One of the most lovely pieces of snark, and/or early example of an Easter egg on an album cover. This is TUBULAR BELLS by Mike Oldfield (1973), and faintly printed in the lower left corner we find:
“This stereo record cannot be played on old tin boxes no matter what they are fitted with. If you are in possession of such equipment please hand it in to the nearest police station.”
(I write this to put it on the web. If Google is to be believed, no one else has written about it.)
There’s a version of this RIAA infographic going around that’s a) total revenues, and b) not adjusted for inflation. “Total revenues” includes subscription revenues, ie Spotify (or as Ulrika calls the model, ransomware).
This is sales only, and also unadjusted for inflation. But I’m calling your attention to it for two reasons:
Now, it looks like video streaming really does benefit from economies of scale, and fragmenting the market is probably going to lead to everyone except Netflix imploding. Had the studios just stayed out of things, let Netflix take their cut, and kept everything consolidated, vast amounts of capital expenditures using shareholder cash wouldn’t have been wasted. Everyone would have been fat cats.
But there’s that damned ego problem. Faced with a second gatekeeper, the studio execs had to give it a try, other people’s cash be damned.
Oh, well.
I like looking at data. One thing I like is trends of names over time. Why? Because if you’re writing something, it makes sense the name of your character should match their age.
I like the Babynames.com site. It shows trends since 1910. (Though be careful. Enter names in the gray field right by the graph, not the darker one higher up the page — that way you’ll get results.) Here’s an example, using Jennifer, made famous for this kind of thing by the book Beyond Jennifer and Jason.
All right, but that’s not the only source. What about Social Security’s web site? (Go down to the “Popularity of a Name” box, and fill it in.) They’re using actual birth records as they come in.
The Social Security site shows a decline, just like Baby Names… but it’s much less sharp. What’s going on?
I had to think a while, and squint at the graphs, but I figured it out. In 1985, when the Social Security site tells us Jennifer was the 5th most popular name, the US birth rate (yes, it’s there, although not on the easiest site) was 15.461 births per 1000 people. In 2021, the most recent year listed, Jennifer was the 493rd most popular name, and the birth rate fell to 12.001 per thousand people — a drop of 22.4%.
Why is this important? Well, the Babynames chart is showing how many kids get a name. The Social Security chart shows the rank of the name among all others.
So while Jennifer was becoming less popular among names, people were having fewer babies in the first place.
Double-whammy. And that’s why the graph looks so much more spiky.
Yes, probably few people care. But it was a fun puzzle for me.
It was 2004, and many hearts were set aflutter by the declassification of this document (click through to see the whole thing, if that’s not clear):
As you can see, it’s a bit of a mish-mash, graphically.
So designer Greg Storey, under his rubric Airbag Industries, decided to take a swing at an improvement. Here we are, decades later, and I still think it’s a wonderful piece of clarity:
To paraphrase Augustine, I know it when I see it.
There’s this text printers use when they want a graphic mock-up of a page, but don’t want to be distracted by the meaning of the words. It’s called Lorem ipsum. It’s a long stretch of Latin, which very few people understand anymore.
I realized tonight an appeal when listening to songs in a language you don’t understand — “world music” — is much the same. The song itself can wash over you. The melody, the qualities of the instruments and human voices. You don’t know what the song’s about, but that’s the point. You’re there to appreciate the song, with the chrome of meaning stripped off.