Someone I admire once lead me to subscribing to the Huffington Post.  What a mistake.  But I did learn something.  If you want to write for the Huffington post the headline of your posting can be, or probably is, generated by a simple grammar.  Usually these involve a celebrity, say scientists or a reality TV star, and a list of ten ways to achive some desire.

Lists are fun.  And taxonomy is easier than real work, or at least it seems that way when you start.  And simple writing guides often suggest the list as possible frame to adopt.

There must be hundreds of blogs and websites that specialize in lists.  Bookmarking sites, obviously, fall into this bucket.  But there ought to be a list of great lists.  I have maybe a half dozen people who I follow on various bookmarking sites, because they list such interesting stuff.  This all comes to minded  because Andrew Gelman draws our attention to this delightful blog of lists.  For example here he has a list of fake books  Dickens commissioned to populate his study’s book shelves.  And this amazing list of foods Twain dreamed of while traveling.  The valuable information that pratfall > kiss > baby > kitten > dog > landscape; if you wish to write box office hit.

So I think I need a list of lists of lists; and now I have at least a first entry.

One of the standards battles I find most fascinating is how we allocate time.  Institutions battle for a share: work, good works, civic life, hobbies, study, family, exercise, networking…  The activities that demand rendezvous with others, what we might call social these days, demand coordinated points of rendezvous.    I like that one of the arguments for the 40 hour work week was that it would enable civic engagement.  On the battle field of time religious institutions have lost a lot of ground over the last century, while commercial institutions have successfully grabbed most of that real estate.  I can recall a time when the only thing that could be forgiven for keeping the Sabbath was the occasional pharmacy.

I was reminded of this by an item about an attempt to regulate how people spend their time.  In this case a ban on cell phone use in cars.  What leapt out at me – a few sacred institutions managed to get an exception to the ban:  “There are a few exceptions, however, including emergency phone calls, and calls to parents, children or a spouse.”  So in this case family won.  But, clearly this is an anti-business regulatory overreach; do I not need to call my subordinates!

Here some other links:

• Fun interactive chart from the NYTimes.
• That is based on the Census’s Time Use survey.
• An  examples of what can be done with that data which in this case consisted of  “one record per survey participant which contains information about the person (sex, age, race, employment status, etc.) along with the amount of time that the person spent doing a particular task (ex. washing dishes, watching TV, etc.) on a single day”.
• For example this chart is fun – reading for pleasure increases with age, more if you’ve had a lot of schooling.  Who are these people with an hour a day to spare for pleasurable reading?
• Here’s a chart showing hours work/week since 1900; notice the recessions.