The Daily Mail Apocalypse Meter

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.