Readers Digest

After cooking my 3 course dinner in 3 1/2 minutes, using my electric toothbrush that promises only a minute of scrubbing is needed, and waiting 4 minutes for an album to finish downloading because my internet was being slow, I laid back and opened The Economist.  Not too much later I checked my watch and couldn't believe my eyes.  A whole three minutes had passed and I was just getting to the bottom of the first page.

While everything else is moving along faster, and faster, the art of reading has kept its pace like a disciplined runner.  While the information you get is being hunted and gathered at an unprecedented rate, the mental digestion process hasn't changed a bit.  And like food, data spoils and is best eaten fresh.

When up to the minute information is just too fast for the "wait a minute" reader like myself, something needs to change.  I started skipping some articles in the publications I subscribe to recently, a practice I pledged to avoid.  Reading two week old economic indicators, and hearing about how Dominique Strass Kahn can get a little touchy for the fourth time in a row, I couldn't help but notice how so much information has such a short shelf life.  As new issue upon new issue piled up, I found myself rushing through articles like they were instructions to diffusing a ticking time bomb.  I was reading more, understanding less, and mispronouncing a lot of words in my head.  To my dismay, I would get to a new issue and find articles similarly crafted, and changed only in that they were more updated.  I had to question my approach and figure out a new way to read.

What I've begun to do is look at "Contents" pages of magazines I haven't gotten to and trying to have a more balanced reading diet.  I found in most cases that just reading an article from the latest issue did fairly well at covering all the preceding issues and was far more efficient.  Of course the unfortunate side of this is the missed anecdotes, unappreciated verbal flourishes, and undiscovered interpretations that come along with such a diet.  For someone who appreciates alliteration as much as apple pie, it's just a bit like missing out on dessert.

Data is coming out faster.  This doesn't only mean more of it is available, but also that more of it is pointless.  Some information is only worth it when it's fresh off the press or out of the proverbial oven.  Current events isn't always best read like a novel.  As dinners are getting zapped to pseudo-perfection in minutes, and movies streamed in seconds, the opportunity cost of old fashioned reading is sky-rocketing.  Not only can you do more than ever in the time that it takes to read a page on your favorite news site, but what you might be reading is going to spoil faster.  Like obesity became a bigger problem as food was hunted and gathered with new technology, so has information overload.  Similarly, as more unhealthy food options became available, data's fast food equivalent is out there and growing.   I'm trying different information diets to keep in shape and its a work in progress.  If you take a look, you might just find you're filling up on something lacking any nutritional value.

Heightened Expectations

     Congrats to the '11 Mavs for beating the dynamically unlovable Heat in 6 games.  I went to a bar with a few friends to watch and an argument about J.J Barea's height got about as much attention as LeBron's fourth quarter numbers this series.  The J.J dispute is not in the scope of this blog but a point that did get me thinking was the fact that he's listed at six feet tall all over the internet, and most importantly, on NBA.com.  I'm aware of the dramatic effect relativity can have on a fella, but J.J is about as six feet as Jason Terry's bicep tattoo is tactful.  Why the discrepancy on such an easily observable measurement?  We're talking the objective of the objective here. How does variation find its way into an utterly verifiable number?
     I read that athletes in the U.S are often measured with their shoes on. This leads to "shorter" European players standing above similarly listed U.S athletes and no, not just because no one gets the metric system over here.  The whole non standardized-ness of it all begs a question.  If we can dig up every detail about their past, speculate about their future, and bug them with pointless questions in the present, why can't we just know athletes heights?  The only economic metaphor I could draw would be a firm "cooking" their books to look better than they are or a credit rating agency inflating their ratings.  The difference is, when it comes to salary valuations of players who are already in the NBA, sport-metricicians are picking up PPG APG STL and RBD before HT and WT who don't even make tryouts.  If the owners don't inherently care about the heights of their players, the league doesn't benefit from shady statistics, and the fans would most likely just prefer the truth, maybe it's the players that turned the rule of the ruler into a democracy where everyone gets to pick their own height?  Eh, I doubt it; If I was J.J Barea I'd be proud as hell for every inch under six feet I was.  Congrats Barea, Nowitzki, Kidd, Cuban and the rest of the Dallas Squad.