The Daily Mail Apocalypse Meter

[mallorys_camera]

I spent rather too many hours this morning doing a statistical analysis of Daily Mail headlines and attempting to correlate them with the current state of the world.

The Big Fun!

Long ago, I decided The Daily Mail is one of the sources of the Nile. In the House of Usher, where I grew up, Moby Dick and movie magazines occupied the same status as favored reading materials.

I had to define a "headline chaos index" (looking at counts of alarmist keywords in Daily Mail headlines) and an "objective risk index" (looking at catastrophic event counts & volatility), normalize components with Z scores, & develop two potential time series—C_t (Chaos) and R_t (Risk). Then I computed a gap index and rescaled C_t and R_t to values between 1 and 10.

Like Nostradamus, Thomas Pynchon, and (I suppose) any common garden variety schizophrenic, I am always on the lookout for the secret ways the Universe reveals its underlying patterns so I can use them to make—ha, ha, ha—predictions! I'm a big fan of astrology, too, though not so much of Tarot cards (except as art) because that underlying interpretive grid is too vague. The I-Ching remains an intriguing outlier—I've never found it to be 100% wrong, though its results are too ambiguous to use as a prescriptive.

Anyway, my Apocalypse Meter exercise allowed me to dither and push off doing real work for three whole hours!

But now... Sigh.

Comments

[halfmoon_mollie1]

Precarious but not apocalyptic. Makes me feel a little less stressed, kind of. Thank you for doing that work!

[mallorys_camera]

You're welcome. 😀

[smokingboot]

I used to be red hot with the tarot, now it just doesn't register, except as art. Recently I have done marginally better with horary or the I Ching. I overwhelmingly fail with Geomancy,guess the little earth spirits don't like me much!

[mallorys_camera]

I did horary astrology for occasional paying clients for a couple of years there back in my long-ago youth. 😀 It is spot on. And a very complex system. Of course, I've forgotten all of it.

[wayfaringwordhack]

Oh, habibiti, I can't imagine the harrowing experience you put yourself through to collect your data. I gave up on news when I was 18 and have never looked back. I think my blood pressure thanks me for it.

"Precarious but not apocalyptic" - 😂 great category naming

[mallorys_camera]

Yes, I put myself through that harrowing experience for yew-w-w-w, dear reader! 😀

I wish I could give up on the news! It's not like I can do anything about it. But the habit is too ingrained.