I’ve long been fascinated by the shifting circles in the New York Times‘ “sector snapshots,” those charts in the Business Section that show the relative sizes of companies in a particular field — and which ones are leading, slipping, lagging or improving relative to the S&P 500.

On Wednesday, the Times ran the snapshot I’d been waiting for – the one that shows where Apple stands vis a vis its competitors in technology hardware & equipment.

The version that appeared in my morning paper showed HP (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) in the first, or leading, quadrant (up for the week and the year) and Apple (AAPL) in the third, or lagging, quadrant (down for the week and the year).

But the best thing about these sector snapshots is that they are available in interactive form on the Times‘ Web site, and by Wednesday afternoon, Apple had shifted from lagging to improving, thanks to the fact that Apple’s share price didn’t fall as steeply Wednesday as the S&P 500.

Check it out for yourself at nytimes.com here. You can track dozens of companies in nearly 30 sectors. Here’s how you do it:

1. Make sure the sector you’re interested in appears in the Category window in the upper left hand corner.
2. Click on the company you want to track in the right hand column to highlight the circle that represents its market capitalization.
3. Move the Time Period slider to see that company shift — like a planet against the fixed stars — on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.

But if it’s Apple you are tracking, you have to move fast. This stock is as changeable as a baby’s bottom, and could be anywhere by the end of the day.

Joe Nocera buried his lead.

The New York Times columnist — and former Fortune editor — waited until the end of Saturday’s 1,700-word “Talking Business” column about the health of Apple’s CEO and the secrecy that surrounds it to reveal that on Thursday afternoon, several hours after he’d gotten his final “Steve’s health is a private matter” from Apple’s public relations machine, he got a call from Steve Jobs himself.

“This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”

Jobs, according to Nocera, said he would share some details about the health condition that made him to look so thin and haggard at his last public appearace — and triggered two share-punishing rounds of speculation on Wall Street — if Nocera agreed to keep the conversation off the record.

Nocera agreed, and reported only that nothing Jobs told him …

“contradicted the reporting that [Times reporter] John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than ‘a common bug,’ they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer.”

The “common bug” is a reference to the explanation for Jobs’ weight loss that Apple’s PR department put out in June — an explanation that Nocera feels fell somewhat short of the truth. Markoff reported on Wednesday that Jobs had had an unnamed surgical procedure earlier this year related to his loss of weight, and Nocera adds that he had learned that Jobs was having ongoing digestive difficulties stemming from the cancer surgery he had four years ago — the details of which were first reported by Fortune (see here).

All this leads Nocera to the broader point he wants to make about Apple:

“Apple simply can’t be trusted to tell truth about its chief executive. Under Mr. Jobs, Apple has created a culture of secrecy that has served it well in many ways — the speculation over which products Apple will unveil at the annual MacWorld conference has been one of the company’s best marketing tools. But that same culture poisons its corporate governance. Apple tells analysts far less about its operations than most companies do. It turns low-level decisions into state secrets. Directors are often left out of the loop. And it dissembles with impunity.” (link)

So, yes, Nocera thinks Steve Jobs is an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law.

But Jobs may have the last laugh. Twice in his column, Nocera refers to things that happened during Apple’s (AAPL) third quarter conference call on Tuesday afternoon.

In fact, the conference call happened on Monday.

UPDATE: The error in the printed edition of the paper has been corrected in the online version.

When Bill Gates and New York Times (NYT) publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. unveiled the Times Reader in April 2006, they demonstrated the program to the American Society of Newspaper Publishers on a tablet PC — a piece of hardware Gates was very excited about at the time.

Tablets still haven’t quite caught on, but the software — which syncs to the Times’ servers and delivers an easy-to-read, paginated version of the paper that can be browsed offline — developed a loyal following. At least among Windows users; more than two years later, there still isn’t a version that runs on the Apple (AAPL) Macintosh.

But there will be. On Tuesday, Rob Larson, VP for digital production at the Times, showed off sample pages of Times Reader for the Mac and announced that a beta version will be available later this month. See here.

Larson also stuck around to answer questions. The service will be free while it’s in beta. After that it will cost $14. 95 a month (about a quarter the price of a print subscription). If you have a home delivery subscription, you’ll get the Times Reader for free.

It’s a Cocoa application that uses Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Silverlight plugin to render the pages.