Over the Edge

So there's going to be a new face running the Treasury Department. I was wondering when that would happen; it struck me as odd that the Treasury Secretary was traipsing around Africa with Bono when the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan. Still, I wonder about this new guy.

It's hardly unusual to pick someone from Industry to run Treasury, but it's not like the U.S. rail business is so beautifully run that one of its leaders will cause the economy toss off its crutches and declare itself healed.

What's more, it turns out that John Snow is a member of the Augusta National golf club -- home of the Masters Tournament and currently under withering editorial and news-side heat from the NYTimes about its lack of female members. Snow will quit the club, of course, but the timing of his departure doesn't resound with conviction.

Also, the WSJ last week listed 10 top candidates for the job -- none of them Snow.

None of these things is exactly damning, but none is exactly encouraging either. Why is John Snow really the best candidate to run the U.S. Treasury Department?

The American Society of Newspaper Editors has suddenly discovered that reporters are not in touch with lower- and middle-class Americans. From the LATimes (free registration required):

 As recently as 1971, only 58% of newspaper journalists had college degrees; now 89% have degrees, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. But only 15.5% of the total population age 25 and older have finished college.

The median annual salary for "experienced reporters" working at newspapers with more than 250,000 daily circulation -- the 40 largest papers in the country -- was about $56,000 last year, according to a newspaper industry study. Pay for "senior reporters" -- and for top reporters and editors at the largest of these papers -- is substantially more. But median income for all U.S. workers over 15 is about $31,500.

OK, picture this. An unemployed 23-year-old laborer walks into the city room of, say, the Albany, N.Y. Times-Union and asks for a reporting job. No college, no clips, no experience, but he knows tons about the working-class community of the Capital District. Think he gets a job?

Of course not. First of all, he's not even getting into the City Room of the T-U, because he first has to get past Security, which is designed to keep people like him out. Secondly, he probably doesn't even read a daily newspaper, so what are the odds that he's going to be asking for a job to begin with?

FYI, my starting salary at UPI in 1978 was $224.04 a week -- about $12,000 per year. When I left in 1983, I was making $512 a week, which at $25,000 was top scale. Not much danger of getting rich there.

An Austrailian mathemetician has figured out the best way to lace your shoes. From the NYTimes:

A shoe with two rows of six eyelets offers 43,200 different paths for a shoelace to pass through every eyelet, even with the added condition that each eyelet must contribute to the essential purpose of pulling the two halves of the shoe together.

Want to know his findings? Click the link.

NYCity tickets coffee roaster for stinking up its industrial neighborhood. Methinks someone's had too much caffeine. From the NYTimes:

 "From time to time," he said, "what can be normal smells that one might appreciate in the city can be, if they continue for hours and hours, considered noxious by some people. We've given these violations to Krispy Kremes. We've given them to pickle manufacturers."

Ever get a tune into your head that you can't get rid of? New research shows where in your brain you process music -- and why music is such an emotional experience.

It turns out that music isn't a left-brain or a right-brain functoin. The study, conducted by Dartmouth professor Petr Janata shows that you process music right behind your prefrontal cortex -- in the front of your brain, in the center.

ãThis region in the front of the brain where we mapped musical activity,ä says Janata, ãis important for a number of functions, like assimilating information that is important to one's self, or mediating interactions between emotional and non-emotional information. Our results provide a stronger foundation for explaining the link between music, emotion and the brain.ä

One of the fun things about running this weblog is seeing who's looking for information about what. Don't worry: I can't see that Person A is reading Page X. But when people click through to OTE from a Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Ask search, I know what they'd been looking for.

For a long while, someone each day would come around looking for information about a gay porn star named Dred Scott. (Apparently, I used the words "porn" and "star" on the same day I cited the famous Supreme Court ruling.) Lots of people have coming knocking to learn about Mallomars. And in the last week or so, there's been a ton of inquiries about UPI Pentagon reporter Pam Hess.

But if you want to know what people all over the world were looking for this past year, you've gotta check out Google's Zeitgeist. Way cool. If you can guess who the most searched-for athlete of the year was, you peeked.

Story in the NYTimes about an author who's daring to lowercase the "I" in Internet.

About time. I tried to do it seven years ago when I was editor of NetGuide. My theory, like Turow's, is that we don't capitalize the commonplace -- and that seven years ago, the Net (excuse me, the net) was commonplace. I couldn't win the argument with the copy desk, which goes to show you the power of copy editors.

One similar fight I did win was at Mobile Office, where I held an issue from going to press until every last hyphen was restored in "e-mail."