Alexis C. Madrigal

Sure beats little green men.

Before considering this theory further, we must bear in mind a few of the proved facts about Mars. It has atmosphere, seasons, land, water, storms, clouds and mountains. It also rains and snows on Mars, as it does with us. Great white patches appear periodically upon its surface. These may be accumulations of snow and they have also been called "eyes."

The biz ain't what it used to be, but then again, for most people, it never really was.

Man, I feel everyone on how scary it is to be in journalism. When I made the transition from a would-be fiction career paired with writing research reports into full-time journalism, I nearly drowned in a sea of debt and self-doubt. I was writing posts on my own blog, which almost nobody read, but it did, with an assist from my now-wife, get me a couple gigs writing for some known websites. I got paid $12 a post by one. The other was generous, and I got $50. I was grateful as hell to have this toehold in the world. I remember walking down Bartlett Street in the Mission and saying to myself, out loud, "I'm a writer. I'm a writer! I'M A WRITER!" It was all I'd wanted to be since I was 16 years old. And I was making it.

Except I was not making it. Every day that went by, I was draining the little bit of money I had. I started selling anything I'd acquired to that point in my life that had any value. After the last Craigslist purchaser walked away with my stuff, I stood there in the living room of our apartment staring at the books and crying.

I had so little money and so much debt that any time I had to go to an ATM, I was seized with horrible anxiety. I practically could only do it drunk. You know those ATMs that display your balance EVEN WHEN YOU TELL THEM NOT TO? Well, I hate those ones. I would take my money and as it displayed my balance on the screen, I would carefully unfocus my eyes so I couldn't really tell how little I had. The credit crunch was happening and I didn't have any credit left. My loving, wonderful, brilliant parents were going through a rough patch, too, and they couldn't help, either. I was tortured by the idea that I'd taken on this new career when my family needed me. I asked myself whether I should have stayed at the hedge fund job that I took right out of college and hated so much I quit before the summer ended.

I sometimes hoped that the whole world would collapse -- it certainly seemed possible back then -- because my debt would be swept away along with the rest of civilization. My dad had once said, right during the credit crisis, "Don't worry, we'll all be potato farmers soon anyway." And I would think about that and it would *make me happy*. At least then I wouldn't worry that I was going to be torn apart at the seams by the demands of a work life that couldn't even keep me afloat in an expensive city. I really, really resented people who could count on financial support from places unknown. They didn't seem to get how hard it was to keep it together when you might drown under your own debt at any minute.

Like an idiot, I figured I could write a book and use the advance to pay off my debt. That kind of worked, though the process of doing the book melted my brain. I was so tired and my mind was so filled with words that I would forget where I was, almost coming to in supermarket aisles wondering why I was staring at mangoes. I hate mangoes. But at least the money gave me some breathing room. I could approach an ATM without feeling weak in the knees.

So, all this to say: I know the pressure these debts can put on you. I know how angry it makes you, at yourself, at other people, at the world. Why didn't I save more? Why did I buy that thing? Why did I have to pick up that tab when I didn't have any goddamn money? How could I support a family like this? Why won't the world recognize my talent is worth more!?

And so when Nate Thayer published emails with our newest editor (second week on the job), I can see how that might happen. How you might finish writing your last email, "No offense taken," and then staring at your blog's CMS that night, decide, you know, what? I'm tired of writing for peanuts, because fuck that. And if a young journalist in her first week on the job was part of the collateral damage, hey, the world just isn't fair, kid. Pay it forward.

I get it, but it was still a nasty thing to do.

I'm glad Thayer's post has garnered him lots of attention. He is a great journalist and I genuinely hope the spotlight gets him more work. Don't get me wrong. I'm still incensed by what he did, but I want journalists to prosper because I believe, like he does, that what we do is vital. 

Let me show my colors here. I am an Atlantic person. I love this place. I feel it in my bones. If I open up one of our musty tomes at the office, I can get sucked in for an hour just looking at the ads, or marveling at the eloquence of W.E.B. DuBois. When I look back at old Ta-Nehisi posts or see Fallows in the halls, I can get emotional. I was watching Ken Burns' National Parks documentary, and he notes, offhandedly, how stories that ran in our magazine helped preserve Yosemite for future generations. He talks about how we published this wild holy man, John Muir, thereby promoting the idea of National Parks, which as Burns' rightly argues is one of the best and most populist ideas to ever become law in this country. These are my people. These are my colors. This is my institution, my connection to a legacy and a lineage. And if you come after one of us, if you come after it, I am not going to take it lying down.

And so ... Twitter was a contact sport yesterday. I practically put in my old mouthgard from football practice. Seemed like every reload brought another attacker and it was instinct, really, to keep them away from my QB, Olga. I know how to block. I know how to hit. You can just see me at my computer, sweating, steam (or is it smoke?) coming out of my ears. Bring it. And I hate that mode. I hate it. It makes me feel bad and say fuck a lot and I TYPE IN ALL CAPS. I want to do those pushups where you clap in-between because I just get so much something, emotion, intensity, adrenaline, running in my veins. (Much love to Becca Rosen, my brilliant, grounded lieutenant for telling me to put down the twitter and pet the kitty and go for a run. That was a good call, as always, BR.)

But that's not what this should all be about, if by "all," I mean the maelstrom kicked up by Thayer. Because the truth is, I don't have a great answer for Nate Thayer, or other freelancers who are trying to make it out there. It was never an easy life, but there were places who would pay your expenses to go report important stories and compensate you in dollars per word, not pennies. You could research and craft. And there were outlets -- not a ton, but some -- that could send you a paycheck that would keep you afloat.

Then the digital transition came. The ad market, on which we all depend, started going haywire. Advertisers didn't have to buy The Atlantic. They could buy ads on networks that had dropped a cookie on people visiting The Atlantic. They could snatch our audience right out from underneath us. And besides, who knew how well online ads worked anyway? I mean, who knows how well any ads work at all? But convention had established that print ads were a thing people paid X amount for, and digital ads became something people paid 0.10X for.

So far, there isn't a single model for our kind of magazine that appears to work.

And while advertisers paid less, there was always more stuff for people to read. All kinds of writing poured onto the web. The median post was much worse than a random story plucked from the top tier of magazines, but the best stuff was and is as good as anything. Drawing on that huge base, there is always a lot of "best stuff" to read now.

The main way to sell ads is to go "cross-platform" pairing digital with print and whatever else (events or video, say). This is what "the marketplace" is asking for. So you need ad inventory online. In some cases, like ours or Wired's, you need a lot of ad inventory online. It is a little more complicated than this, but that means you need page views, and if you want page views, you need people coming to your site. You need unique visitors.

If you can show me a way that this can be reversed for a large general-interest magazine, I would love to hear about it. So far, there isn't a single model for our kind of magazine that appears to work. 

Seriously, though, what's a magazine like The Atlantic (or The New Yorker or The New Republic or Harper's or The New York Times Magazine) to do then? Could the print model -- smallish editorial staff, large writer pool paid by the word -- work online?

Let me give you this hypothetical. You are a digital editor at a fine publication. You are in charge of writing some stuff, commissioning some stuff, editing some stuff. Maybe you have an official traffic goal, or (more likely), you want to be awesome, qualitatively and quantitatively. A lot of people in this business are driven from the inside out, and you almost have to be given the daily demands. You have to want to be jacked into the Internet all day long, every day. This is not the life most journalists imagined when they were looking at 1970s magazines. In any case, you want to crush, as I would call it.

And your total budget for the year is $12,000, a thousand bucks a month. (We could play this same game with $36,000, too. The lessons will remain the same.) What do you do?

Here are some options:

1. Write a lot of original pieces yourself. (Pro: Awesome. Con: Hard, slow.)
2. Take partner content. (Pro: Content! Con: It's someone else's content.)
3. Find people who are willing to write for a small amount of money. (Pro: Maybe good. Con: Often bad.)
4. Find people who are willing to write for no money. (Pro: Free. Con: Crapshoot.)
5. Aggregate like a mug. (Pro: Can put smartest stuff on blog. Con: No one will link to it.)
6. Rewrite press releases so they look like original content. (Pro: Content. Con: You suck.)

Don't laugh. These are actual content strategies out there in the wilds of the Internet. I am sure you have encountered them.

Myself, I'm very partial to one and five. I hate two and six. For my own purposes here, let's say you do, too, and throw them out.

That leaves three and four, which I want to discuss here.

Let's stipulate two things: 1) I want people who want to make a living writing to be able to do so. 2) I do not think it is very easy to make a living writing freelance for digital-only publications for the reasons described below.

Most sites -- save the NYT, Drudge, and a handful of others -- can't send massive amounts of readers to stories. Traffic causality runs the other way: Individual stories live or die out there in the social world and that brings readers to theatlantic.com. A post has to succeed on its own, although a bigger brand, with more social tools and bigger homepage treatment can give it what I call "activation energy," the necessary but not sufficient first push into the web.

This is actually a great argument for long form and other quality pieces of analysis or reportage. People share them because they are definitive or delightful or interesting. And that brings good to the site.

But here's the weird thing: While the top six or seven viral hits might make up 15-20 percent of a given month's traffic, the falloff after that is steep. And once you're out of the top 20 or 30 stories, a really, really successful story is only driving 0.5 percent or less of a place like The Atlantic's monthly traffic. But that's the best-case scenario. In most cases, even great reported stories will fizzle, not spark. They will bring in 1,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 visitors. You'd need thousands of these to make a big site go.

I can already see some old-school journalists tearing up. This poor kid, he looks at the numbers and ergo, that's all he cares about. "Traffic," they spit. And I get it. The word has been used to bludgeon you into dumb shit. To put great stories on the shelf to build slideshows. To give up on quality and focus on quantity. I do get all that. But that's precisely why we (journalists) must understand the numbers! The business side of any publication knows them inside and out. If we don't understand how to tell good stories with our own data, who do you think wins any argument that involves data, which they all do? You can know money is important without succumbing to the idea that cash rules everything around you.)

Let me try to convince you of this: We can have binocular vision. We can understand these numbers. And we can know that the mission of a place like The Atlantic is to bring moral purpose, interesting ideas, great arguments, and excellent reporting to the world and to drive these stories as far as they will go into the public consciousness. 

Furthermore, looking at the numbers teaches you about the social reality of the Internet. In a very real sense, unless you look at the numbers, you do not know what (the dynamic sociotechnical space that is) the Internet looks like. Your view lets you see its boulevards and parks, but it is like a photograph from the 1850s when the exposure times were too long to capture moving people. Your Paris is empty.

OK, sorry, I will wipe the spittle off my screen now.

What do the numbers mean for an editor's strategy?

Here are the basics:

One, you gotta take a lot of shots. Hypothetically, let's say you devote an entire month to one single story, betting the house on it. In the very best circumstance, a viral hit heard round the world with a big traditional media push, you'd do maybe 800,000 uniques. And then you'd have to do the same thing the next month. In practice, no one can do this. Because you can't predict that viral hit. While the best stuff tends to do far, far better than average, it is not always the best stuff that hits virally. You can't control all the variables of the world's attention and some dudes at Reddit who really like stories about legalizing pot seeing *your particular story* about legalizing pot. In practical terms in the social world, there ain't no levers to pull! We write, we hope, we pray, we tweet. And that's it. So, you need to post frequently to make luck more likely to strike you.

Second, you want to become a node. And to become a node, you need to do things that inculcate trust from your readers, and you need to keep doing that over and over. In the digital world, we build the distribution networks day by day, and if you don't feed them, they shrink. So again, you need some basic level of posts.

Third, you need to do great stuff. But hell, you're posting all the time! How do you do great stuff? You find ways to optimize between speed and quality. Everyone has their own coping strategies. And it's always gonna be a tradeoff. In my view, you want to do the fast things as fast as possible so you can slow cook the other stuff. You trust your readers to know which is which (because they get it).

And where do freelancers fit in all this? Think about all these numbers. You are going to need dozens of successful posts, and because you can't control precisely what succeeds, that means even a small blog, with one person at the helm, is going to need, say, 100-150 posts a month.

If you've got $1000, that means you can count on paying 10 people $100. That gets you about 10 percent of the way. And now you've got to edit and handhold 10 people and (probably) take a lot of shit from people who think they are (and in fact, are) worth more than that. Run this same scenario with $3,000 a month. Or $4,000. (Perhaps you would decide, as we have, to hire another staffer instead of devoting $48,000 in freelance money to get 40 percent of the way to what you want.)

Or you could pay one person $1000, or $1/word for a great reported story about something awesome that you are almost sure will be a hit. OK, now you're to, say, 5 percent of your traffic goal and you're out of money. BUT THAT ONE PERSON IS PSYCHED. Run this same analysis with more money again. You can never get there paying a dollar a word, no matter how you scale up the money. And, your frequency is declining rapidly. You are becoming a less important node.

You have to want to be jacked into the Internet all day long, every day. This is not the life most journalists imagined when they were looking at 1970s magazines.

Perhaps you try to cut a deal with two people to blog for you several times a week for $500/month. That's 24 posts. And that almost seems workable as you scale up the money. In fact, we do this at The Atlantic and so do many other publications. But my perception is that no one feels satisfied with this arrangement. It's all the pressure of a full-time gig without the rewards. And on the editor side, the production tends to be uneven. The worst part is: It's hard to make someone part of your editorial mission when they're in this kind of position. You can't tell them about Ralph Waldo Emerson and Truman Capote and have them feel that they are part of this tradition.

No matter how you slice it with a small freelance budget, paying people is going to get you a very small amount of the way to your own internal or external goals. And if you think it is the ad-supported model, look at how Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish is doing. They are going to support a staff of five with the money they collect.

And so we return to the main topic at hand: what about people who write for free?

Let me state two things here. One, this can never be the backbone of an editorial strategy. It just won't work unless you screw everybody, including your readers. Two, I have cut all kinds of deals myself on this topic. I don't like to ask people for work that we can't pay for. But I'm not willing to take a hardline and prevent someone who I think is great from publishing with us without pay. My main point and (to be normative about it) the main point in these negotiations is this: What do you, the writer, get out of this?

But the fact is, a lot of people *do* get stuff out of it. They're changing careers into journalism, say. Or they're a scholar who wants to reach a broader audience. Or they've got a book coming out. Or they're a kid who begs you (begs you!) to take a flier on them, and you have to spend way too much time with her, but it's worth it because you believe she's talented, even if you know the story isn't going to garner a big audience.

All this to say: As a rule of thumb, it sucks to take free work from people who are freelancing for a living. Agreed. But this is not a law of the universe and I would hate to see this imposed on me by anybody out of an obligation to a theoretical journalism where this hurts everybody. Can't we take it case by case?

Some people reading this might say: This new world of digital journalism sucks. Hey, I agree sometimes! Some days, I'd much rather be out reporting on the latest world-shaking event that I discovered. I'd love to take six months (or hell, six weeks) writing one story while pulling in six figures. SIGN ME THE EFF UP FOR THIS JOB.

But the economics of these jobs were always bizarre. Many magazines have been funded by wealthy people who were willing to take moderate losses. (Thank you to all of you.) Or Conde Nast could suck money out of its newspapers to feed into its glorious magazine operations. Nevermind that back at the newspapers they kept people working for nothing at podunk papers that also happened to make crazy bank with their classified ads. Any time I imagine the glamorous world of writing for The Atlantic or The New Yorker or Harper's in 1968 or 1978, I remember that most journalists were going to homecoming football games and writing about the king and queen. Most journalists were humping around the local garden show and talking about trends in petunia horticulture. Most journalists were doing things that no one really wanted to do, but they did it anyway for money and for a shot at the show which almost never came. I respect the hell out of those journalists working at those local papers. They were doing the stuff that, at least within certain empires, that let the magazine editors have lunch at Balthazar's (or insert actual appropriate New York lunch spot).

And as for the magazines themselves, they had relatively small staffs of people who stuck around for a long, long time. Who wouldn't? You could pay good money for great work from awesome writers, and your friends, and your friends who were awesome writers. They loved you for it. But who really got those jobs anyway? Looking at the staff rosters, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been me, back then.

So, yeah, the economics of our business are terrible in some ways. And like everything else, the worst of it falls on the workers, the people making the widgets, doing the journalism, making the beds. The money gets sucked upwards and the work gets pushed down. 

But you know, even when you have a generous owner who is not trying to make a gazillion dollars and skim the cream, this game is still really, really hard. You still have limited funds. You still can't pay freelancers a living wage. The only strategy that makes sense is to hire some people. Then, you learn from each other (thanks, Megan Garber!). You work hard. You write good stuff. You comfort each other when people are huge a-holes in the comments. You catch typos for each other. You come up with jokes on Gchat. You figure out who has the golden touch with headlines (Derek Thompson is a certifiable genius at this). You make friends on the print side (Kate Julian! I know I owe you another Q&A candidate) and try to learn their game. You stare at Chartbeat and ask yourself, "Why am I doing this? It is two in the morning and I should be asleep and even my cat is giving me the stinkeye."

And then, you hope hope hope that this amounts to something sustainable. Because I owe it to this institution to help ensure its survival. I'll be damned if The Atlantic dies with my generation, if all that is left of it when I leave is some moldering books and cold servers. Quite possibly, I would get to the gates of heaven and Ida Tarbell would be sitting there like, "Wait, wait, *you're* one of those guys who let The Atlantic die?" And poof: trapdoor in the clouds, burning in hell for all eternity. Actually, strike that, I'd probably get stuck in purgatory rewriting press releases about corporate sustainability, forced to eat tuna sandwiches every day for lunch.

Anyway, the biz ain't what it used to be, but then again, for most people, it never really was. And, to you Mr. Thayer, all I can say is I wish I had a better answer.

Is the way we talk about the human mind messing with our ability to think about it clearly?

U.S. National Library of Medicine

The philosopher Colin McGinn is a tough book reviewer. He looks like a cop in an old movie about cops and robbers, and writes like one. And when he decided to take down Ray Kurzweil's new book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, he pulled no punches. First, he runs through Kurzweil's "pattern recognition theory of the mind":

One cannot help noting immediately that the theory echoes Kurzweil's professional achievements as an inventor of word recognition machines: the "secret of human thought" is pattern recognition, as it is implemented in the hardware of the brain. To create a mind therefore we need to create a machine that recognizes patterns, such as letters and words. ...

The process of recognition, which involves the firing of neurons in response to stimuli from the world, will typically include weightings of various features, as well as a lowering of response thresholds for probable constituents of the pattern. Thus some features will be more important than others to the recognizer, while the probability of recognizing a presented shape as an "E" will be higher if it occurs after "APPL."

These recognizers will therefore be "intelligent," able to anticipate and correct for poverty and distortion in the stimulus. This process mirrors our human ability to recognize a face, say, when in shadow or partially occluded or drawn in caricature.

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Then the assault begins. First, McGinn states that Kurzweil's whole theory is wrong, just on its face: "that claim seems obviously false." 

But the fascinating part of the critique is why Kurzweil's theory can seem plausible. And that comes down to the language Kurzweil (and other people) employ in writing about neuroscience. McGinn calls it "homunculism," the erroneous attribution of human-like qualities to pieces of a human. And it generates the illusion that we understand how synapses firing leads to an appreciation for rock 'n roll. 

[H]omunculus talk can give rise to the illusion that one is nearer to accounting for the mind, properly so-called, than one really is. If neural clumps can be characterized in psychological terms, then it looks as if we are in the right conceptual ballpark when trying to explain genuine mental phenomena--such as the recognition of words and faces by perceiving conscious subjects. But if we strip our theoretical language of psychological content, restricting ourselves to the physics and chemistry of cells, we are far from accounting for the mental phenomena we wish to explain. An army of homunculi all recognizing patterns, talking to each other, and having expectations might provide a foundation for whole-person pattern recognition; but electrochemical interactions across cell membranes are a far cry from actually consciously seeing something as the letter "A." How do we get from pure chemistry to full-blown psychology?

McGinn goes on:

Why do we say that telephone lines convey information? Not because they are intrinsically informational, but because conscious subjects are at either end of them, exchanging information in the ordinary sense. Without the conscious subjects and their informational states, wires and neurons would not warrant being described in informational terms.

The mistake is to suppose that wires and neurons are homunculi that somehow mimic human subjects in their information-processing powers; instead they are simply the causal background to genuinely informational transactions.

I find McGinn persuasive on this point. But I'm much more interested in homunculus language from the reader perspective. We can use the presentation of this language to find areas where we might be fooling ourselves into thinking we know more than we do. 

Here's my biotech reading list. I'd love your help fleshing it out.

I've spent the last few weeks creating a syllabus for myself on the world -- people, techniques, theory, history -- of biotechnology. I've talked with some scholars, accepted some Amazon recommendations, and done some rummaging around in bibliographies, but I'm only getting started. I thought I'd list my recent acquisitions here in hopes that you'll help me flesh my little self-taught course out. You know how to get a hold of me: comments here, @alexismadrigal, or amadrigal[at]theatlantic.com. 

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(Oh, and I'm also looking for journals and blogs that I should be keeping an eye on.) 

Right now, I'm pretty heavy on the theoretical and anthropological investigations of biotechnology. I'd like more basic texts on the techniques and some more scientist/technologist accounts of their own work and how it's shaped their thinking. If you can't tell from the readings, what I'm most interested in is the nature of life from the perspective of the people who manipulate it. 

Here's the list, sorted alphabetically by author last name:

Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era by Melinda Cooper

Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy by Sarah Franklin

Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene by Stephen Hall

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles

Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas by Stefan Helmreich

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes

Refiguring Life by Evelyn Fox Keller

Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller

Over the next six months or so, we're going to see an explosion of new ways of interacting with computers, televisions, and mobile devices.

The Leap Motion controller next to an iPhone 4S. Look how tiny that thing is. And it weighs almost nothing. (Alexis C. Madrigal)

The interfaces are coming! Over the next six months or so, we're going to see an explosion of new ways of interacting with computers, televisions, and mobile devices. Many of them are radical departures from the way things have been done, which is exciting. I'll run several down in this post that are slated to come out this year. 

Almost all of them will fail quickly and be forgotten forever. But there's a chance that one of these new technologies will hit a consumer sweetspot and become enshrined in our lives like the remote control or the keyboard. 

For decades after the creation of the graphical-user interface and the widespread adoption of the mouse, the computing interaction paradigm was largely static. You had a keyboard and a pointer on the screen that you controlled in some way, usually a mouse, but sometimes a touchpad or pointing stick (aka "red nubby thing on old Thinkpads").

Try as people might, and people like Microsoft's Bill Buxton have archived the evidence that they did, people liked the basic computing setup. It was fast and accurate, familiar and decently intuitive. 

But the iPhone -- and the brilliant iOS software and declining multi-touch display prices -- cracked that computing paradigm wide open. And for the last half a decade, touchscreens have more or less taken over for mobile computing. At the same time, gesture interfaces from Nintendo and Microsoft in the gaming space exploded, marking a serious move away from the traditional controller for non-hardcore gamers.

That's given a lot of new hardware interface designers hope, not to mention a plausible story to tell venture capitalists. Add a dash of Kickstarter funding and Sergey Brin's interest and you have an explosion of new possibilities. Here are five that I've noticed. What's fascinating is that all are slated to be out this year:

• The Leap Motion control system took preorders last year and just announced they'll be shipping in May. I've played with a Leap system and I found it fun and interesting. I'm not sure it will replace your touchscreen or laptop input devices, but at $79, it seems worth trying out. The Leap uses cameras to track your motion, but they say the actual secret sauce is in the math that allows them to do that tracking at very high speed and resolution.
• Thalmic Labs has a different approach. They give you an armband that tracks the electrical signals in your muscles. 
• Google Glass relies on a pure voice interface hooked to a small transparent screen. The Verge's Joshua Topolsky got to try a pair out and wrote up a fascinating essay about the exercise.
• Then there's the Mycestro, which is billed as a "3D wearable mouse." It consists of a big ring that you put on your index finger, which tracks your finger movements in space, allowing you to execute the basic functions of computing. The device's creator has raised more than $150,000 on Kickstarter.
• While it's easy to focus on new products, some of the most exciting work is coming in how people use and hack the Kinect. At least one analyst thinks that it will be the explosion of new uses for the Kinect that will lead the gesture control disruption.

J.C. Penney employees are reported to have watched five million YouTube videos from the office during the month of January.

Reuters

The number of YouTube videos employees watch is not exactly the kind of number tracked by corporate analysts or released by companies. Suffice to say, on the evidence of being a human being in the white-collar workforce, I have long been sure that the number of YouTube videos watched on the clock is astronomical, belonging to the category of numbers so large that you should write them like this: 10⁷. 

But it's hard to calculate. There are too many confounding variables. YouTube says it streams more than 4 billion videos per day, with about 40 percent coming from the US, so 1.6 billion American streams each day. Let's assume there are 300 million Americans who all watch exactly the same amount of videos each day. That'd be five per day per person in the United States. But how many come outside of work? How many come from the country's 55 million white-collar workers during the hours between 8 and 6pm? We just can't know. 

But, a factlet in a Wall Street Journal article on retailer J.C. Penney's struggles confirms that, under the right circumstances, desk jockeys can be extreme consumers of online video:

During January 2012, the 4,800 employees in Plano had watched five million YouTube videos during work hours, said Michael Kramer, a former Apple executive brought in by Mr. Johnson as chief operating officer.

As New York Times Magazine Hugo Lindgren noted on Twitter, that's 50 videos per person per day. J.C. Penney's Chief Operating Officer called the company's culture at the time "pathetic." But I wouldn't be surprised if the white-collar worker average was 10 videos a day or even more. Nine hours a day is a long time to stare at a screen and Aunt Laura keeps sending such funny clips!

Imagine the world before the microscope.

From Robert Hooke's "Micrographia"

Imagine that all humans knew about the world around them was what they could see with their naked eyes. Imagine a world without microscopes  It's hard to return to that condition. It's just so crazy to think that all the world consisted of what we could perceive with our somewhat limited visual perception.

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In a feature for Aeon Magazine, Philip Ball digs into what happened when people first gained access to the previously hidden worlds at the microscopic scale.

The implications were theological as much as they were scientific.

Invisibility comes in many forms, but smallness is the most concrete. Light ignores very tiny things rather as ocean waves ignore sand grains. During the 17th century, when the microscope was invented, the discovery of such objects posed a profound problem: if we humans were God's ultimate purpose, why would he create anything that we couldn't see?

The microworld was puzzling, but also wondrous and frightening. There was nothing especially new about the idea of invisible worlds and creatures -- belief in immaterial spirits, angels and demons was still widespread. But their purpose was well understood: they were engaged in the Manichean struggle for our souls.

Absent a way of interpreting all the wonders of the microscopic world, people drew on what they knew, religion, superstition, or even simply human life. Check out this idea that floated around during the late 19th century:

The physicist George Johnstone Stoney declared in 1891 that the physical universe is really an infinite series of worlds within worlds. The scientist Edmund Fournier d'Albe developed these ideas in Two New Worlds (1907), where he envisaged an 'infra-world' at a scale below that which microscopes could register, peopled, like Leeuwenhoek's drop of water, with creatures that 'eat, and fight, and love, and die, and whose span of life, to judge from their intense activity, is probably filled with as many events as our own'. The human body, he estimated, could play host to around 10 to the 40th power of these 'infra-men', experiencing joys and woes 'without the slightest net effect on our own consciousness'.

From a medical perspective, of course, the invention and refinement of the microscope helped humans figure out that bacteria could cause infection. But this piece of biomedical technology has not received a sufficient amount of attention as a probe for meaning. People often say in wonder, "Think of all the stars and galaxies that we now know exist!" But it's much more rare for people to marvel at the incomprehensible amount of life that exists invisibly right in front of them.

Emily Bazelon's deeply reported piece on bullying at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Watertown, Connecticut is full of important information. But for me, the most telling moment occurred when she traveled to Facebook headquarters to see how they dealt with so-called "third party" reports of about inappropriate content.

Once there, she found someone who scans through the requests. And she asked him how long he might spend deciding if a page should stay up or come down. In the section below, he tells her that they "optimize for half a second." Half a second! As it happens, in this story, a bullying Facebook group at Woodrow Wilson was incorrectly labeled as appropriate twice, despite not having been organized under a real name, so that it was clearly in violation of Facebook's terms of service, among other problems. The mislabeling by two reps also meant that any further requests to take it down would be ignored. Though no one making requests to take the page down -- like, say, the people working at the school -- would be informed that they were being ignored.

Facebook's come up with some remarkable tools for managing conflict on its site. They've pioneered efforts to identify suicidal users. And they've got a really, really tough problem on their hands when it comes to kids and bullying. Middle- and high-schoolers are all on Facebook and that means all their drama is on Facebook, too. (I should also note that no other social network handles these issues particularly well, either.)

But Facebook purports to be a safer, real-namey Internet. That's part of the pitch, right? And they claim to have ways of handling problems like this, which serves as a defense to the suggestion that perhaps a government agency should try to regulate them, especially around minors' use of the service. These methods they have, though, are almost always opaque. They claim everything is working well and we have to believe that's true because there are no independent audits being made.

And that's why Bazelon's account from inside Facebook is so important. She got to see the tools and management practices at work. And what she saw dismays me. Facebook could clearly provide better customer service, but they don't want to. Why not? It costs money. Even when they do hire people, of whom they clearly don't have enough, they force them to work at a pace that ensures mistakes. It strikes me that they're optimizing not for actual responsiveness to real concerns but the appearance of responsiveness to real concerns.

This probably isn't surprising. This is how businesses work. Facebook itself recognizes this is an issue and how they might solve it. Here's one of their disclosures in the company's annual report to the SEC:

We have in the past experienced, and we expect that in the future we will continue to experience, media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny of our decisions regarding user privacy or other issues, which may adversely affect our reputation and brand. We also may fail to provide adequate customer service, which could erode confidence in our brand. Our brand may also be negatively affected by the actions of users that are deemed to be hostile or inappropriate to other users, or by users acting under false or inauthentic identities. Maintaining and enhancing our brand may require us to make substantial investments and these investments may not be successful. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain the Facebook brand or if we incur excessive expenses in this effort, our business and financial results may be adversely affected.

The bet Facebook is making is this: they'll catch most baldly inappropriate content if they give their reviewers half a second to look at each page. Sure, they'll miss some, but that's good enough to keep users on the platform and operations cost low enough for investors.

That's reasonable, at least until Facebook's consumers demand more accountability from the company.

The whole story should serve as a reminder that when we talk about "online bullying," we need to specify where that bullying is occurring and identify the actors involved. Decrying "the Internet" does little. Identifying the people who are responsible for reviewing bullying pages on Facebook -- and the processes that limit their effectiveness -- could do a lot.

Here's the full anecdote from Bazelon's piece:

Sullivan cycled through the complaints with striking speed, deciding with very little deliberation which posts and pictures came down, which stayed up, and what other action, if any, to take. I asked him whether he would ever spend, say, 10 minutes on a particularly vexing report, and Willner raised his eyebrows. "We optimize for half a second," he said. "Your average decision time is a second or two, so 30 seconds would be a really long time." (A Facebook spokesperson said later that the User Operations teams use a process optimized for accuracy, not speed.) That reminded me of Let's Start Drama. Six months after Carbonella sent his reports, the page was still up. I asked why. It hadn't been set up with the user's real name, so wasn't it clearly in violation of Facebook's rules?

After a quick search by Sullivan, the blurry photos I'd seen many times at the top of the Let's Start Drama page appeared on the screen. Sullivan scrolled through some recent "Who's hotter?" comparisons and clicked on the behind-the-scenes history of the page, which the Common Review Tool allowed him to call up. A window opened on the right side of the screen, showing that multiple reports had been made. Sullivan checked to see whether the reports had failed to indicate that Let's Start Drama was administered by a fake user profile. But that wasn't the problem: the bubbles had been clicked correctly. Yet next to this history was a note indicating that future reports about the content would be ignored.

We sat and stared at the screen.

Willner broke the silence. "Someone made a mistake," he said. "This profile should have been disabled." He leaned in and peered at the screen. "Actually, two different reps made the same mistake, two different times."

There was another long pause. Sullivan clicked on Let's Start Drama to delete it.

If you've been following the blog this week, you've seen our posts on a cat that left its pawprints on a medieval scribe's work and another that left its mark on a brick made in England during Roman times that ended up in a remote outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company called Fort Vancouver in Washington State, where it now sits in a museum to be visited by schoolchildren. 

I love both of these cat stories, but neither of them is as funny as the duo of anecdotes recorded by Thijs Porck, a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Culture at Universiteit Leiden. 

In the first, he recounts the story of a 1420 scribe whose precious work was peed on by one cat and then, the smell being attractive to other cats, many other felines. He had to draw a little picture of a cat and what appear to be hands pointing to the edges of the urine stain. Reader beware, he seems to be saying (here with the original Latin and Porck's translation):

"Hic non defectus est, sed cattus minxit desuper nocte quadam. Confundatur pessimus cattus qui minxit super librum ostum in nocte Daventrie, et consimiliter omnes alii propter illum. Et cavendum valde ne permittantur libri aperti per noctem uni cattie venire possunt."

[Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many others [other cats] too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.]

Given the everpresent risk of urination, why would these scribes keep the cats around? As you might guess and Porck confirms, the cats helped keep down the mice, who loved to munch on the paper.

This helpful hunting tendency was immortalized in Porck's second anecdote. This one comes from a fairly well known poem by a 9th-century Irish monk, and it describes a scene many writers with cats will be familiar with:

I and Pangur Bán my cat, 
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Why do I bother telling you these funny cat stories? Because I think they humanize history in a useful way. It's easy to remember 1420 as kings and wars and agricultural statistics. And it those are useful ways of thinking about the past. But so is the idea that tucked inside every historical moment, no matter how big, you will find someone nearby sitting in a room writing poems about the cat. Which surprises exactly no one about our own time, but can seem astonishing in history.

A team of forensic experts are trying to stanch the flow of prescription drugs into the black market.

Edited from flickr/grump puddin

The evolution of health technology. See full coverage

A look at Google's new laptop, the Chromebook Pixel, unveiled today at an event today in San Francisco

How did a Roman brick from the British Isles get to Washington state's Fort Vancouver?

Fort Vancouver Historical National Historic Site

At some moment a few years after Jesus Christ died but before the second century began, someone made a brick on the island that would become the cornerstone of Great Britain. The area was controlled by Rome then, and known as Britannia  and as the brick lay green, awaiting the kiln, a cat walked across the wet clay and left its footprints before wandering off to do something else. The clay was fired, the prints fixed, and the brick itself presumably became a piece of a building or road.

Two thousand years later, a Sonoma State master's student named Kristin Converse was poking around the holdings of the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state. She was writing her thesis on the business and technology of brickmaking in Portlandia (known more formally as the Willamette Valley). A brick caught her eye. It was part of an odd group that was not of local origin. In one corner, there were the footprints of a cat. Where had this cat lived? 

Back in 1982, the bricks in question had been examined by an archaeologist named Karl Gurcke who specializes in the identification of bricks. "The only bricks that come near to matching this type in size are the so-called 'Roman' bricks," Gurcke wrote in a report on excavations at Fort Vancouver. This suggested that the "type may indeed be Roman in origin," and that they were "shipped over from England."

Converse tested the presumed Roman bricks, using a process called neutron activation analysis, which allows scientists to determine the elemental components of a material. Bricks made from different clays and at different times show particular chemical signatures, so she could compare bricks from the Fort to bricks from Endland. "They tested very well like Roman bricks from England," Bob Cromwell, an archaeologist at Fort Vancouver told me. "It is still a hypothesis, but the data is all pointing in that direction: the size and the elemental analysis compares very favorably with definitive Roman bricks."

The question became, then, how did a Roman brick from the British Isles get to Fort Vancouver?

Fort Vancouver Historical National Historic Site

The answer: the mercantile empire of the Hudson's Bay Company, a commercial entity substantially older than the United States, having been incorporated in 1670. The Company controlled the entire Pacific Northwest under a local company official known as the Chief Factor. Although after 1818, the region was nominally under the shared control of the U.S. and Britain, the only real western power was the Hudson's Bay Company, and the only real resources it could draw on came from its global network of trading ships and outposts.

Fort Vancouver was the seat of the Company's west coast operations. It was established in the winter of 1824-1825 on the banks of the Columbia River, a few miles north of what would become Portland, Oregon. With the Willamette and the Columbia right there, it was like setting up shop at the intersection of two major highways. But despite the great location and abundant resources of the region, they didn't actually have the equipment or know-how to do a lot of things. 

While there were roughly 25 Native American tribes in the region, there were not any brickmakers among them, which meant there weren't any bricks. So, the Hudson's Bay Company, which ran the Fort, had to order them from a world away.

"You can certainly bring over brickmakers to look at the local lays and the Columbia River silts are great for making common brick. But at the time, when they are out there establishing their post, if they want some brick for their chimney, there just isn't any," Gurcke said, when I reached him at his job with the Park Service in Skagway, Alaska. "So they ship them from, in this case, England. We do have some records of them shipping bricks very early from England."

It often took two years for the bricks to reach the Fort, which is one reason that many brickmakers sprung up in later decades. Converse, in fact, found several spots in the Willamette Valley that could have provided bricks to Fort Vancouver in later decades as settlers arriving via the Oregon Trail figured out that the little city was a good market. 

But those are hard stories to tell, as Converse discovered, because the early brickyards have long since been built over with houses and TGIFriday's. She can prove that many bricks at Fort Vancouver were made from Willamette Valley clay, but it's hard to say more.

It's almost easier to tell the global story than it is to tell the local one because the strangeness of the material can be pinpointed more easily. For example, the mortars that were used to cement bricks together were made from Hawaiian corals.

"They had a trading station at Oahu, harvesting coral, and shipping it here," Cromwell said. "We have bricks with this coral mortar still adhering to it. They would break up the coral, mix it with sand and water and you'd have an instant mortar."

And none of this is to mention "the Village," which sprung up outside the Fort and housed up to 600 people from all over the world including "English, French-Canadian, Scottish, Irish, Hawaiian, Iroquois, and people from over 30 different regional Native American groups." They learned to speak Chinook Jargon, a mixture of Chinook, English, and French. Every once in a while, Cromwell told me, people from other European nations would show up, too, or a few Japanese sailors would come by after having been shipwrecked.

So to make a lowly chimney in some house in the employee village near the Fort, you might have Roman bricks, mortared together with Hawaiian coral, and built with the labor of a Portuguese worker or an Iroquois visitor. Globalization! And it was the middle of the 19th century: Mark Twain was still a child.

What's fascinating, too, is that this story can be told with an almost unthinkably mundane object, the common brick, which turns out to be uncommon if you look hard enough.

"At a glance, bricks appear all alike, yet upon examination, they can exhibit a frustrating degree of variation. Unbranded bricks in particular provide an unsatisfying ratio of information gained to curation space occupied, and many excavated bricks went unrecorded, uncollected, and even discarded," Converse notes in her master's thesis, with just a note of despair. "Yet bricks have a story to tell if we can coax it from them, and contain potential information regarding the development of industry, trade networks, construction techniques, resource utilization, and even attitudes and status."

And sometimes, they tell you a story about a mischievous cat whose imprint traveled all the way around the world, then ended up in a museum. Which I learned about because Cara Tramontano tweeted it after words started going around about another cat who left his imprint on a southeastern European scribe's work from March 11, 1445. 

Where, exactly, do the epistemology books cover this sort of thing? I'm sure I'll find out soon, after a cat walks across someone's keyboard and accidentally tweets me a link to a letter by a philosopher who will turn out to be my mother's cousin's best friend, and the world expert on serendipity in Jacksonian America.

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake talks with Alexis Madrigal about how new location-based tools will help us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes.

Caterina Fake describes how her startup, Findery, is helping the Internet get local.

Augmented reality is very exciting. The promise of it is this: all the information on the Internet overlaid on the real world exactly where and when you need it. What's that mountain called? A pop up could tell you. What's the highest rated restaurant on the block? Boom, the reviews arrive on your Google Glass or screen. Want to know which neighborhoods of Oakland prevented non-white people from moving in? You could overlay the historical maps right onto the world in front of you.

But when you really start to think about it, the dream of augmented reality recedes. Who is going to make all this geotagged content? And how are people going to use it? What genres and forms are going to be natural to read out there in the world rather than (as we imagine readers) curled up on the couch?

Luckily, Caterina Fake has built a site that's testing the content question. Findery is a service that relies on user-generated annotations of the physical world. Her users are, in some ways, evolving towards finding good answers to some of the questions about augmented-reality content.

We spoke for a Q&A running in our beautifully redesigned magazine. This is an extended remix of that conversation.

You've been working at consumer-oriented Internet companies for more than a decade. How has the Internet changed in that time?

We've gone through this really expansive phase, and we are in a state of reunification and refocus on the local. I don't know how long you would say the expansive period lasted, maybe 10 years. It was a period of all-embracing, global vision. When we were making Flickr, we called it the "Eyes of the World." The idea was that everybody, everywhere, is looking. It was this sense of being able to penetrate worlds that you had never been able to access before--of global, universal travel. It was really big and really amazing and mind-blowing and mind-boggling, and it's the reason that I was into the Internet to begin with.

When I first got online, it was in the '80s, and I was on all these bulletin-board services. I was really into [Jorge Luis] Borges, and I found this whole group of Borges scholars in Denmark. Here I am, I'm a teenager, I'm living in suburban New Jersey, and I don't have anybody to talk to, but I meet all these people online, and I learn all about Borges. When you're remote like that, the Internet can give a sense of connection to people.

So we built a lot of tools to make it easier and easier for everybody to get online and do the same thing. I think we've reached capacity in that sense--in the sense of the globalization of the individual mind.

And now things are changing. Are we entering a new phase?

I think we are gaining a new appreciation for the here and now, for the place we live, for the people in our neighborhood, for groundedness. This may be something that comes from social-media exhaustion. You see the early indications of a return to the local.

The computers people have are no longer on their desks, but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world. So your location is known. It used to be that you would search for a florist in Bellingham, Washington, and get the most popular florist in the world. But now the computer knows where you are; it even knows what block you're on.

How will this change what people actually read and watch and listen to? And how will Findery work?

Findery lets you tease out local knowledge, hidden secrets, stories and information about the world around you. People can annotate places in the real world, leave notes tagged to a specific geographic location--an address, a street corner, a stream, a park bench, the rock at the end of the road. Then, other people find those notes.

To give you some examples, I've lived for years in my house in San Francisco but had no idea, till Findery, that Anne Rice wrote Interview With the Vampire down the street, and that Courtney Love lived on the block when she was dating Kurt Cobain. The Safeway near my house turns out to almost have been a funeral home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and there's a famous artist working out of an abandoned building nearby. I've learned the names of plants I'd never noticed before. Someone has grafted branches from fruit trees onto the trees in the park near my office, and you can forage fruit from them. You shouldn't cross the street on the south side of Gough but on the north side, which will save you time, the way the traffic lights are timed.

People do lovely things on Findery, like leave drawings of a place in that place, and write poems about places and leave them there. People make little scavenger hunts and leave private notes for each other.

You are a longtime Internet person. Why do you care so much about sense of place?

My background is in art. I was a painter and an occasional sculptor, and I really like materials--you know, stuff. Physical objects. The world and the trees and the sunshine and the flowers. And all of that doesn't seem to really exist out in the ether of the Internet. Bringing people back into that actual, feel-able world is very important. My life project is humanizing technology: making technology more real and bringing it back into human interactions.

Where are you right now?

I'm sitting in a house that was built in the 1920s, in Finland. I have a book here that has the names of all of the people who have ever lived in this house--this wonderful old book. And you know this book should be out there: you should know this as you're coming down the street. You should be able to see that these were all railroad workers' houses once upon a time, and these are the families that lived there, and there were seven children living in two rooms.

What do you want Findery to feel like? How are we going to see this kind of content layered onto the planet?

It will be like a magic book, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when it is fully built out. It's this sort of magical little board that you flip open and everything around you is revealed.

An adventure machine.

An adventure machine! Information and queries start coming up around you.

Do you think we might see these things pop up on a hands-free, head-mounted augmented-reality display, like Google's Project Glass?

I actually find that heads-up displays in cars and on Google Glass remove you from the presence of the people around you. But in the end, I'm not really a hardware person. I'm ecumenical about delivery systems--I'm more focused on the what than the how.

Could more knowledge lead people to shun dangerous or crime-ridden areas?

There was a lot of crime information on Findery for Hunters Point, a poor neighborhood in San Francisco. As a team, we felt an urge to make the place come alive, to say, "This is the community, this is the history of the place, here's the important stuff that's going on now." That can't happen unless you give people a place to talk. If a newspaper reports on Hunters Point, the "if it bleeds it leads" attitude dominates. The news doesn't tell you the story of a place as the locals know it.

Are there any other downsides to consuming all this local knowledge?

If you have a beginner's mind when you arrive in a new place, it can be very wonderful. I went to Rome for the first time in 2006, and I honestly didn't know how wonderful it would be. I thought, Oh, it's a city of ruins. Not much more than that. When I got there, my mind was blown. I had never seen a place so dense with amazing things. So there's something to showing up somewhere without any local knowledge.

I'm fascinated by the production side of this. So often, when content producers think about someone reading something, they imagine her curled up on a couch or sitting in a posture of repose. One thing that's fascinating about local content is that people are going to be reading it while they are out in the world. So how do the things that we make for them have to change?

You mean is the content immersive?

How do you decide what to write about? Let's say you're walking down a street and you see an interesting gargoyle on a building, and you think, "God that's the most interesting thing on this block" we should write about that gargoyle. When we start to think about publishing an entire city, how do we prioritize the stories?

So the last startup that I did was Hunch. Hunch uses a lot of heavy math and machine learning to reveal to you things that it thinks you are interested in. It uses all kinds of algorithms to figure out, "Oh this is a gargoyle guy and not a golf guy." Right? This is a person who is interested in history and not a person who's interested in celebrity gossip. So there's a lot of kind of heavy brute force computation going into figuring out those things. Putting that stuff together, hopefully you end up in a world where you are finding things that are interesting to you--but there's also a great deal of chance built into the algorithms, so you don't live in a filter bubble.

It seems like every distribution medium ends up coalescing around certain forms, specific ways of writing. Newspapers have the 600-word story. Magazines gave us longer profiles. What will be Findery's defining form?

The form Findery is zeroing in on is shorter than a blog post, longer than a tweet. It's pithy--a paragraph, maybe two. Because you're mobile, you're not going to read a novel; you want the précis, the distillation, the thing that you need to know. And then, if you want to dig deeper, you dig deeper.

It's better without context, but if you must know, here it is. 

The happiest city in America is Napa, California -- and the saddest all swear too much.

Red states are relatively happier. Blue states are relatively less happy. Gray states are neutral.

Sorry, Louisiana, you are the saddest state. And Hawaii (shocker!) you are the happiest. 

That's according to a team at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, who posted their new analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets to to arXiv.org. They call their creation a "hedonometer."

They also found that the Bible belt stretching across the American south and into Texas was less happy than the west or New England. The saddest town of the 373 urban areas studied was Beaumont in east Texas. The happiest was Napa, California, home of many drunk people wine makers. The only town among the 15 saddest that was not in the south or Rust Belt was Waterbury, Connecticut. (Although Waterbury has appeared on several "worst places to live" lists, which seems like mean lists to make.)

The researchers coded each tweet for its happiness content, based on the appearance and frequency of words determined by Mechanical Turk workers to be happy (rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine) or sad (damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied). While the researchers admit their technique ignores context, they say that for large datasets, simply counting the words and averaging their happiness content produces "reliable" results.

Here's a closer look at how they calculated a happiness for the top and bottom cities. The illustration is a little confusing, so let's walk through it because it really shows the methodology of the research. 

Next to each word are two symbols, a plus or minus (+/-) and up or down arrows. The plus or minus indicates whether that word is considered happy or sad. The up or down arrow indicates whether that word was used more or less than average in that city. So, let's take 'shit' as an example. Shit, a negative word, was used less often in Napa and more often in Beaumont. The size of the bar that you see shows how much that word contributed to the happiness rating for the city. So, the lack of shits in Napa played a substantial role in its high rating, while the prevalence of shits hurt Beaumont's happiness rating. Looking just at Beaumont, one can see why it got a low rating. The only positive words at the top of its ledger are "lol" and "haha," and there were not enough hahas to bring it up to the national average. The rest of the words -- shit, ass, damn, gone, no, bitch, hell -- were negative and used often.  

For individual cities, the Vermont researchers note, the amount of swearing contributed substantially to their final scores. They think it's worth investigating this phenomenon, which they call "geoprofanity."

One difficulty I have with the study is that it doesn't take into account that people might just talk about happiness differently in some parts of the country or within some demographic groups. The study identified people with Norwegian ancestry as happier than African Americans. Is that because the Norwegians are actually happier or do they just tweet as if they're happier? 

This is not an easy problem to solve, but the authors of the new paper do an admirable job showing that their data correlates with other existing measures of happiness, primarily surveys conducted by Gallup. They also show that their happiness data correlates with income and the prevalence of obesity in an area. 

We should also note that many people vacation in Napa (the top city) and Hawaii (the stop state), which might throw off the numbers at the very top. But if you look a bit farther down the lists, you see cities (Longmont, Green Bay, Spokane, San Jose) and states (Idaho, Maine, Washington) that are not year-round tourism hot spots, but still score very high on the hedonometer. 

Another problem is that the researchers did not look at Twitter in Spanish. If the researchers contention that income is positively correlated with happiness is true, cities where the poor population is primarily Spanish speaking would appear happier on this list than warranted. The prevalence of Western states with large Latino populations on the happy list would seem to suggest this bias is worth exploring.

Nonetheless, it's fascinating to see people exploring how to quantify happiness beyond survey data. I'd love to see examples of cities that overperform on happiness relative to their economic factors. Do they just have good weather or has some set of policies had an actual impact? 

Just a few pixels on a screen, moving slowly

When I tuned into NASA's livestream of the asteroid 2012 DA14's closest approach to earth, I'm not sure what I expected. What I saw was this: a few pixels moving up a screen. It looked like a screenshot from Pong. And that was it. The approach came and went (happily!).

Perhaps I have been conditioned by the Hubble Space Telescope and the movie Armageddon to expect a lot from space, visually speaking. The thing is, though: This is how a lot astronomy looks. Grainy images, tiny changes tracked through hard work and almost miraculous engineering. The stunning visual is the exception not the rule.

At least, that's what the early data suggests.

The meteor we all saw streaking across YouTube from Russian dashboard cameras was the largest in a century, a scientist who studied the event told Nature's Geoff Brumfiel.

That would make it the biggest rock to hit the Earth since 1908's Tunguska wiped out a big old patch of Siberia.

"It was a very, very powerful event," says Margaret Campbell-Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who has studied data from two infrasound stations near the impact site. Her calculations show that the meteoroid was approximately 15 metres across when it entered the atmosphere, and put its mass at around 40 tonnes.

The infrasound stations are owned by Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, and are designed to provide independent data on weapons tests. The Russian meteor was substantially more powerful than the North Korean nuclear weapons test this month.

Brumfiel also reports that no scientist saw the meteor strike coming, which would have become visible a day or two ago. We might find out more about the meteor strike from military satellites, if the government decides to release that data.

Today, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at Goldman's technology conference with analyst Bill Shope. Among other factoids, Cook mentioned that 120 million people visited Apple's retail stores last year.

I wondered how that stacked up against Disney's theme parks across the globe. It turns out, they're close! Add up all the Disney lands and worlds and kingdoms and 125 million people visited a theme park in 2011, the last year for which statistics are available