, which are too small. Thirty percent would be a more realistic figure, if the goal is to get expenditures back in line with revenue projections.

So, baby steps. The bad days are starting for NYT journalists (worst part: you know you're going to have to work through your "10 additional days off"). But at least the company's finally touching the untouchable.

[BONUS: The paper is also going to save a few million in newsprint by doing away with that crazy three-page "index" in the front of the A section. Good lord that thing was dumb.]

Organizers were not available to chaperone the event this week (on 3/14 get it?), so they unconscionably had to make due with a smaller celebration:

Despite the lack of festivities, the Math Department honored the day at its weekly forum held at Mather dining hall on Tuesday. Guest speaker Luke Anderson, a financial analyst for Harvard and the founder of TeachPi.org, discussed the historical fascination and what he called "modern pi fixation."

Anderson also made sure to perform his pi rap based on Eminem's "Lose Yourself"

Perhaps the afterglow of Pi Day 2008 will still linger through until next year:

Francois W. Greer '11, who came in third place at last year's pi-reciting contest, said he had not realized that the celebrations would be missing. He said that even if the festivities were taking place this year, he probably would not participate as he no longer recalls all 228 figures he recited last year.

"It was pretty crazy," he said of watching James Nile-Joyal reach 3,141 digits.

This Saturday, just take a moment to remember 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 and everything it's done for us.

[Harvard Crimson via Ivygate]

Anywhere from 11 to 16 percent.

How we came up with that figure: The Times gets $225 million upfront from W.P. Carey, the real-estate company serving as its transaction "partner." (If by "partner" one means "loan shark.") Lease payments start out at $24 million a year and are set to rise over the deal's 15-year length. After 10 years, the Times can repurchase its 21 floors of the building (developer Forest City Ratner owns the rest) for $250 million. To turn those figures into an effective interest rate, we used Excel's internal rate of return function, and ran scenarios where lease payments stayed flat over 10 years and where they rose 10 percent annually. A reasonable scenario — 3 percent annual increases, roughly in line with inflation — yields a rate of 12.5 percent.

Compare that to the 11 percent cash interest the Times is paying Carlos Slim Helù, who already owns 6.9 percent of the newspaper publisher.

The sale-leaseback transaction may result in some tax savings which will lessen the overall cost of the deal. But still, it's a hefty rate. If it were a regular mortgage loan, we'd call it subprime. According to Bankrate, 15-year home loans are going for 4.94 percent. Even credit cards are charging an average variable rate of 10.84 percent. Translation: The New York Times is in worse financial shape than the average American consumer. That's sad indeed.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER NATE SILVER SPOILER OF THE OSCARS ALERT.

Slumdog Millionaire wins everything! Well, just Best Director and Best Picture. 99% confident, Nate Silver is! He's also pretty damn sure Heath Ledger is winning best supporting actor, and he has some strong ideas about other awards too, all gleaned through fancy statistical analyses, as is Nate Silver's wont. Read them all in New York magazine and then skip the damn Oscars.

There are two basic ideas that dominate the discussion of how to rescue the flailing newspaper industry. Everything is more or less a variation on these themes. The New York Times is the paper everyone really wants to save, so it's the easiest example to use. Let's explore!


Idea: Charging For Online News
Star advocate: Steven Brill, journalistic entrepreneur and thinker
Details: Brill wrote a big long memo recently on how the New York Times can save itself. In a nutshell: The NYT's site gets 20 million unique visitors a month. If they each pay $1 per month to access the site, that's $240 million per year. Multiply that figure for any pay rate you want. This cash will save the paper.
Problems: First, how many of those 20 million users will actually pay for the site? Take out those who just wander in off Google searches, and casual non-news junkies, and the majority of everyone else, who are willing to settle for free news of a lower quality (look at local TV news. Most people are happy to settle for free news of lower quality). Maybe 2 million paying customers? Say you got 2 million to pay $2 per month. That's about $50 million a year. Not close to the NYT's $200 million+ newsroom budget—which doesn't include what the paper also has to spend on non-newsroom costs, which is also significant. To cover the NYT's newsroom budget alone at $2 per month, you need more than 8 million paying customers. Not likely. If you increase the fee, you make it that much harder to draw in customers. If you assume 2 million people will subscribe, they each need to pay $100 per year for the site. Also not likely.

Idea: The Endowment Model
Star advocate: David Swensen, Yale's star money manager
Details: In an op-ed, Swensen figures that a $5 billion endowment earning 5% a year would cover the NYT's newsroom budget, and it could operate as a nonprofit. Future: ensured.
Problems: 1. As previously mentioned, $200 mil is only the newsroom budget. Covering the paper's full budget for everything would require more cash. 2. A 5% annual payout sounded conservative a year ago. Now, who really knows when we'll again be living in a world where that figure is safe to assume? It sounds like a princely sum these days. Investment losses for an endowment would still hurt the newsroom budget. Just like what's happening to Yale now, for example. 4. Even assuming all goes well, where do you get a $5 billion endowment for a company worth less than a billion dollars?

And for micropayment advocates, see here.

Until questions like these are answered, newspapers are still where they've been for the last five years or more: in a place with no good ideas for the future.

[Note: David Swensen is probably good at math. And I personally think the NYT will have to charge for its website sooner or later, although I don't know how they'll make the math work out. I am not good at math. Pic: Flickr]

Growing up in the Toronto suburbs, Mr. Brown learned piano, but gave it up at age 12 for guitar, after hearing the Beatles' "Red Album," and becoming obsessed with the group. Like many Beatles fans, Mr. Brown was fascinated with the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night." The chord has at least four sheet music variants, but nobody has ever quite replicated it, and the Beatles haven't revealed how they produced the complex sound. Mr. Brown said he spent hours experimenting before it occurred to him: "Music is basically just math."

Once he deduced that, it was only a matter of weeks of insanely technical calculations before he figured out the chord was made with a piano, and a guitar. Now he's moved onto rendering Beatles songs on graphs, another insanely technical and time-consuming process.

Brown has thus far not become a rock star as the result of his work. [WSJ]

1. Stay off of television: You got yourself a (well-deserved) spot as a TV election pundit during the election cycle, Nate. But your future is behind a computer. You're not particularly telegenic (don't feel bad, neither are we!), and besides, the punditocracy is already overflowing. We don't need another talking head; we need a true guru. Plus, TV appearances require you to learn to apply makeup, which the Times has already packaged as an anecdote to poke fun at you. Don't fall into this trap.

2. Follow the money: Statistics show (never gets old) that corporate America has all the money. Baseball fans and political junkies are fine people, but they're not the ones holding an extravagant portion of the world's wealth in their dessicated, greedy hands. In order to have a long-term career you're going to have to do something that appeals to the corporate types. Luckily, they love numbers too!

3. Open a consultancy: "Consultant" is the best job of all. You get to sell your advice for steep prices—then, if your advice turns out to be awful, it doesn't matter because you already got paid. Your future is in selling your statistical magic to evil corporate overlords. And you're already ahead of the game, because you have a catchy name. "Silver Consultants" or something like that should look good on a business card.

4. Don't be evil: Just because we stole this slogan from The Google doesn't mean it's bad advice. Just as there are plenty of TV pundits, there are also plenty of consultants willing to pimp out their expertise to the highest bidder, regardless of how many sweatshops they run. Your advantage, Nate, is that you're actually better than your competition right now, which gives you some leverage over your clients. That means you can pre-screen to ensure that Silver Consultants does not provide its trademarked Mystical Statisticals to any firm that wants to do terrible awful things with the knowledge! In this way you become both rich and ethical, at least by the standards of the rich.

5. In four years, sign on with Obama: Might as well make it official. This election was your audition. We all know it. Everyone knows you're good. You have three years to get your consultancy up and running, make a pile of money, and then become the chief pollster for Obama '12. This is truly Living The Dream. Nate Silver, you are the new Mark Penn. Only younger, smarter, and less evil. We hope.

[Pic via Newsweek]

Experts have discovered that Americans no longer go to work to perform actual work; they simply go to work to send and receive email about what would happen if they theoretically were to do some work. When they're not doing this, they're mentally recovering:

According to a report to be published in October by the New York-based research firm Basex, interruptions such as spam, other unnecessary e-mail and instant-messages take up 28% of the average knowledge worker's day.

On top of that is what Basex chief analyst Jonathan Spira refers to as recovery time — the time to get back to where you were before you were interrupted, which Spira says is 10 to 20 times the duration of the interruption. These interruptions account for up to 2.1 hours per worker per day. Multiply that by 56 million knowledge workers in the U.S., he calculates, and the cost is $650 billion per year.

By my calculations, that means that after you spend your 2.1 hours per day using email, you spend—on average—another 31.5 hours per day recovering from these hectic interruptions. Email is therefore responsible for a full 33.6 hours per day of your time.

It's certainly getting to be a problem.

[LAT]