Beginnings

I’ve mentioned elsewhere my packrat tendencies, and this time I have the ultimate example.

In an old file I’ve found the handwritten composition I wrote for a highschool English class in 1949. For me this is akin to an archeologist discovering the papyrus that will later define a whole civilization.

OK, that’s a bit much; but it was the start of something.  It’s titled “The Science of Listening,” and I remember very distinctly it was a response to the activity of another guy in English 7-5 who, it seemed to me, never stopped talking. Worse, the technique was working for him. Dr. Mercier seemed to be taken in, responding to Peter's eager volunteering to read his work in class and awarding him high grades.

This paper, as you’ll see below, was my scathing riposte. Sixty years before the invention of snark!

The Science of Listening

      “Hearing, while one of the most valuable natural gifts we possess, is also one of the most underrated. It is our greatest aid to learning, our strongest tie with the world around us, for what we cannot see, we may hear of, and hearing of it we may picture it in our minds.
      “But we have not yet reached the crux of the matter, for hearing is not listening. Hearing is a natural endowment. Listening is an acquired virtue, and a science in itself. Hearing is the curse of knowing noise. Listening is the power of concentrating sound and arriving at a single product.

      “It is a curious fact that man has not the power to talk and listen at the same time. The need therefor becomes felt for a medium of transmission, a switchboard through which the tangled lines of articulation and absorption may be sorted out. This need was filled by the invention of silence, the discovery of one of the unsung benefactors of humanity. 
      "Like every great soul he was ridiculed and humiliated. 'Silence will never work!' they said. 'You’re not taking an interest in the world if you don’t make noises with your mouth.' There were even those who believed that the way to get an education was to keep their mouths open rather than their ears. So they ridiculed the great man, as to this day his disciples are reviled.

      “But we digress. With the coming of silence, listening came into its own. Man found that by remaining quiet himself he was better able to concentrate on the sounds others were making. Through further development and practice he found himself able to distinguish the pertinent facts from the rest of the sounds. In this way he greatly facilitated his education.

      “However, listening has not yet been fully accepted for what it is worth. Rather, since it is accompanied by silence, it is sometimes taken as the mark of the disinterested or unintelligent. It still has a long hard climb ahead before it reaches universal acceptance, and until it does, listening must remain a lost art rather than a science.“

A little confusion there at the end between art and science, but you get the idea.

There was just one problem: I was too modest -- or insecure -- to volunteer to read it aloud in class. No one has ever seen or heard it until now.  

When I Edited Engineers - 1

I used to work in aerospace, editing proposals to the government. Because the proposals had technical content, it seemed logical to management to have engineers write them. The result often was that the quality of the technical stuff was excellent, but the non-technical stuff surrounding it, of which there’s quite a bit, didn’t work as well. 

Language would be stilted, and there would usually be too much of it. “Summaries” and “overviews” would choke with detail; and while, thankfully, graphics weren’t my responsibility, I did have to wrestle with paragraph-length figure captions. I also suspected there were office pools for Most Acronyms In A Single Sentence.

Time and temperament permitting, I would collaborate with the subject matter experts to rewrite or sometimes write the material. Other times, left to their own devices, the SMEs would fall into certain patterns in their writing; certain words would be used, or misused, in the same way. It was my responsibility to correct this, but since prevention is preferable to cure, I wrote up generic corrections to some of the more common problems and made them available to each new proposal team. It had no visible effect, but I present them in an occasional series here pro bono for any engineers who may happen by.

When I Edited Engineers  - 1

On “Over” Use

Many people have developed the habit of prefacing numbers with the word “over.” It seems to have become almost an involuntary thing. Even engineers who may deal in precision out to four decimal places in their everyday work become susceptible to it when working a proposal.

Aside from the fact that it would make more sense to say “more than,” it’s a tricky thing, and you don’t want to use it indiscriminately.  It’s one thing to say “over a million,” but something else to say “over 27.” You won’t be asked for more precision if you’re a journal claiming your million-plus readership, but if you’re talking about testing an airplane, you want to avoid saying “over 27 successful flights.” If you didn’t make it all the way to 28 -- 27^1/₂  is bad news. 

I think there’s a reason why people use “over” more than “more than.” “More than” makes you conscious of the question “How many more?” and that might require some effort or research to get the answer (plus which you might find that “more than” was just an expression and there were only 27 after all).

More Views on LinkedIn (on More Views on LinkedIn)

The next “thud” you hear coming from this quarter may be LinkedIn hitting bottom on my value scale. 

I’ll acknowledge my own contribution to that; I allowed myself to get into discussions (arguments, really) that had nothing to do with business, and were on subjects and with people so polarized  there was never any chance discussion would change a mind on either side. Engaging in that is, I’ll say it myself, stupid. 

Now, however,  I’ve seen something  that may tell us more of what LinkedIn is really about. 

People publish tips for success on LinkedIn, success being defined most often as getting more people to view your profile. Presumably the more people who look you up, the more chances you will have to succeed in whatever it is you’re doing, usually selling something. For some people, of course, being noticed is the goal in itself.

But of three tips I saw recently, only one involved anything constructive, like posting information of value. The real keys to succeeding on Linked in appear to be (a) to keep changing things in your profile (doesn’t matter what) because people connected to you receive notice of those changes and, you hope, will want to see what’s changed, upping your number of profile views; and   (b) to look at lots of other people’s profiles, on the assumption that they will then look at yours  -- upping your number of profile views -- to see why you’re checking on them. This one has the added benefit of also increasing the number of views for all those people you’ve looked at -- a win-win situation if I’ve ever seen one. The beauty of it is, it doesn’t require any intellectual effort. Your fingers do the walking.

Somehow, that doesn’t seem like what I remember as the reason for joining. I’d be happy to debate the subject with anyone who cares to defend those techniques.

I’ve also posted to a “LinkedIn Influencer,” the question “What qualifies you to be an “Influencer”? The occasion was my attention being called, via email announcement, to something he had written. It was well enough written, and presented nothing to offend, but Influential, with a capital “I”? Didn’t seem that way. It sure didn’t have the heft of the Communist Manifesto, or Martin Luther’s checklist, or something written by the Thomases  Paine or Jefferson. Fact is, it didn’t rise to the level of a political speech by Mitch McConnell -- a very low bar.

But then, there are people easily influenced (take a look at the post just before this one, December 7, for an example). For me, though, old and set in my ways, a banal essay about  happiness, money, and success isn't going to influence anything.

All in all, LinkedIn is a disappointment. If that puts me on the short end of a 300-million-against-one argument -- so be it.

"Thought Leaders"

I’ve made fun of LinkedIn’s “thought leadership” before, but I’m wondering now if maybe it’s indicative of a serious condition.

I recently ran across a LinkedIn post (it was actually months old when I discovered it) but it intrigued me to the point that I started looking back at some of the 7500 comments it generated.

The subject was why the author doesn’t accept “connections” to his network. If you don’t know LinkedIn, LinkedIn encourages people to connect with other people to expand their business networks, and provides a mechanism for doing that with one click of a mouse. You could say “connecting” is the definition of what LinkedIn is.

The gist of the article was that the author was selective about whose requests for connection he accepted. People do abuse the system and many requests for connection are really attempts to sell you something.  

That said -- the article adopted the most arrogant tone imaginable, the author in effect laying out a list of reasons why most people aren’t good enough to associate with him. I reserve judgement on whether he’s just tone deaf (some people don’t realize how they sound in writing) or if he’s really as arrogant as his writing says he is.

The real point of my writing about this, though, is the reaction from people who read it. It generated  7500 comments, and almost every one said the article was terrific. The mind boggles. One of his criteria for refusing a connection was lack of a photo on the applicant’s profile page. “You aren’t a real person if you haven’t posted a photo.” Yet dozens of people with no photo on their profile page congratulated him on the article. Come on, folks; recognize when you’re being insulted.

The fact is, the article is insulting to everyone. If you want to connect with him, for whatever reason, if you don’t meet his stringent specs, don’t bother to apply. Bad enough from someone who is apparently a successful businessman; but here are aspiring entrepreneurs and wannabe tycoons saying “Great article. I’m adopting your guidelines.” Most would be prohibited from accepting themselves as connections under those rules 

I know there are 200 or 300 million people on LinkedIn and you can’t draw generalities from a few or even a few thousand, but I can’t help wondering: “Are this many people really this willing -- even eager -- to be led?” Why would you adopt policies that work for someone you don’t know, operating in a particular situation bound to be different from yours?  Wouldn’t it be better to develop your own guidelines, even if that means making a mistake or two along the way?  

The whole idea behind being on LinkedIn is to meet new people. If you turn away, or away from, everyone who doesn’t post a picture or lay out all the details of his or her life or who hits a typo in a message, you don’t know who you might be missing.     It could be me.  
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RPH

Commercial Break

They do it on the radio and TV (and how! ”We’ll be right back after these six commercials…”)

Ads on TV movie programs are the title holders, for my money, for “Most Commercials Stacked Together” and “Most Repetitions of a Phone Number.” I’ve decided that I will not do business with anyone whose commercial repeats the phone number more than twice. Some are up to four times. Also I thought there was a rule that volume wasn’t supposed to be turned up for commercials any more. If it is a rule, it’s the most abused rule in business.

In a sense this whole blog is a commercial for my writing service, but it lacks two important ingredients of a sales message. One is the specific information someone would need to be able to buy the product. You can form an idea of my style, but you don’t know how much I ask for writing something, so here it is.

The rate is $45 per hour. When I quote a fixed price, that’s what it’s calculated on. I’ve never become accustomed to quoting by the word, but pretty often that’s what’s expected, so I’ve set a conditional minimum of $0.10 per for that.

That will all be modest to a few knowledgeable clients and exorbitant to the others, apparently the majority, judging by pay scales on most of the online job boards. What you have to factor in is (a) I work pretty fast, (b) I'll probably get it right the first time, and if I don’t, the corrections will be off the clock, and (c) the work will need only minimal editing when you get it.

I grant you it’s ten times the going rate in many places, but you have to consider the economies in some of those places -- India, Bangladesh -- that encourage low rates. Problem is, competition from those areas combined with lowered standards combined with pursuit of profit have caused those rates to slop over into the more developed world, where some of us still work. There are people here, too, who work for that money and perpetuate the situation, but times are hard and they may be in tighter circumstances than I am. I still maintain, though: penny-a-word and $5-per-hour are not part of my world.   

The other element that’s lacking in the blog posts is the “call to action,” the traditional close to practically all advertisements: “Send for a free sample”; “Call now; operators are standing by.” 

Free samples in my line of work are clips of past ads or articles. I’ve managed to get a few onto a “Samples” page here, but I’m not fully in control of that process. Samples will certainly be made available on request, however; just call or write the number or address under “Contact” on the home page.

Call now! I’m standing by.    

Drive, Pivot, Curate

Buzzwords come and go in the business world (is “buzzword” one of them, destined to be supplanted, or already archaic?) But they’re not just casual expressions. When you think about it, there’s real intent behind them.

One of the popular words currently is “drive.” If you’re marketing or blogging or communicating in some form and your stuff isn’t driving something, you’d better rethink you plan, because everyone else’s is.

It's the stylish new way, for now, of saying that something you're doing that used to cause an event to happen or motivate people to do something now drives those things. It's muscular.

It's also pretty much all-purpose. You can drive anything from web site readership to a whole marketing campaign.

The most evocative use of the word, for me, is that of “driving people to a web page.” It conjures those old Cecil B. DeMille  movie epics -- “Cast Of Thousands!” -- where dark-haired men in miniskirts and jeweled tunics coax groups of ragged people to build pyramids, usually with encouragement from whips.

Then there’s “pivot.” Where people used to change what they were doing to doing something else, now they pivot. For large organizations, changing course can be like turning an aircraft carrier. “Pivot,” then, is meant to imply that the change is instant, a clean break with what went before. The organization has turned on a dime. 

“Curating” is another popular word (“curate” twisted into a verb. You can tell it didn’t start out in life that way when you go to a traditional dictionary. A “curator” is defined as one who has charge of or is a guardian for some one or thing. It ain’t “one who curates.”)  

In the online world it's aggregating (another stylish word) stuff other people have written and using it for your own purposes. Think of it as an even more sincere form of flattery than imitation: poaching. 

Full disclosure/confession: I’ve done it. Years ago I worked in a small advertising agency, and we published an external newsletter (it would be a “blog” today) for which I swiped (“curated”) articles from more respected publications and reviewed them.       I wish I had known to call it curating back then; it sounds so dignified.  

Crime Doesn't Pay

I broke a rule, and I’ve had my comeuppance.

Last week I was bitten by a squirrel. Before you ask -- he was not rabid. In fact, he (or she) was as rational as you or I. It happened in pursuit of a peanut.

It was a particularly bold customer who came right up to me on my bench and almost demanded tribute. I found one leftover peanut in my pocket and offered it, but I misjudged how hungry the little guy was, and I neglected to let go of it in time. Those teeth are small, but they’re sharp. As they clamped down on the nut, one got the tip of my finger. The fingertips, as you probably know, are particularly well supplied with nerves and blood, and mine hurt like hell and bled like the proverbial stuck pig. I don’t think anyone saw what happened next, and just as well; how would you explain waving your hand around with a squirrel attached to it?

Eventually he (or she) decided he (or she) already had the good stuff, and hanging on wasn’t going to get him or her anything better. The squirrel left, and I turned to nursing the finger. That was when I looked at the ground under the bench and discovered I had contributed a surprising amount of blood to the encounter. The wound is mostly healed now because I treated it like it was ebola, washing the spot with soap and near-scalding water and painting it liberally with iodine. (Iodine is my sovereign remedy for almost everything external.). The bite continued to hurt for three or four days, but it’s now just a memory and a small scar on my finger.

The moral of the story, and there is a moral, comes in here.

There had been a number of incursions into our little world by coyotes. For a while, visits had become more frequent, and more lethal to residents’ pets. Because of a restriction written into the bylaws by people who did not suffer companion animals on the premises gladly, only small dogs are allowed. The result has been that some of the smallest dogs I’ve ever seen live here. Driving around, maybe just catching a glimpse out of the corner of your eye, you could easily mistake some of them for rats if they weren't attached to old people. There are cats here, too, but again, the bylaws work against the larger breeds, and only housecats are allowed.

The result of all this is that the coyotes were finding bite-size morsels unable to defend themselves, and were having a field day. The result of that was the promulgation of a rule that we were not to feed the wildlife so as not to stock the larder even further for the coyotes. 

“Wildlife” in this part of the savannah is rabbits and squirrels. You see where this is leading. By feeding the squirrel I broke a rule, and I had to suffer the consequences. They weren’t the consequences the rule anticipated -- the penalty was a fine, supposed to take a bite only out of your wallet  -- but justice triumphed in its own roundabout way.

Shots rang out...

…but the cliché survived.

Why is it that shots always “ring out” in TV news accounts of shootings? Why aren’t they just “fired”?

It was probably considered a colorful expression when some observer coined it back at the time firearms were invented, but it’s still in use today, and it’s the cliché of clichés. 

In my limited experience with shooting, at a distance small arms fire makes a kind of popping noise, and close up, shots are an insult to your eardrums. You’ll notice that when you see policemen or survivalists’ children practicing at firing ranges they’re always wearing those big ear protectors. Is that so they won’t mistake the “ringing” for their cell phones and become distracted from their targets? I don’t think so.

But there is a ringing sound associated with one particular type of shooting. Anyone who has fired an M-1 rifle will remember the sound of the empty clip leaving the rifle. However -- War Story Ahead -- I may be the only person who can honestly associate “ringing” with the firing of an artillery round.

Actually it had less to do with the sound itself than with my position relative to it. 

I was engaged in “O and S”-ing an artillery piece. The purpose of orientation and synchronization is to arrange for the gun to fire in the direction the radar is pointing when it’s indicating a target. They probably do it digitally today, but when I was involved with it it required sticking your head into the breech and boresighting on some feature of the landscape. That’s what I was doing when a very large gun 20 yards away fired. The sound reverberated in the confined space in which my head was enclosed, and my ears were ringing the rest of the day.  

But I don’t cite that as justification for furthering the use of the cliché; in fact, I think the expression ought to be banned in polite journalism. Certainly you don’t hear it in ordinary verbal (non-TV-anchor) descriptions of gunfights. More likely it will be,       “I heard these three shots, bam, bam, bam…”  The police would record,  in their famously stilted language, that "the perpetrator fired three rounds from a .38 caliber pistol at the responding officer, who returned fire, striking the deceased in the upper torso…” (but you hardly ever see anything there about anything “ringing”). 

I make fun of how the police talk, but their descriptions aren't any duller than what you get from TV, where shots always ring out, bullets start flying and, inevitably, it turns into a war zone. Gotta be something between cop jargon and TV cliché. I'll have to work on it.    

Everyone's Entitled

I’m getting emails from LinkedIn offering me the opportunity to “hear what Influencers have to say.” Featured in the email are “a ghostwriter speaker,“ “a bestselling writer about habit…,” “a trainer and nonprofit innovator,” Richard Branson, and Arianna Huffington.

Do I have Influencer Huffington confused with another Arianna Huffington? The one I remember was the wife of a conservative politician who ran a deep-pockets campaign for a Senate seat and lost. I’ve looked into her background a bit; through Wikipedia, (admittedly, not always the most reliable source in the world, but I would expect any gross misrepresentations to have been litigated by now) and a profile in The New Yorker. 

Politically, according to Wikipedia, she supported Newt Gingrich and led a campaign that vilified President Clinton in staggeringly personal terms. She’s a liberal now. Literarily, she apparently survived three accusations of plagiarism, one of which she settled. She’s a publishing guru today. She reached the rarefied height of “LinkedIn Influencer” in 2012. The New Yorker article (October 13, 2008) is generally sympathetic but has some telling quotes from acquaintances.

I suppose someone who switches from our party to the opposition is a turncoat, and someone who does the reverse has “seen the error of his or her ways.” Probably apocryphal, but Abraham Lincoln was supposed to have argued the opposite sides of two similar cases on the same day in his lawyer years, explaining that he believed he was right in the morning but he was sure he was right in the afternoon. With all the conservative bullhorns out there I suppose I shouldn’t carp about someone talking up the liberal side, no matter how recently or circuitously arrived at.       A great lesson in chutzpah, though.

Still, think how lucky we are to have “Influencers“ -- people who know more than the rest of us and will take some of their valuable time to tell us that. 

Since the whole basis of social media, as I’ve come to understand it, is conversation, and conversation is a two-way process, and we’re already being invited to hear what they have to say, then Influencers must be open to hearing what we have to say. 

Before LinkedIn I didn’t know it was OK to approach someone who doesn’t know you at all and shove your opinion at him or her or ask for help or free professional advice, but LinkedIn has changed that. So -- who better to go to, if you’re starting an airline, for example, than Sir Richard? or for adjusting your political attitude, than Arianna? The great part is, an Influencer can hardly refuse you help; noblesse oblige is a guiding principle for the titled nobility.

Such Language... !

I’ve noticed that what were once considered obscenities are ordinary conversation on line today. I wonder if I’m missing the boat, not sprinkling a little billingsgate through this blog.

What I mean, for example, is the opportunity to use a pithier word where I use “stuff.” You hardly ever see “stuff happens” quoted on the Internet. There’s also the adjective/adverb and sometime, when not in the gerund, interjection that's transcended its original meaning and is now part of intercourse on line generally.

The unimaginativeness of it is depressing, especially when you think of what’s been lost over the ages. The English had some terrific expressions.

“Zounds!” Now there was an interjection you could get some attention with. Looking for colorful adjectives? Try “scurvy” -- anachronous in a day when you can buy oranges at any corner supermarket, but you're immediately established as a salty character with your audience. 

“Odious” is a two-fer: the denotation is “hateful,” but the connotation adds “for a disagreeable or offensive quality,” so you have a cultivated way of saying your opponent’s program is bad and smells that way. Follow up with “fetid” or "miasmic" and the listener can’t help but envision your adversary’s plan emerging, slime-covered, from some swamp-like recess of his/her mind.  

But for pure poetry in the service of argument -- has anyone ever equalled Oliver Cromwell’s 1650 invitation to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland to give their decision a re-think?  “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken…” Lay that alongside “Your argument sucks” in the “comment” section of any Internet post. No contest.

If you’re going to comment online, maybe go to a thesaurus before you submit; get something imaginative. Want to get snarky about someone’s physical appearance but still sound cultured?  Read Cyrano de Bergerac for a lesson in creative ways to insult someone with too much nose. 

It’s a great language; there are many ways to express a thought. My thesaurus lists something like 180 different ways to say you think something is bad, with a whole paragraph of slang terms, some of which you might not have thought of before. (And on the off chance that you’re really discussing copulation, there are almost 50 other ways to say that.)

The thing to remember, if it’s emphasis you’re after: when obscenities become commonplace, you need to find new words to put some jazz into your writing. 

(F)lying With Statistics -2

This will make more sense if you start back at the October 12 post...

"Passenger-miles" is the main sleight-of-hand trick the airlines use to work their statistical magic, but it isn't the only gimmick in use; this from an air travel industry Internet page:

"The number of U.S. highway deaths in a typical six-month period -- about 21,000 -- roughly equals all commercial jet air travel fatalities worldwide since the dawn of jet aviation decades ago. In fact, fewer people have died in commercial air travel accidents in America over the past 60 years than are killed in auto accidents in a typical three-month period."

Here we momentarily drop the "passenger-miles" device in favor of what seem like a couple of straight numbers-to- numbers comparisons; but on examination these, too, turn out to be impressive-sounding yet uninformative factoids. Maybe more people travel on highways every six months today than traveled by air in all those decades ("since the dawn..."). Maybe there are more automobile trips every three months now than there have been commercial air travel flights over the past 60 or 70 years. We don't get real numbers. (Note also the language: people die in air travel accidents but they're killed in their cars.)

But it's the passenger-miles gambit that provides the basis for the most competitive comparisons the air travel industry makes. Here's another quote from that Internet page:

"In the United States, it's 22 times safer flying in commercial air travel than driving in a car, according to 1993-95 study by the U.S. National Safety Council comparing accident fatalities per million passenger- miles traveled."

Why "passenger-miles"? Seen any 200-seat cars on the road? No, the automobile figures are compiled at -- what? -- maybe two or three passengers per mile? as compared to the airlines' hundreds? Think how many more individual trips highway travelers took -- the vastly greater number of opportunities for accidents they exposed themselves to -- to rack up the same millions of miles. How many air travel passengers would have died (or been killed) in that number of trips?

But even if you accept passenger-miles as a concept, there's still the question of scorekeeping. One hundred passengers fly 1,000 miles, at which point the plane crashes. Sixty passengers die. Does the airline get 40,000 passenger-miles credit for the survivors?

No, "passenger-miles" may help the airlines figure their ROI or decide on what type of equipment to buy next, but as backup for safety claims -- that ain't getting me out of my car. Let me know, better, when they develop a jetliner that can coast over to the side of that highway in the sky if its engines cut out, so you can ring up the aero club at the emergency callbox. You can improve your chances of surviving an auto accident by wearing a seat belt. What will your seat belt do for you if the view out the front window of your plane becomes cornfield?

                          #                #            #

I had referred to airline industry web pages as the source, but I’m reminded now that it was primarily these newspaper articles, although some websites figured into it later. 

I can also now cite the names of the experts who published the statistics I refute so decisively. They were H.W. Lewis, a Physics professor, and Richard H. Wood, a professor of Safety Science.    I believe it was a coincidence that both articles appeared the same day, as there doesn’t appear to have been a special section on safety in that issue of The Times.  I had written a letter to the editor in 1980 that went nowhere, but the impetus to actually pursue the subject came by way of the late Times columnist, Jack Smith, who touched on it in a column five years later.

Maybe the subject’s been debated someplace, but I’ve never seen it done – a surprise to me considering the prevalence of bright minds much better at mathematics and statistics than mine. That raises the possibility that I could be talking through my hat, something I’ve been known to do – but I don’t think so this time. 

(F)lying With Statistics -1

Another discovery arising from the previously reported packrat environment in which I live has been the source material for an article/essay I’ve been nursing for 29 years.

I now know it’s 29 years because I’ve found the yellowing clippings from The Los Angeles Times that started it all, and they’re dated September 1, 1985.  Finding them puts me in a position to make some corrections, which I’ll append to this post, but I’ll have to break the post into two parts; no one is going to read a 1200-word blog post, or not one of mine, anyway.  

“(F)lying With Statistics” is a damning expose of the commercial airlines’ shameless use of “passenger-miles” to reassure us of how safe it is to fly. (The “fractured-flyer miles” part of the article is my contribution.) With a bit of statistical counterpunching and an appeal to logic, I leave the airlines’ argument bleeding on the tarmac. I’ve refrained from going public with the material until now because it could cause panic amongst the traveling public – the next Y2K, maybe, and we know how that turned out. (If we don’t, we can go back to the July 27 post on this blog.)

Over its near-three-decades the piece has seen use as an essay, a tongue-in-cheek SEO article, and one installment of a “Private Eye” series. The blog seems the logical final resting place for it.


        Statistically, Flying Is the Safest Way to Travel

         -- but do you really want to be an air travel statistic?

I think it was Shelley Berman, in one of his comedy routines, who commented that the airlines could always prove that "flying is the safest way to fly."

It's the old "passenger-miles" ploy that does it.

The strategy is obvious, isn't it? With commercial airliners seating hundreds and distances in thousands, you multiply "passengers" by "miles" and one successful trip adds a couple of hundred thousand markers in the "win" column.

The argument goes, “The record of America’s scheduled airlines has averaged out to about one fatality per billion passenger-miles.” That statistic is then translated into a 1 in 10,000 chance of being killed. (Odds of being mutilated, disfigured, or maimed aren’t posted.)

So, are less successful flights reported in fractured-flyer miles? (To the airlines' advantage, the numbers would be smaller, since these people didn't get to finish the trip.)

No, one accident is one accident. Accident statistics -- the bad numbers -- are reported in terms of individual events. I've seen it argued by an air safety expert that except for the people involved, keeping score in terms of people killed is “a meaningless statistic. What counts is the number of individual accidents,” number of people on board being random.

Fair enough; but let's apply the same standard to the safety statistics -- the good numbers. If "people on board" is irrelevant in reporting accidents, why does it become significant when reporting on safety? The fair comparison to "number of individual accidents" is "number of individual flights without accidents." Tell me how many flights touched the ground only when and where they were supposed to. But that would bring the safety numbers down out of those reassuring billions.

Next post: Part 2, and I rest my case.

Let Me Count the Ways…

It’s an old principle of copywriting that putting a number in the headline is a good way to attract readers’ attention  prior to trying to sell them whatever you're selling. It suggests there’s going to be substance and specifics in what follows.

It can be positive ("3 Ways To Turn Your Catbox Waste Into Dollars") but negative works, too ("6 Things You Should Never Do While Riding A Bicycle").

People on LinkedIn have taken the technique `a outrance. You’ll find dozens if not hundreds of posts in that pattern, some less reasonable than my examples above.

Since the delivery is by its nature authoritative, presumably each is written by an authority on that subject.

Is that likely? If all those people know all those secrets and are kind enough share them with everyone else, there should hardly be any problems left in the world. We’d all know how to manipulate employees, cozzen our bosses, write perfect “content,” and Avoid These Five Mistakes When Quitting our Job. Everyone would be making money in a corner office / at home / in their pajamas / sitting at the beach, by writing / teaching (anything) / telephoning / composting... Surprising that we still have high unemployment and poverty.

That’s not to say there aren’t gems scattered around in the mulch, but it takes a lot of reading, or at least sampling, to sift them out. Most of the time I ignore them, but some will intrigue me with what seems like a particularly pertinent line and I’ll go for it. 

Most of those times I find lists of things I already know, particularly if the subject is writing. I think any seasoned writer would have the same reaction. There are just so many principles, tips, and tricks you can read before you realize you've seen it all before. Maybe you learned it under a different title; a lot of old ideas have been recycled for the new market. 

And one of them is the numbers game, so I’m thinking about getting into it myself. First post will be "10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read on LinkedIn," subhead "5 will get you 8 probably 90 percent of it is old news."

Let Me Count the Ways...

Let Me Count the Ways…

It’s an old principle of copywriting that putting a number in the headline is a good way to attract readers’ attention  prior to trying to sell them whatever you're selling. It suggests there’s going to be substance and specifics in what follows.

It can be positive ("3 Ways To Turn Your Catbox Waste Into Dollars") but negative works, too ("6 Things You Should Never Do While Riding A Bicycle").

People on LinkedIn have taken the technique `a outrance. You’ll find dozens if not hundreds of posts in that pattern, some less reasonable than my examples above.

Since the delivery is by its nature authoritative, presumably each is written by an authority on that subject.

Is that likely? If all those people know all those secrets and are kind enough share them with everyone else, there should hardly be any problems left in the world. We’d all know how to manipulate employees, cozzen our bosses, write perfect “content,” and Avoid These Five Mistakes When Quitting our Job. Everyone would be making money in a corner office / at home / in their pajamas / sitting at the beach, by writing / teaching (anything) / telephoning / composting... Surprising that we still have high unemployment and poverty.

That’s not to say there aren’t gems scattered around in the mulch, but it takes a lot of reading, or at least sampling, to sift them out. Most of the time I ignore them, but some will intrigue me with what seems like a particularly pertinent line and I’ll go for it. 

Most of those times I find lists of things I already know, particularly if the subject is writing. I think any seasoned writer would have the same reaction. There are just so many principles, tips, and tricks you can read before you realize you've seen it all before. Maybe you learned it under a different title; a lot of old ideas have been recycled for the new market. 

And one of them is the numbers game, so I’m thinking about getting into it myself. First post will be "10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read on LinkedIn," subhead "5 will get you 8 probably 90 percent of it is old news."

Let Me Count the Ways...