Pondering Numbers

1. As a young comic book kid, I looked forward to seeing the circulation figures in the October issues. Total Paid Circulation was the number that mattered. The New Yorker is the last magazine I subscribe to by mail, and the total paid distribution of the print edition is down to only about 650,000 copies.


2. I have a digital-only subscription to The New York Times. It recently had a feature on physical fitness, and I did a double-take on the percentiles by age and time to run one mile. When I was 17-21 years old I could run a mile in 6:15. I was never good enough a runner to qualify being on a track team. It’s laughable that I was in the top 1% of males. How many people run at all after high school, anyway?


3. You know how I go on about the dominance of Epic Systems in the electronic medical records market? Here’s a chart showing how Epic has performed since I retired, relative to the other two prime vendors.

Walk, Don’t Run

I know my days of clocking 7 minutes/mile in a half-marathon are behind me. But now I fear that I’m done with running all together, making this my final time in managing to complete a distance of 5K/3.1 miles.

My acute ankle injury has become chronic, to the extent that it appears the bones are deforming. I have scheduled an appointment with a podiatrist at an orthopedic center.

Until then I am limiting myself to walking and riding the old Nordic Track ski machine. The upside of both activities is listening to podcasts. Today while on the Nordic Track, I listened to part 3 of the Richard Feynman series on Freakonomics Radio.