How People Read Online Content
So, apparently, people read web content in an F-shaped pattern.
I find this infinitely fascinating, mostly because it reflects how I read web content, but also from a publishing perspective. It emphasises just how differently one should present and publish information electronically and physically.
It is of particular interest to anyone (viz: bloggers) who actually want their content read. Like me.
The Momentous Day
12:30pm, Saturday, April 29th. My scheduled time to sit down and take the GRE.
I had written down my directions and confirmed my appointment time yesterday, so I would be prepared this morning. I got a good nine hours of sleep last night, and this morning, a half-assed meditation and a full breakfast. I intended to leave the house a quarter to 12, figuring that this would give me plenty of time. Of course, I didn't get out of the house until 12, and then discovered as I was pulling out of my driveway that I had somehow lost the paper with the directions on it. Naturally.
I frantically started dialing numbers of people who, a) might know, or b) might be in front of a computer. Gabe was my first choice, but I received no answer. Andrew was my second choice, and I received both an answer and an affirmative to the computer requirement. I had him look up the ETS number, only to realize right after he had given it to me that I still had it in my phone from yesterday. Long story short, I did, in fact, get the address.
Which didn't really help, as there was not a building on Wichita St with an address on it. I belatedly called the testing center itself and was on the phone with the lady when a man yelled at me that if I was taking the GRE, I was a half hour late and I had better get my ass in there. Which I did, forthwith and with chagrin.
The test experience was unremarkable, although my frenetic search for the building in question had taken a certain toll on my previously unruffled nerves.
I think I aced the essays; according to the Princeton Review graders, my most common problem was lack of detail in my examples. I feel that I ameliorated (yes, that was a vocabulary word) that error, to what extent only the grades will tell me. I'll know in a couple of weeks.
The verbal I felt I did rather average on. There were no strains of brilliance in my performance; as always the reading comprehension made me feel rushed. I think I may have not paid enough attention to the first third of the test. My score ended up being a 660, or the 92nd percentile, worse than my last two practice tests, but better than my first. I'm disappointed by this; I was hoping to get in the high 90s, or really, anywhere in the 700s would have made my year and confirmed my brilliance.
The math I felt like I bombed. They kept throwing me xy axis questions, and I couldn't remember the formula to find a slope, and I ended up guessing and spending too much time on those questions. Somehow, I still ended up with a higher score than all my practice tests: 620. According to my Princeton review book, that's in the 50th percentile; Alex tells me that can't be right simply because of the standard deviation. This basically means that, according to Alex, I should be in a higher percentile; not something I'm going to argue with. Regardless, I can't complain; my goal was to get an average score, at least 50th percentile. Although, that doesn't really assist my delusions of grandeur.
Next step: Research schools and hone my senior thesis (re archetype in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, interesting in and of itself, since Nabokov hated that sort of thing) so that it will be ready for applications come fall.
Humor, Parental Concern, and Jogging: A Blog in Three Parts
Wow. Just, wow. Gabe just drew my attention to how imbecilic and assinine my sense of humor can be.
I was exceptionally diverted by this Harry Potter comic, in which Snape is a Snog-hunter, paid by parents to descry and prevent the illicit actions of their offspring attending Hogwarts. It is quite convivial, really.
Upon sharing this brilliant parody with the afore mentioned Mr. Golden (who laughed, even if he did not find it quite as jocular as I), he pointed out that, while I was easily amused, I was even more easily amused by the integration my various interests into forms that already tickle me. His example was as follows:
Take this comic (the very existence of which causes me to giggle),
Replace the first two pinatas with Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the third pinata with Dumbledore, and the children with Deatheaters.
I, predictably, died laughing. Although the IM use of "LOL" and "ROFL" has become so pedestrian that it is rarely meant literally anymore, I most certainly meant it for its intended purpose (although I tend to use "hahaha" or "bahaha" in place of the more ubiquitous abbreviations, in any case). I was having to deal with the escape of repressed laughter, in the form of snorts and titters, in a workplace environment. And thus, he lay his case to rest.
Shifting gears completely, my mother is adorably over-concerned about my GRE on Saturday, for which I have been (sort of) studying feverishly. For the past few weeks, everytime I talk to her, she has some new miracle cure to help me win. In fact, as of now, I believe she has my entire test-taking experience planned. It is the only time I can honestly say that she has encouraged my consumption of coffee. Besides that she has some essential oil blend I'm supposed to put on my hands to smell through-out, I must take my amino-acid supplement, and 8 hours of sleep the night before is essential.
I think she may be more concerned and nervous about it than I am.
Christian said something to me a while ago about going to graduate school, and I can relate a little more right now than I could when he told me. He said that after he applied, while he was waiting for his answers, actually goingbecame less important. And while my goal right now is to become a literature professor, if it doesn't happen, then I'll just do something else, and the discovery of it will only be another adventure. Having gone through the steps, at least I know I explored the options.
Finally, I am impressed with myself for keeping up with my jogging. I'm into my second week and my stamina has improved strikingly. When I started, I had a jog:walk ratio of about 1:3 blocks. I'm now at a 2:1 ratio, starting with a full 4 block jog. I don't know if I've been able to do that since I was a kid.
I can tell a difference in my mood the following day if I run or don't run. I'm just not as lively or happy or in love with life if I skipped my run. That is not to say that I actually like the process. Honestly, if I enjoyed it more and pushed myself just a little harder, my jog:walk ratio could be higher. I'm not generally winded when I stop my two block jogs. But my goal is to jog the full 15 minutes that I'm running, so I will have to push myself a little more, bit by bit. The 2:1 ratio is still new to me, so I'm still rather proud of it.
Plague & Pestilence
::edit:: I want to rewrite the conclusion of this, as it was very late at night when I finished and I was too tired to conclude correctly, because I actually changed my opinion slightly towards the end of writing this. I just haven't had the opportunity yet, so take my conclusion with a grain of salt.
(On a side note, I need to find somewhere to purchase that cursed card game.)
I have noticed that, in general, modern humanity is full of pansies.
Andrew sent me a couple links earlier this evening about diseases, about mumps in Iowa and, of course, bird flu doomsday predictions. The most interesting thing about modern pandemics is how propotionally few people die in them than died in ancient pandemics, and how big a fuss is made about them.
Just so we're clear on definitions, according to Wikipedia,
...an epidemic (from Greek epi- upon + demos people) is a disease that appears as new cases in a given human population, during a given period, at a rate that substantially exceeds what is "expected", based on recent experience...
A pandemic is a widespread, possibly worldwide, epidemic. Take the total death tolls from 20th century pandemics and calculate the percent of the world's population that died, then compare them to past pandemics.
The Typhoid fever epidemic of Peloponnesian War killed 25% of Athenian troops and, over four years, 25% of the Athenian population. It most likely contributed to the eventual Athenian loss of the said war. As an interesting side note, it was only just, this past January, confirmed by University of Athens researchers, who analyzed teeth from a mass grave underneath the city, that the bacteria responsible was typhoid. Five million people are said to have died of smallpox during the Antonine Plague. The world population at the time was 170-400 million people, so it killed a significant percentage; 5,000 people a day were said to be dying in Rome.
The Justinian plague, the first recorded outbreak of bubonic, killed an estimated 25 million people when the world's population was between 190-206 million. Byzantine chroniclers recorded that 10,000 people a day were dying in Constantinople at its peak (regarded by historians to be inaccurately high, but still). It basically cost the Byzantine Empire control of western Europe, and plunged western Europe into the Dark Ages, which, when you look at the bubonic outbreaks of the 1300s, is almost a blessing. Those killed an estimated 20 million in six years while the world population was between 360-432 million, killing a quarter of the total European population and up to half the population of the worst-affected urban areas. Imagine how many more people would have died in that outbreak if Europe had been as well connected in the 1300s as it was during the Justinian plague. Did the 1918 influenza pandemic cost a superpower a continent? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Then there were the cholera pandemics of the 1800s. I couldn't find total death tolls for these, just X number of people dead in Y year in Z place, X varying from 1000 to 100,000, but they were almost thought of as foregone conclusions by the end of the 19th century (read some literature from the time to get a sense).
Typhus, emerged during the Crusades in the late 15th century. The world population was between 425-540 million. The Spanish lost 3,000 to war casualties and 20,000 to typhus in Granada, while fighting the Muslims. In the early 16th century, 18,000 French troops were lost to typhus in Italy, causing the French lose contol of Italy to the Spanish. Mid-16th century, 30,000 people died of typhus in the Balkans, fighting the Ottomans.
I'm not even going to touch on numbers of natives lost to diseases brought over by colonialists and colonists. It's touched upon in the Wikipedia pandemic entry, and it's horrifying.
By the time the 20th century influenza epidemics hit, there was just really no room for comparison. The Spanish flu, the 1918 pandemic everyone keeps going on about, killed about 50 million, while the world's population was between 1.5-1.7 billion. My mom sent me an interesting article several months ago about the purported link between self-medicating with aspirin and the pandemic. Sort of makes you remember that fevers do serve a purpose until they're high enough for long enough that they might be harmful. The Asian Flu in the late 1950s kills about 70 thousand in the United States, when the population in North America was about 187 million, and the Hong Kong flu of the late 1960s caused half as many deaths in the US when the North American population half again as large.
Meanwhile, worst case, worldwide death rate predictions are about 150 million, about 1.875% of the world's rapidly growing population, although more realistic estimates are 7.4 million, or .0925%. Further, we in the US are really overreacting. We have some of the best health care in the world. Most of those cases are not going to be in the US. It's really rather ridiculous.
We're actually worried on personal levels, ie, losing someone we love or contracting the illness ourselves. Only if you're really awesomely selfless do you have much concern for the faceless masses who might contract the illness. And when you really put it into perspective, no matter if the 150 million or the 7.4 million predictions are right, we are incredibly lucky to be placed where we are in humanities timeline.
Callous as it makes me sound, I'm not altogether appalled by the world catastrophes occurring. For a large part, mismanagement of world resources by humans have caused the immense damage we've been seeing with natural disasters; ie, we've brought it upon ourselves. Darwinianly speaking, humanity is long overdue for a pandemic, since disease and natural disasters are just about the only ways Darwinism has any power of homo Sapiens Sapiens. As long as the faceless masses remain faceless, I just hope that those I love and I stay safe, and since we take care of ourselves (or at least the people I love do, for the most part), there's not as much to fear from Darwin. What can I say? I'm a pansy.
References:
Historical Est. of World Population
US Pop
Horse thinks this is a crappy picture.
A New Form of Procrastination
I realized that I was blogging on Myspace and then copying to my Friendster blog with enough frequency that I should just create a blog. Besides which, I've suddenly started blogging about things other than Bleach. Christian just started up a Blogger blog, so I thought I'd follow suit.
I downloaded a whole bunch of Deathcab For Cutie today. Until this point, I have really only heard those two songs they play on the radio. I'm really enjoying them. I have a vaguely formed notion that I should undertake my musical education, so I can articulate just why I'm enjoying them.
I should really be studying for my GRE.
--End Procrastination--
