While the precipitous drop of the Dow this year has garnered much financial media hand-wringing recently, another index has also attracted attention , especially in the blogosphere: the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, aka the VIX. What does it mean to track "volatility," and why is it important? Volatility, as bad as it sounds when talking about something like a marriage or digestion, isn't as much of an economic bogeyman as its name would suggest. Think of volatility as the ...