It’s the start of a fresh month, so let me carry on my blog statistics reporting. In February 2014, apparently, there were a mere 423 pages viewed around here, with 209 unique visitors. That’s increased a bit, to 453 views from 257 visitors, my second-highest number of views since last June and second-highest number of visitors since last April. I can make that depressing, though: it means views per visitor dropped from 2.02 to 1.76, but then, they were at 1.76 in January anyway. And I reached my 14,000th page view, which is fun, but I’d need an extraordinary bit of luck to get to 15,000 this month.
March’s most popular articles were a mix of the evergreens — trapezoids and comics — with a bit of talk about March Madness serving as obviously successful clickbait:
- How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw, and again, nobody’s found one I overlooked.
- Calculating March Madness, and the tricky problem of figuring out the chance of getting a perfect bracket.
- Reading The Comics, March 1, 2014: Isn’t It One-Half X Squared Plus C? Edition, showing how well an alleged joke will make comic strips popular.
- Reading The Comics, March 26, 2014: Kitchen Science Department, showing that maybe it’s just naming the comics installments that matters.
- What Are The Chances Of An Upset, which introduces some of the interesting quirks of the bracket and seed system of playoffs, such as the apparent advantage an eleventh seed has over an eighth seed.
There’s a familiar set of countries sending me the most readers: as ever the United States up top (277), with Denmark in second (26) and Canada in third (17). That’s almost a tie, though, as the United Kingdom (16), Austria (15), and the Philippines (13) could have taken third easily. I don’t want to explicitly encourage international rivalries to drive up my page count here, I’m just pointing it out. Singapore is in range too. The single-visitor countries this past month were the Bahamas, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Peru, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, and Taiwan. Hungary, Peru, and Saudi Arabia are the only repeat visitors from February, and nobody’s got a three-month streak going.
There wasn’t any good search-term poetry this month; mostly it was questions about trapezoids, but there were a couple interesting ones:
- “first [basketball] team to 100 wins what percent of the time” (it’s near 90 percent)
- “john venn interests that don’t have to do with math or science” (according to his biography at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Saint Andrews, Scotland, he had interests in history and wrote a Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College as well as a treaties on the life of John Caius, one of the founders of his college; he also had a knack for building machines, including an automated cricket bowler that apparently clean bowled one of the Australian cricket team’s top stars four times, which I take to be impressive to people who speak cricket)
- “what’s the gag in the name of the counselor in the wife of pi cartoon” as well as “scot hiburn wife of pi meaning of counselors name” (the joke is that he’s named “Hugh Jripov”, when he could have been named “Obelus” and let people know what the name of the division symbol there is)
- “instructor b+e do i need passed extra exam to get qualifications” (I don’t know, but if you’re asking questions like that, you probably do need passed)
So, that’s where things stand: I need to get back to writing about trapezoids and comic strips.
nebusresearch 