I should maybe close out the Christmas/New Year season with the report of statistics which WordPress prepared about my little blog here. Of course they keep statistics; one of the big changes in human thought in the 20th century was that pretty near everything could not only be measured but that they could be measured statistically: what are the mean, the mode, the variances, how do things correlate, what can be done to maximize the desired and minimize the unwanted?
I don’t do quite that much tracking myself, as it’s a little too much work when all I’m doing is pointing out how Cow and Boy mentioned frustum volume formulas or something, but I do like watching the counter flicker as people find that, mostly, they want to see me talking about the area of a trapezoid. That’s by far the most popular thing I wrote in 2012, and all based on my fumbling the middle of a class. Had I not attempted to improvise in class, I would be less popular on the Internet. There’s a lesson here for our times and I don’t know what it is.
But you may be interested in the full report, so, here it is. In an abstract way I like the notion of comparing my readership to the number of people who’ve climbed Mount Everest, although since I don’t really have an intuitive understanding of how many people did climb Mount Everest in 2012 (it tells me, but it’s not like I had any picture of that in my head before) it’s kind of like comparing areas of things to the number of Rhode Islands which would fit inside it, or lengths to the extent of Volkswagen Beetles. It’s a nice picture, though.
An excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 6,100 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 10 years to get that many views.
Click here to see the complete report.
I do remember reading a book which pointed out that Sir George Everest, of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India and for whom the mountain is named, pronounced his name with a long E and stress on the first syllable. The mountain, every time I’ve ever heard it, gets pronounced with a short E and a weak first syllable. I look with compassion on my fellow member of the club of people whose last name gets mispronounced all the time (and by the same mistaken vowel, at that). I’m sure he would take comfort in that.
