five | oclock | bot: Some Monday Bits and Bobs in Order to Distract

January 24, 2024

Some Monday Bits and Bobs in Order to Distract

Various things on the web today keeping me from focusing on the obvious...

MPR's new radio station, 89.3 The Current, launched this morning. Right now some guy named Thorn is playing all my favorite music. Go, Thorn, go! You can stream it, which is what I'm doing now at work. My iPod is sitting in its caddy looking all forlorn. Okay now he's playing music by local band The Owls. Love this.
Via the BBC, Shooting in Tal Afar. It broke my heart. It's graphic. But it's real in a way that mentioning "freedom" 27 times in some goddamn speech will never trump.
Do you subscribe to Publisher's Lunch? I do, and I love it. Right as I'm about to bite into my soggy pb&j, it arrives in my inbox. Sometimes, when it's good, reading it is like eavesdropping in some Union Square powerlunchteraunt. And it can get bitchy sometimes! Today they make fun of a Dartmouth academic...

As longtime readers know, we're not only interested in what's happening every day, but in how traditional news organizations decide what to cover. So when we first saw Dartmouth College's press release a couple of weeks ago about research presented by Russian Language and Literature assistant professor Mikhail Gronas tabulating some Amazon reviews and declaring it "a palpable, probabilistic approach to literary criticism," we shrugged it off. (He applies academic catchphrases like "index of controversiality" that make academic the obvious: pointed books by the likes of Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh tend to draw a lot of strongly negative and positive, or one star and five star, reviews. Drawing on his extensive background and research, Prof. Gronas' concludes, "I suspect that books that have a high 'index of controversiality' are more likely to sell better.") The release also underscores that Gronas got a friend to "write a computer program to collect the information." Ooooh.

We revisit this non-story today because it has now become Times-worthy. The paper also takes note of the "computer program" involved. (It's just a hunch, but we suspect they used Amazon's web services, as do hundreds of thousands of programmers every day.)

The Times at least reveals why Dartmouth is encouraging Gronas's straying beyond his field. They are patenting the software that determines the "controversiality index," in the "hope that book companies would use the index to market books."

There's also a funny story about Oprah's reaction to a book publisher turning down her offer to be featured in a favorites segment of her show: "Can you believe that? They did, and so you know what I said? 'Well, it's not going to be my favorite thing no more!' But how dumb is that? That's pretty dumb. It's a book! How many books could you have sold? It's a beautiful book."

Of course, this is all mere distraction. Tim sent me beautiful tulips today, which made me cry at my desk. They're drinking up water, smelling like spring, and looking beautiful.