Tag: 2018

How All Of 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


It’s looking as though WordPress has really and permanently discontinued its year-in-review posts. That’s a shame. They had this animation that presented your year as a set of fireworks, one for each post, paced the same way your posts for the year were. The size of the fireworks explosion corresponded to how much it was liked or drew comments or something. Great stuff. Haven’t seen it in a couple of years. The web washes away everything whimsical.

I can do it manually, at least, looking at the summaries for yearly readership and all that. It’s just a bit different from the monthly reviews. And then I can see what lessons I draw from that, and go on to ignore them all. My impression of 2018 had been that I’d had a mildly better-read year than I had in 2017, but that my comments and likes had cratered. That is, people might find something they wanted to read, but saw no reason to stick around and chat with me, which I understand. But here’s what the data says.

2018 statistics: 16,597 page views. 9,769 visitors. 1.70 views per visitor. 182 posts published.
Also I swear they’ve changed the color scheme on this statistics page. This is probably setting up to a complete redesign of the statistics page to make it into something that gives almost the same information but takes way more JavaScript to do. I’m being old again. Pay no mind.

And, for the sake of convenience, let me put things since 2012 — my first full year — in a coherent table.

Year Posts Published Page Views Unique Visitors Likes Comments
2012 6,094 180 275* 97 190
2013 106 5,729 2,905 262 161
2014 129 7,020 3,382 1,045 308
2015 188 11,241 5,159 3,273 822
2016 213 12,851 7,168 2,163 474
2017 164 12,214 7,602 1,094 301
2018 182 16,597 9,769 1,016 386

The 2012 visitors count doesn’t; they only started keeping track of those numbers (where they’d admit to us) partway through the year.

2015 you can see was a busy year. That’s the first year I did an A-To-Z sequence, and that got a fantastic response. In 2016 I tried two over the year and while neither was as well-received, it did turn out nicely. 2017 and 2018 had a single A-To-Z sequence each. I’m surprised how nearly I track to a post every other day over seven years straight. And I’m surprised that my page-view count grew by about one-third from 2017 to 2018. And that unique visitors grew by about the same amount, and has been except for 2016-to-2017. I’m certainly not doing much to be better about promoting myself, so something else is at work. The evaporating number of likes and comments I can’t explain. It’s looking like 2015 and 2016 were exceptional years, but what was the exception?

I can say what’s popular: posts that tell you how to do something. And, of course, my participation in the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival. I hope to do that again this year. The ten most popular things from 2018 were:

Fascinating, to me, is that only one piece (the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival) was posted in 2018. But overall it suggests I should start more pieces with the tag “How to … ”.

122 of the world’s countries sent me any readers at all in 2018. Here they are, and how many came from each, as WordPress organizes them and thinks dubious things like the “European Union” or the “United Kingdom” are countries:

Country Readers
United States 10,545
Philippines 803
United Kingdom 737
Canada 641
India 635
Australia 285
Singapore 246
Denmark 199
Turkey 148
Germany 122
South Africa 114
Sweden 106
Brazil 105
Slovenia 105
France 85
Italy 83
Netherlands 72
Spain 71
Hong Kong SAR China 70
Puerto Rico 67
European Union 66
Switzerland 63
Poland 62
Austria 53
Indonesia 53
New Zealand 50
Mexico 45
Ireland 44
Pakistan 43
Belgium 41
Norway 39
Malaysia 37
Greece 36
South Korea 35
Russia 29
Algeria 28
Romania 27
Israel 25
Argentina 24
Kenya 22
Japan 21
Czech Republic 20
Finland 20
United Arab Emirates 20
Thailand 19
Egypt 18
Vietnam 16
Ghana 15
Peru 15
Portugal 14
Bangladesh 13
Nigeria 13
Croatia 12
Lithuania 12
Ukraine 12
Taiwan 11
Bulgaria 10
Bhutan 9
Brunei 9
Chile 9
Serbia 9
Hungary 8
Nepal 8
Saudi Arabia 8
Slovakia 8
Belize 7
China 7
Kazakhstan 7
Venezuela 7
Afghanistan 6
Morocco 6
Qatar 6
Sri Lanka 6
American Samoa 5
Colombia 5
Iraq 5
Kuwait 5
Lebanon 5
Macau SAR China 5
Mongolia 5
Albania 4
Estonia 4
Georgia 4
Jamaica 4
Jordan 4
Uruguay 4
Barbados 3
Costa Rica 3
Guernsey 3
Iceland 3
Latvia 3
Mauritius 3
Palestinian Territories 3
Panama 3
Cambodia 2
Cyprus 2
Ecuador 2
Laos 2
Libya 2
Luxembourg 2
Namibia 2
St. Kitts & Nevis 2
Tanzania 2
Trinidad & Tobago 2
Armenia 1
Bahamas 1
Bahrain 1
Botswana 1
El Salvador 1
Ethiopia 1
Fiji 1
Gibraltar 1
Guam 1
Kyrgyzstan 1
Macedonia 1
Malta 1
Mozambique 1
Myanmar (Burma) 1
Oman 1
Senegal 1
Sint Maarten 1
Tunisia 1

I’m quite surprised to have so many readers from the Philippines and wonder if some peculiar event happened, like a teacher told the school to look at my piece about the number of grooves on a record. I figured to appeal more to countries where English is a primary language, and know I have a strong United States cultural bias. (Quick, name a non-American comic strip that’s ever got into a Reading The Comics post. Time’s up! You were trying to think of Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends.) But the gap in readers per capita between, say, the United States and Canada seems more than I should have expected.

In all, in 2018, I posted 182 things. They came out to 186,612 words overall, for an average of 1,025 words per post. On average posts attracted 5.3 likes, and 2.8 comments. Seems as though I could do more. I don’t really know what.

How December 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


With the end of December it’s the time to see what was popular around here, and just how popular it was. I keep figuring I’ll learn something useful from these explorations. Now and then I come to conclusions and one of these months I’ll even act on them.

December was an exhausting month. The last couple weeks of any A To Z sequence always are. These sequences are great fun, of course, or I wouldn’t keep doing them. But fatigue sets in, especially as I discover I’m not getting as far ahead of deadline as I imagined I would be and I get to the difficult letters of the alphabet’s end. And the Fall 2018 A To Z made up for being less frequent than past glossaries — two, rather than three, essays a week — with being crazily longer. So I was exhausted by that. And then the mathematically-themed comics for my Reading the Comics posts completely dried up. Add to that real-life obligations that I would not skip — being with family, and going to pinball events — and I ended up posting 17 things in December. Which is more than usual, yes. A typical month is 12 to 14 posts. But it’s down from the 23 of October and November, and I’m as convinced as I can be without evidence that the number of posts determines how many page views I get.

So October 2018, aided in part by my hosting the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival, had 2,010 page views from 1,063 unique visitors. November I got in 1,611 page views from 847 visitors. December, well, that saw 1,409 page views from 875 visitors.

December 2018: 1,409 views; 875 visitors; 1.61 views per visitor; 17 posts published.
I’d have liked to have taken this screenshot at just past midnight, Universal Time, on the 1st of January, but I was busy with something or other. Who can really say what, or why, though?

There were 82 things liked in December. It’s a slight drop from November’s 85, and October’s 94. I suppose it’s a rise in likes per page view, at least. The number of comments utterly collapsed, which probably reflects the end of the A To Z project. In October and November I had appeals for suggested topics; December didn’t have time for them. So what was 60 comments in October and 36 in November dropped to 17 for December. It’s not my least talkative period of the last year, but it’s up there. I need, seriously, to work on opening my posts to more comments. I’d ask people for suggestions how to do that, but who would answer?

The most popular essays around here in December were two perennials, two A To Z pieces, and some comics:

What countries sent me page views, and in what quantity? These, and these:

Country Readers
United States 819
Canada 77
United Kingdom 68
India 46
Turkey 39
Philippines 31
Singapore 31
Australia 27
Denmark 23
Indonesia 15
Slovenia 14
South Africa 13
Italy 11
New Zealand 11
Sweden 10
Greece 9
Netherlands 9
South Korea 9
Bangladesh 8
Ireland 8
Lithuania 8
Germany 7
Brazil 6
Hong Kong SAR China 6
Poland 6
American Samoa 5
European Union 5
Mexico 5
Russia 5
Switzerland 5
Finland 4
France 4
Norway 4
Belgium 3
Czech Republic 3
Ghana 3
Hungary 3
Israel 3
Kenya 3
Pakistan 3
Serbia 3
Austria 2
Chile 2
Egypt 2
Libya 2
Romania 2
Spain 2
Taiwan 2
Ukraine 2
Vietnam 2
Albania 1
Algeria 1
Argentina 1
Botswana 1
China 1
Colombia 1 (****)
Iceland 1
Iraq 1
Japan 1
Jordan 1
Kuwait 1
Latvia 1
Palestinian Territories 1 (*)
Portugal 1
Puerto Rico 1
Saudi Arabia 1 (*)
Sint Maarten 1
Slovakia 1

That was 68 different countries sending readers, down from November’s 70 and October’s 74. There were 17 single-reader countries, up from November’s 13 and down from October’s 23. The Palestinian Territories and Saudi Arabia were single-reader countries in November too. Colombia’s been a single-reader country five months now. I don’t see how China can be a single-reader country, even given that English isn’t a primary language there. More than one person has to stumble across here just by accident. There’s something going on there.

According to Insights, I start the month and year with 72,915 total page views, from an admitted 36,260 unique visitors.

I published something like 18,587 words here in December, which is a drop from the 26,644 of November. I write “something like” because I don’t know how WordPress tallies stuff like words in captions, and I don’t think it counts words in comments. And the idea of a “word” in a count like this is difficult to make precise and indisputable. So don’t be fooled by the digits into thinking there’s any precision there. Also it’s still 1,093 words per post, which is a bit down from the 1,158 in an average November essay but still.

For the year-to-date, by the end of December, I was writing an average of 1,025 words per post. That is, posts for the whole of the year, rather than just in December. That’s down from the end-of-November average of 1,108 words per post. I averaged 5.2 likes per post, down from the end-of-November average of 5.3. And 2.8 comments per post, up from the end-of-November average of 2.7. That’s certainly not a significant change.

I’m glad to have you as a reader, even if it’s just for this sort of self-preening post. You can put my posts in your RSS reader and enjoy them at your convenience. If you’re using WordPress regularly you can also add me to your WordPress Reader. That’s from the button at the upper-right corner of the page. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj. And just about every Sunday plus, usually, some other day of the week I’ll be Reading the Comics for the mathematics stuff. Thanks for being here.

How November 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


I knew that November 2018 was going to be a less busy month around here than October would. I didn’t have the benefit of hosting the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival for it. I’m hoping to host the carnival again, though. Not until after the new year. Not until after I’ve finished the Fall 2018 A To Z and have had some time to recuperate. It’s a weird thing but writing two 1500-to-2000-word essays each week hasn’t lightened my workload the way I figured. If you’re interested in the current Blog Carnival, by the way, here it is. Anyway, as reversions to the norm go, November was not bad. Here’s what it looked like.

November 2018. Views: 1,611. Visitors: 846. Views per visitor 1.90. Total posts: 23.
WordPress readership figures around here for July 2016 through November 2018. I was able to capture this picture just before anyone visited me in December, which I’m going to say is because I had really good reflexes and not because nobody wanted to deal with me the first Saturday of the month.

So there were 1,611 pages viewed here in November. Down from the 2,010 of October, but noticeably higher than September’s 1,505. That’s still a third-highest month (March 2018 was busier still). But it’s weirdly gratifying. There were 847 unique visitors logged in November. That’s down from October’s 1,063, and even September’s 874. I make this out as my fifth-most-visitors month on record. All those months have been this year.

85 things got liked in November. That’s down from October’s 94, up from September’s 65, and overall part of a weird pattern. My likes are definitely declining over time. But there’s little local peaks. If there’s any pattern it’s kind of a sawtooth, with the height of the teeth dropping. I have no explanation for this phenomenon. There were 36 comments in November, well down from October’s 60, but equal to September’s. It’s above the running average of the last two months (28.5 comments per month) but it’s still well below, like, the average commentary you can expect on the Comics Curmudgeon. Granted, we serve different purposes.

Of the most popular essays this month the top two were perennials. Some A to Z stuff filled out the rest. I’m including the top six posts here there was a tie for fourth place, and sixth place was barely behind that. If this reason seems ad hoc, you understand it correctly. Read a lot around here were:

Mutt, hauling a Victrola in: 'Have I ever shown you these valuable records I have?' Jeff: 'No!' Mutt: 'These records are very valuable! They are the first records ever made!' Jeff: 'They sound scratchy!' Mutt: 'Yes, they have some scratches, but they are worth five dollars each!' [ Later that Day ... Jeff is sandpapering a record. ] Jeff: 'I'll surprise Mutt.' (To Mutt). Jeff: 'Now they don't have scratches any more! I sanded them until they were smooth!'
Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff rerun for the 1st of December, 2018. Clearly an attempt to get itself added to my page about how many grooves are on a record’s side. I have no information about when this strip first ran. My gut says the art dates to the 1940s. The word balloons are all recent, computer-assisted reletterings. (Look at the lower end of each letter ‘S’.) The relettering is certainly easier to read than the original cramped and shakily reproduced lettering. (Look at the record player’s ‘Come, Josephine’ text, or the sound effect of Jeff scratching the record clean in the fourth panel to see how bad it could be.) But the relettering is probably why the dialogue has that slightly over-edited, not-quite-human flow we’re used to from Funky Winkerbean.

And where were all these readers coming from? Here’s the roster of countries and their readership totals:

Country Readers
United States 1,038
United Kingdom 72
Philippines 66
Canada 63
India 46
Denmark 37
Singapore 32
Australia 26
Sweden 15
Slovenia 14
Italy 12
Netherlands 12
Spain 11
Hong Kong SAR China 9
Germany 8
Brazil 7
Croatia 7
United Arab Emirates 7
Romania 6
Thailand 6
France 5
Puerto Rico 5
South Africa 5
Venezuela 5
European Union 4
Indonesia 4
Mexico 4
Norway 4
Pakistan 4
Poland 4
Austria 3
Israel 3
Nepal 3
Russia 3
Switzerland 3
Turkey 3
Algeria 2
Argentina 2
Bangladesh 2
Belgium 2
Bulgaria 2
China 2
Finland 2
Georgia 2
Ghana 2
Greece 2
Japan 2
Jordan 2
Malaysia 2
New Zealand 2
Nigeria 2
Panama 2
Peru 2
Portugal 2
South Korea 2
Sri Lanka 2
Taiwan 2
Belize 1
Bhutan 1
Colombia 1 (***)
Costa Rica 1
Czech Republic 1 (**)
El Salvador 1
Guernsey 1
Kenya 1
Lebanon 1
Namibia 1
Palestinian Territories 1
Qatar 1
Saudi Arabia 1

70 countries sent me readers in November 2018. That’s down from October’s 74 but up from September’s 58. 13 of them were single-reader countries, down from October’s 23 and September’s 14. Czech Republic has been a single-reader country for three months. Colombia for four months now.

According to the Insights panel, I start the month at 71,506 total page views for the 1,185 posts I’ve done altogether. It also records 35,384 unique visitors, but I again have to defensively insist WordPress didn’t count unique visitors for the first couple months I was around here. I swear.

I published 23 posts in October. A to Z months tend to be busy ones. These posts held something like 26,644 words in total. For the 165 things I had posted this year, through to the start of December, I averaged 1,108 words per post. That’s up from the start of November’s 996 words per post, but still. I’m averaging 5.3 likes per post, and 2.7 comments per post. At the start of last month I was averaging 5.5 likes and 2.8 comments per post. This is probably not any important kind of variation. There’ve been 450 total comments and 870 total likes this year, as of the start of December.

Are you interested in reading me more regularly? You can put my posts in your RSS reader and enjoy them at your convenience. You can also add me to your WordPress Reader, using the button at the upper-right corner of the page. Also possibly a pop-up menu from the lower-right corner. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj. Through the end of the year I’ll keep working on the Fall 2018 A To Z. And every Sunday plus, usually, some other day of the week I’ll be Reading the Comics for the mathematics stuff. Thanks for considering any of this.

How October 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


I expected there to be a fair number of readers here in October. The A to Z project, particularly, implied that. A To Z months are exhausting, but they give me a lot of posts. And I’m as sure as I can be without actually checking that the number of posts is the biggest determining factor in how many readers I attract. There were 23 posts in October, compared to September’s 15 and my summertime usual of 12 to 14.

Then there’s the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival. This posted in September — by six hours — but it was destined to bring new and, I hope, happy readers in. And that happened also. Here’s what the WordPress statistics showed me for the month:

October 2018: 2,010 views from 1,063 visitors. 1.89 views per visitor. 23 posts published.
I’m so looking forward to seeing how big my faceplant back to normal is for November. No, really, nobody put references to me on some high-volume blog that tells people of cool stuff they might be reading. I couldn’t bear it.

So this was my highest-readership month since the blog started seven years ago. 2,010 page views, from 1,063 unique visitors. That’s also the greatest number of unique visitors I’ve had in one month, and the first time I’ve broken a thousand visitors. September had 1,505 page views from 874 unique visitors; August, 1,421 page views from 913 unique visitors.

There was a bit of an upswing in the number of likes: 94 of them issued in October, compared to September’s 65 and August’s 57. This is on the higher side for this year, but it is down a good bit from the comparable month two or three years ago. In June 2015, for my first A to Z, I drew over 500 likes; I don’t know where likers have gone.

There were 60 comments on the blog in October, partly people who liked or wanted to talk about A To Z topics, partly people suggesting others. It’s the greatest number of comments I’ve had in one month in two years now. September had 36 commenters; August, 27. Have to go back to March 2016 to find a month when more people said anything around here. That, too, was an A-to-Z month, and one of the handful of months when I posted something every single day.

There were a lot of popular posts this month, naturally. This might be the first time in years that none of the top five were Reading the Comics posts. The A to Z and the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival squeezed out very nearly everything:

52 countries sent me any readers in August. 58 did so in September. There were 16 single-reader countries in August and 14 in September. For busy October?

Country Readers
United States 1,172
Philippines 99
United Kingdom 94
Denmark 82
Canada 65
India 59
Singapore 53
Australia 50
Poland 27
Slovenia 24
Brazil 20
South Africa 16
Turkey 15
European Union 13
Greece 13
Germany 12
France 11
Mexico 11
Puerto Rico 11
Spain 10
Ireland 8
Malaysia 8
Italy 7
New Zealand 7
Russia 6
Switzerland 6
Argentina 5
Netherlands 5
Nigeria 5
Norway 5
China 4
Hong Kong SAR China 4
Indonesia 4
Pakistan 4
Belgium 3
Belize 3
Chile 3
Kenya 3
South Korea 3
Algeria 2
Austria 2
Barbados 2
Croatia 2
Ghana 2
Japan 2
Morocco 2
Qatar 2
Romania 2
Slovakia 2
Sweden 2
Ukraine 2
Albania 1
Bahrain 1
Bangladesh 1
Bulgaria 1
Cambodia 1
Colombia 1 (**)
Cyprus 1
Czech Republic 1 (*)
Georgia 1
Jamaica 1
Jordan 1
Kazakhstan 1
Macau SAR China 1
Macedonia 1
Myanmar (Burma) 1
Oman 1
Peru 1
Portugal 1
Serbia 1
Sri Lanka 1
Taiwan 1
Uruguay 1
Vietnam 1

74 countries sending me any readers at all. 23 countries sent me a single reader for the month. Czech republic has sent me a single reader two months in a row now; Columbia, three months in a row.

Insights tells me that I started November with a total of 69,895 page views, from a logged 34,538 unique visitors. As ever, please recall the first couple years WordPress didn’t tell us anything about the unique visitor count, so for all I know there “should” be more.

In October I published 28,733 words, which is nearly double September’s total. Whew. I’d posted 142 things this year by the start of November, and gathered a total of 391 comments and 787 likes for the year to date. This averaged to 3.1 comments per post on average, up from 2.6 at the start of October. And 5.5 likes per posting, down from 5.8 at the start of October. The 142 posts through the start of November averaged 996 words each. That’s up from 946 words per post at the start of October. I’m going to crush myself beneath a pile of words that I meant to be less deep.

If you’d like to add this blog to your WordPress Reader, there should be a button to do so at the upper right corner of this page. It should also be an option in this pop-up menu from the lower right corner. Or you can add this blog to your RSS reader, and read it in any format you like and without me or WordPress being able to track you. If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, I am @Nebusj. Still thinking seriously about getting a Mathstodon account. And if you’re interested in my two biggest projects here, all of my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should appear at this link. My biggest ongoing project is Reading the Comics, and its many posts are here. Thank you for reading.

How September 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog, Finally


I like to do my monthly recap of my readership, like, at the start of the month. It’s just that between the Carnival, the A-to-Z, Reading the Comics, and my being busy on Friday I didn’t have the time before now. I’d say that it doesn’t matter because these statistics-review posts are mostly for my own entertainment. But I do feel there’s something untidy in my being a week late.

It was a well-read month! My second-most-read month, if I’m not missing something. WordPress reports 1,505 page views, up from August’s 1,421 and July’s 1,058. (The highest I have on record is March’s 1,779 page views.) Third-highest number of unique visitors, as well: 874 of them. August had 913 unique visitors. July a mere 668, but that was a more normal month. (March had 999 unique visitors and yes, it still burns me up that I didn’t have just the one more.)

Yes, I’m excited by what I see for October’s views already. I should have made this chart sooner in the month. Now I’m going to be all disappointed when it doesn’t stay this riotously popular on, like, the 28th of October.

The number of ‘likes’ around here rose, to 65. Had been 57 in August and 37 in July. That’s still tiny, though, compared to what was normal around here even a year ago (98 in September 2017, and that was down from all of 2016). The number of comments was up, to 36 from August’s 27 and July’s 28. But the number of comments around here is so erratic that I’ve mostly given up on figuring any kind of pattern.

The top most popular articles for September were one perennial, one that I’d have expected to be a perennial (and was the number-two post last month), comics, and the carnival:

I have the suspicion that the Playful Mathematics Education Blog Carnival #121 post will be most popular next month too. And that only my publishing it the last day of September kept it from being on top for that month too.

52 countries sent me any readers at all in August. 16 of them were single-reader countries. The same numbers accurately described countries and single-reader countries for July. And for September? … Here’s the roster.

Country Readers
United States 885
Philippines 149
United Kingdom 64
India 63
Canada 51
Australia 34
Turkey 23
Singapore 22
Germany 21
Denmark 16
Slovenia 16
European Union 12
France 8
South Africa 8
Switzerland 8
Brazil 7
Netherlands 7
Pakistan 7
Brunei 6
Kazakhstan 6
Ghana 5
Puerto Rico 5
Russia 5
Spain 5
Egypt 4
Ireland 4
Malaysia 4
Sweden 4
Taiwan 4
Thailand 4
Austria 3
Finland 3
Morocco 3
Norway 3
Poland 3
South Korea 3
Belize 2
Greece 2
Iceland 2
Indonesia 2
Jamaica 2
Kenya 2
Mexico 2
Vietnam 2
Algeria 1
Argentina 1 (*)
Belgium 1
Chile 1 (*)
Colombia 1 (*)
Croatia 1
Czech Republic 1
Guam 1
Israel 1
Kuwait 1
New Zealand 1
Saudi Arabia 1
Slovakia 1
United Arab Emirates 1

So that’s 58 countries total, with only 14 of them single-readers. Argentina, Chile, and Colombia were single-reader countries in August; nobody else was. No countries are on a longer than two-month streak. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than a hundred readers from the Philippines. Also 12 readers listed as from the European Union, distinct from the countries participating in it, seems unusually many.

According to the Insights panel I’d had 119 posts this year, right before October began. And had gathered 67,885 page views. This would be from a total of 33,475 acknowledged unique visitors. (My blog started before WordPress told us anything about unique visitors.) As of the start of October, there had been 313 total comments. This makes an average of 2.6 comments per post on average. At the start of August there had been 2.6 comments per post on average. But remember that was fifteen fewer posts. At the end of September I’d gotten 696 total likes, for an average of 5.8 likes per post. That’s down from 6.0 at the end of August. By the end of September I’d had a total of 112,648 words posted around here. 15,014 of them were posted in September. Since there were fifteen posts altogether that’s an average of 1000.1 words per post in September. For the year, through the end of September, that’s 946.6 words per post this year. At the end of August that had been 930 words per post. So as ever, my attempts to write more quick, simple, short things that don’t wear me out has failed. And I have the rest of an A to Z to write, too! I’m so doomed.

If you’d like to watch my continuing logorrheic doom, please follow along. You can add me to your WordPress Reader by using the button at the upper right corner of the page. If you’d rather read without my having the ability to track, you can follow me by RSS here. If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, try adding me as @Nebusj. Thanks for being here, in whatever form you are.

I’m Still Looking For Fun Mathematics And Words


I’m hoping to get my 2018 Mathematics A To Z started the last week of September, which among other things will let me end it in 2018 if I haven’t been counting wrong. We’ll see. If you’ve got requests for the first several letters in the alphabet, there’s still open slots. I’ll be opening up the next quarter of the alphabet soon, too.

And also set for the last week of September — boy, I’m glad I am not going to have any doubts or regrets about how I’m scheduling my time for two weeks hence — is the Playful Mathematic Education Carnival. This project, overseen by Denise Gaskins, tries to bring a bundle of fun stuff about mathematics to different blogs. Iva Sallay’s turn, the end of August, is up here. Have you spotted something mathematical that’s made you smile? Please let me know. I’d love to share it with the world.

How August 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


And with the start of the month it’s my chance to do my usual self-examination. In this I look over what was popular, and how popular, and draw no usable conclusions from this. The month didn’t end as I had hoped, owing to family matters. But then nothing ever does quite go as one hopes. We just have to carry on anyway. But looking over WordPress’s review of readership around here:

August 2018 statistics: 1,421 views. 913 visitors. 1.56 views per visitor. 14 posts published.
I’m a little surprised to have had fourteen posts. I was pulled away from my writing the last week of the month so thought I would just have a gap.

Huh. August was a busy month, with 1,421 recorded page views. The last several months had been 1,058 and 1,077. This is the third-highest number of page views since April of 2016 at least. And that’s from 913 unique visitors, which is the second-highest number of unique visitors I’ve got on record. (March 2018 continues to taunt me with 999 unique visitors.) People found something they liked.

They liked 57 things, which compares to July’s 37 by being larger. It’s still an anemic total, though. June had 94 likes, and even that is way down from a year ago. August 2017 had 147 likes. And there was a time there’d be 345 likes in a month. That time was April 2016. Comments drifted slightly downward, to 27 from July’s 28 or June’s 30. I count that as holding still, anyway. As ever, I need to do better writing things that encourage responses.

The roster of most popular articles suggests that I’m catching on as a reference for the record-groove counting problem. Just under 200 page views were of that alone. The next-most-popular piece had only 67 views. Don’t think I’m not considering studying power-law scaling of my posts. If you have no idea what I’m on about, don’t worry. I may get to it. But here’s the most popular posts for the past month:

I’m still taking nominations for the A-To-Z, by the way, and shall be for a while yet. Also, discussions of fun mathematics which don’t fit the A-To-Z format may yet belong in the Mathematics Blog Carnival, to appear here at the end of September. Please let me know of anything that’s educational or playful or just fun that you’d like to see shared with more people. Can be your own writing; can be something you think more people should know.

What countries of the world, plus the European Union, sent me readers in August? And how many? Here’s the official roster as WordPress make it out.

Country Readers
United States 802
Philippines 232
Canada 52
Turkey 44
India 40
United Kingdom 31
Australia 30
European Union 26
France 18
Germany 12
Bhutan 8
Italy 7
Singapore 7
Belgium 6
Czech Republic 6
Netherlands 6
Peru 6
Puerto Rico 6
Spain 6
Israel 5
Pakistan 5
Sweden 5
Brazil 4
Finland 4
Mexico 4
New Zealand 4
Nigeria 4
Norway 4
Algeria 3
Indonesia 3
South Africa 3
South Korea 3
United Arab Emirates 3
Denmark 2
Malaysia 2
Vietnam 2
Argentina 1
Austria 1 (*)
Chile 1
Colombia 1
Egypt 1
Estonia 1
Ethiopia 1
Hong Kong SAR China 1
Ireland 1 (*)
Latvia 1
Luxembourg 1
Panama 1
Portugal 1
Romania 1 (*)
Slovenia 1
Sri Lanka 1

They list 52 countries sending me any readers. This is the same as in July. There were 16 single-reader countries, again the same as in July. I know, I’m worried I made a mistake with the data too. Ah, but here. Austria, Ireland, and Romania are on two-month streaks as single-reader countries. Nobody’s been on the roster more than two months in a row. Serbia just missed the half-year milestone.

The Insights panel would have me believe I started September on 66,380 page views, from 32,601 recorded unique visitors. I’ll go along with that gag. For the year to date, I’ve posted — well, I forgot to take a snapshot of the data before Sunday’s Reading the Comics post published. If we pretend the 2nd of September was part of August, though, then: I’ve had 105 posts so far this year; 14 in August and 15 in the Greater August that included this past Sunday. I’ve accumulated 269 total comments, for an average of 2.6 comments per post. This is the same average I had at the start of August. I gathered a total of 633 likes, for an average of 6.0 likes per post this year. Start of August I’d had 6.4 likes per post. Counting Sunday’s post I had 97,634 total words published so far this year, 14,551 of them in August. In July I had 14,032 words in only twelve posts. My words-per-post average is up to 930. Start of August it had drifted down to 885.3.

If you’d like to read my posts you’ve got options. They all involve reading, though. Maybe having them read to you. But all my posts are available by RSS feed. If you like the WordPress reader, there’s a button at the upper-right corner of the page. And if you’d like to see messages announced on Twitter, I’m @Nebusj there. And yes, I am sniffing around Mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Twitter-like social site Mastodon. Just browsing its public feed can be fun. There’s a mix of people sharing neat stuff they ran across, little puzzles that’ve been bothering them, and legitimate current research. I do not have an account there and might not make one at all. But I’m thinking about whether I ought. Will tell you if and when I do.

How July 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


July 2018 was another month in which stuff got in the way of my plans. I know it seems like I’m always apologizing for that. But I tell you truly: stuff keeps getting in the way of my plans. I could keep up the most essential stuff, the Reading the Comics posts. But bigger projects — I may as well stop being coy; I’m hoping to do another A to Z this year — kept getting lost under daily stuff. This includes pet health problems. I’ll leave it at that because they were sad ones.

But let’s see what these strained circumstances did for my readership, such as it was.

July 2018, views: 1,058. Visitors: 668. Views per visitor: 1.58. Posts published: 12.
My WordPress.com statistics report for July 2018 and the months leading up to that.

OK. Spent another month at above a thousand page views, which is a nice threshold. There were 1,058 pages looked at around here in July, down from June’s 1,077 and May’s 1,274. This is three months in a row I’ve had twelve posts, most of them Reading the Comics stuff. This goes to support the hypothesis that the thing most in my control that affects my readership is the number of things I write. There were 668 unique visitors, down a little from June’s 681 and a fair bit from May’s 837. The number of likes plummeted once again, to a mere 37. It had been 94 in June and 73 in May. But that’s still a drop.

And it hurts a bit. I think I’m doing much better Reading the Comics posts than I used to. I credit the discovery that GoComics.com links aren’t as secure as I had thought. If I’m going to include the image of every comic strip I talk about, I want to have a more substantive discussion. Reprinting strips that I don’t have the copyright to is fair use, of course, in that I’m using them for educational purpose. But making sure that I have a deeper discussion based on the strip makes me feel more secure in my use.

At least the comments held steady, with 28 of them over the month. That’s down from June’s 30, but that’s not a real difference. May saw only 17 comments. And it’s pretty good to have that many comments. Pet issues and other obligations had me spend a week and a half just checking that nothing had exploded. (It didn’t. I’ve never had something explode around here.)

And what was popular around here? One perennial, some comic strip stuff, and a post I am delighted got some attention:

There were a large number of views of the record-grooves post. But they weren’t particularly concentrated any one day or week. I think it might have reached that point where it’s Google-ranked highly enough to turn up as an answer to people’s query. I’m always embarrassed when my self-examination posts are among the most popular stuff I write. But if I view them as concentrating the stuff my readers think is particularly important, well, that’s all right then. Maybe I should do more regular recaps of what’s been popular lately. Could fill that late-in-the-week content hole.

But the important thing is I’m delighted people are reading about my prosthaphaeretic rule for finding square roots. I’m sure that it’s an old trick. And it’s not at all practical, not anymore. But I did notice it sitting there, waiting for me to uncover. That was fun.

Now to the list of countries sending me readers: will it include the United States up top?

Country Readers
United States 669
United Kingdom 110
India 49
Philippines 42
Australia 25
Canada 23
Slovenia 10
South Africa 10
Germany 9
France 7
Hong Kong SAR China 6
Kenya 6
Brazil 5
Mexico 5
Netherlands 5
New Zealand 5
Spain 5
Macau SAR China 4
Malaysia 4
Pakistan 4
Puerto Rico 4
Argentina 3
Belgium 3
Italy 3
Japan 3
Singapore 3
Chile 2
Guernsey 2
Indonesia 2
Mauritius 2
Norway 2
Poland 2
Portugal 2
Sweden 2
Tanzania 2
Turkey 2
Austria 1
Bangladesh 1
Brunei 1 (**)
Bulgaria 1
Denmark 1
Hungary 1
Ireland 1
Israel 1
Laos 1
Peru 1
Romania 1
Serbia 1 (****)
Slovakia 1 (*)
South Korea 1 (**)
Venezuela 1
Vietnam 1

There were 52 countries sending me readers in July, down from 55 in June and 58 in May. There were 16 single-reader countries, down from 19 in June and 22 in May. Slovakia’s been on that list two months in a row. Brunei and South Korea three months now. Serbia’s on its fifth month in a row on the single-reader list. I hope they like me a little bit enough. It’s a rare month to have no countries with an & in their name, like Trinidad & Tobago. Hm.

If the Insights panel is correct, I started August viewed 64,958 times by 31,688 logged unique visitors. I’d finished with 90 posts on the year, gathering a total of 232 comments and 572 likes. That’s an average of 2.6 comments and 6.4 likes per post. I reached 83,083 total words published, an average of 923.1 words per post. At the end of June I was averaging 885.3 words per post. I don’t know how I got so much more longwinded so fast. But it does credit me with 14,032 words published in July, and that over only twelve posts. No wonder I’m tired.

Thanks as ever for reading my posts. You can add this page to your RSS reader by using this address. If you’d rather add it to your WordPress reader, you can use the button at the upper-right corner of the page. And if you’d rather see me on Twitter, please do add me @Nebusj. Thank you.

How June 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


I’ve broken the habit of watching my WordPress readership statistics day-to-day. This is good. It’s too easy to read random fluctuations as significant changes. And to go from that to supposing that everyone’s decided they hate me now. I do still check monthly. And I try to think what I can learn from that data. Not too hard, and not enough to change what I do. But to where I might think I learned something.

I had another 12-post month. As seems to keep happening I started out with an ambitious program of the weekly Reading the Comics posts, finishing up a couple of open-ended essay threads, and then a few drop-ins as I ran across something interesting. And then my days got all busy and stuff demanded my attention and all I had time for was the comics posts after all. It turned out mostly all right, though. Here’s just how all right:

June 2018, Views: 1,077. Visitors: 681. Views per visitor: 1.58. There should also be a listing that there were 12 posts.
Meanwhile in the world’s dullest domino chain.

So for the sixth month running I beat a thousand page views. Came in at 1,077. It’s my thinnest margin since back in February when there were a mere 1,062 page views. Still, I had a more than this large comfortable round number of page views. The number of unique visitors dropped also, to 681. That’s my lowest number of visitors since February again. But that just seems to reflect there being less traffic overall in June; the number of views per visitor was 1.58, basically the same as May’s 1.52 and April’s 1.53. No archive-divers here, seems.

There were 94 things liked in June; that’s up from April’s and May’s 73, and down from March’s 142. There were 30 comments posted in June, up from May’s 17 and April’s 13, but down from March’s 53. All respectable enough; none exactly suggesting I know how to write stuff people love to share or comment on. Which is on me, of course; no reader’s got the job of responding to stuff they don’t care to.

The popular posts were nearly what I would have guessed: the Buggles and some comics stuff. But there were surprises even in the top five:

So I’m surprised that last month’s readership review post would be among the most popular. I guess it shows the value of having any picture at all, however marginally interesting, in a post. Still seems dangerously self-absorbed. The non-Euclidean geometry one also surprises me, since it was only up for two days and still got as many readers as anything else posted in June. The lesson here, I suppose, is that people love seeing me not know stuff that’s obvious to people familiar with a topic. This is promising for future essays, though, since there are so many obvious things I don’t know.

Then there’s the list of countries that sent me readers to include, since that’s apparently a thing people like:

Country Readers
United States 698
India 62
United Kingdom 45
Canada 44
Germany 19
Philippines 19
Singapore 15
Australia 14
Italy 14
Sweden 14
Poland 11
South Africa 9
Austria 8
France 7
Indonesia 7
Puerto Rico 7
Belgium 4
Brazil 4
Denmark 4
Hong Kong SAR China 4
Mexico 4
Netherlands 4
Norway 4
Spain 4
Czech Republic 3
Egypt 3
Kenya 3
Switzerland 3
United Arab Emirates 3
Argentina 2
Ireland 2
Japan 2
Lithuania 2
Malaysia 2
Nepal 2
Vietnam 2
Brunei 1 (*)
Cambodia 1
Croatia 1
Ecuador 1
Estonia 1
Fiji 1
Georgia 1
Ghana 1
Greece 1
Iraq 1
Malta 1
New Zealand 1
Nigeria 1
Serbia 1 (***)
Slovakia 1
Slovenia 1
South Korea 1 (*)
Thailand 1
Turkey 1

There were 55 countries sending me any readers, down from 58 for three months in a row. There were 19 single-reader countries, down from 22 in May, up from 14 in April. Brunei and South Korea were single-reader countries two months in a row. Serbia’s had a single reader for me four months in a row now.

The Insights panel tells me July started with this blog having had 63,897 total page views, from an admitted 31,020 unique visitors. It logs for the year 2018 a total of 78 posts that attracted, to that point, 196 comments. And that there had been 535 total likes given to something over the year so far. This comes to an average of 2.5 comments per post, and 6.8 likes per posting. By the end of May I had gotten only 2.4 comments and 6.7 likes per post, so, at least I’ve got something figured out.

By the end of June I had posted 69,051 words as WordPress logs things; that’s 13,374 words over June, a bit more than I posted over May despite June being the shorter month. I’m up to an average of 885.3 words per post; at the end of May I was at a mere 843.6 words per post. The trend is obvious; by the end of the year I’ll just never stop writing things. You’ll just see a continuous feed of me putting more heaps of words onto this pile. You’ll be shocked how many times and how many different ways I can type ‘that’ wrong and correct it. Or how often an ‘of course’ creeps into my writing and I have to edit that out.

As ever, I encourage you to read this post and more like it. You can add this page to your WordPress reader by using the button at the upper-right corner of this page. This link is the RSS feed, which gets all my posts as they’re posted, and which you can add to your RSS reader without my ever knowing about. I’m @Nebusj on Twitter. If you see me on Tumblr you’ve found a hoax, since I’m not on Tumblr and every time I look at it I feel helpless and confused.

How May 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


And now the easiest post I write all month: my review of what my readership looked like the past 31 days. I have to admit once more I’m not satisfied with my writership. I didn’t get some projects going that I wanted; but that’s all right. I’ve got five big ideas in mind for the coming several months. Thinking up what to do is always the hard part, other than actually doing it. So that’s my part. Now on to your, the readers’, part. Here I pause while savoring my last moments of not knowing the response was bad.

Oh, how about that. It wasn’t bad. It was even good. Readership was back up in May, rising to 1,274 page views all told. This ties with January for the second-greatest number of readers so far this year. It’s a fair bit up from April’s 1,117. Down from March’s 1,779, but what wouldn’t be? The number of unique visitors rose too, to 837. That’s below March’s tantalizing 999, but up from April’s 731. I did post 12 pieces in May, compared to 11 in April, and 16 in March. I suspect that the number of posts published is the only thing in my control that can influence readership numbers.

A bar chart of readership figures, mostly circling around 1,000 readers per month with a spike two months ago.
Of course the real information is in the Views Per Visitor statistic, but I don’t know what it means.

I can say what people were looking for. The most popular post of the month was, once again, about the number of grooves on a record’s side. I think it’s been getting more popular lately. This shows the power of uploading a better picture of that Buggles album cover, I suppose. The five top posts of the month:

So it’s worth spending some time improving the graphics for my crushingly detailed examination of the area of trapezoids. Writing blogs always say use quality graphics for your articles and it turns out they’re so right.

I struggle still with reader engagement, and I understand that. A lot of what I write is in improv terms hard to advance. I need to be better at writing open things that encourage response. There were a mere 17 comments in May, improved from April’s 13 but still not much at all, especially compared to March’s 53. Which still isn’t great but is something. There were 73 things liked in May, the same number as in April. And way down from March’s 142.

What countries sent me readers? Mostly the United States, as always. But here’s the full roster:

Country Readers
United States 915
Canada 60
India 59
United Kingdom 36
Australia 21
Germany 12
Puerto Rico 11
Denmark 10
Philippines 10
Singapore 10
Malaysia 9
Slovenia 9
Indonesia 8
New Zealand 7
South Africa 7
Israel 6
Spain 6
Brazil 5
Hong Kong SAR China 5
Italy 5
Switzerland 5
Sweden 4
Vietnam 4
Greece 3
Ireland 3
Norway 3
Russia 3
Albania 2
Belgium 2
Ghana 2
Japan 2
Pakistan 2
Slovakia 2
Thailand 2
Turkey 2
Algeria 1
Austria 1
Brunei 1
Costa Rica 1
Egypt 1
European Union 1
Finland 1 (*)
France 1
Jamaica 1
Kuwait 1
Mauritius 1
Morocco 1
Netherlands 1
Poland 1
Qatar 1
Saudi Arabia 1
Serbia 1 (**)
South Korea 1
Sri Lanka 1
Saint Kitts & Nevis 1 (*)
Trinidad & Tobago 1
Ukraine 1

That’s 58 countries which sent me readers over the month. That’s three months in a row the total’s been 58 countries so I assume WordPress is just making these numbers up and figures 58 looks about right. Not suspiciously few, not suspiciously many. We’ll see.

There were 22 single-reader countries. That’s different at least; in April there were 14, and in March 15. Finland and Saint Kitts & Nevis were single-reader countries in April also. Serbia’s been single-reader for three months running now.

The Insights panel tells me that for 2018 so far I’ve had 66 posts, and have accumulated a total of 443 likes and 161 comments. There’s 55,677 total words. This means I published 10,836 total words over the month, which is more than I did in April. I thought I was tired. My year’s average right now is 843.6 words per post; at the end of April that was 830.4. My posts for May alone averaged 903 words. The April posts averaged 772. I knew I was getting more verbose. There’s 2.4 comments and 6.7 likes on average for the post. At the end of April this was 3.5 comments and 6.9 likes per post.

The month officially starts with 62,824 pages viewed from a tracked 30,339 unique visitors. I’ve officially got 759 WordPress visitors, who’re following through their Readers page. I’d be glad if you joined them: you can use the button at the upper-right corner of this page to follow via WordPress. You can also see me as @Nebusj on Twitter. And if you’d prefer you can follow the RSS feed for my posts. If you do that I get absolutely no information about what you read or how interesting you find it, and that’s fine by me.

We ended up putting 38 goldfish back in the pond. The reader with long-term memory may remember we brought 52 in. The fish had a hard winter, one afflicted by water quality issues and feeding issues. We’re trying to recover emotionally, and to work out a plan for better fish care next winter.

How April 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


People were far less interested in the number of grooves on a record’s side this past month. That’s what I take away from the readership figures around here for April, as WordPress reports. There were, it appears, some 1,117 pages viewed in April, from 731 unique visitors. That’s well down from March’s 1,779 views and 999 visitors. But March was clearly an outlier; February saw 1,062 page views from 611 visitors. This is four months in a row with at least a thousand page views, so everything seems consistent.

The number of likes fell to 73, down from 142. This seems like a lot of drop, but considering there were 102 likes in February and 112 in January … yeah, that’s a bit lower. Hm. Comments were down, too, with a mere 13 posted in April. There were 53 in March, 30 in February, those are much more engaged numbers. It’s my doing, I know; I had a month of mostly writing about comics and that’s fun, but it’s not much to discuss. What’s to say, “That wasn’t really a student making fun of the story problem!”? Nah. Also I’m abashed to realize I had only eleven posts in April; March had a healthier count of 16.

Statistics chart showing a big spike in March and a return to the roughly twelve-month normal for April 2018.
Definitely more normal than the March 2018 figures.

So what were people reading? One perennial and then a bunch of mostly new stuff:

The Insights panel tells me I’ve gotten to 44,841 total words published this year so far, with 135 total comments and 370 total likes. So, 8,494 words over the month. I’m currently averaging 830.4 words per post, 3.5 comments per post, and 6.9 likes per post. Words and likes are slightly up from March; comments are down a bit.

As I make it out 58 countries sent me readers this past month. That’s the same as March, and up from February’s 54. They’re these:

Country Readers
United States 687
United Kingdom 84
Canada 59
India 38
Australia 21
Singapore 18
Philippines 17
Brazil 16
South Africa 16
Ireland 11
Spain 11
Turkey 11
Puerto Rico 8
Denmark 7
France 7
Afghanistan 6
Italy 6
Netherlands 5
Peru 5
Slovenia 5
Sweden 5
Germany 4
Israel 4
New Zealand 4
Poland 4
Ukraine 4
Mongolia 3
Russia 3
South Korea 3
United Arab Emirates 3
Algeria 2
Argentina 2
Belgium 2
Bulgaria 2
Egypt 2
Hong Kong SAR China 2
Indonesia 2
Japan 2
Lebanon 2
Lithuania 2
Malaysia 2
Norway 2
Romania 2
Switzerland 2
Armenia 1
Czech Republic 1
Finland 1
Gibraltar 1
Iraq 1
Kenya 1
Luxembourg 1
Nigeria 1
Palestinian Territories 1
Senegal 1
Serbia 1 (*)
St. Kitts & Nevis 1
Tunisia 1
Vietnam 1

That’s 14 single-reader countries, down one from March and down two from February. Serbia was a single-reader country in March; nowhere else was. May starts with 61,549 pages viewed from 29,502 admitted unique visitors.

I’d appreciate it if you did follow NebusResearch regularly. I haven’t restored the e-mail postings, although if I go another month or two without anything suspicious turning up in the comments I might try it. But you can follow on your WordPress Reader, by using the button at the upper right corner of the page. Here’s the RSS feed, if you’d rather read the way you like without WordPress being able to trace you. And if you don’t mind Twitter you can follow me as @Nebusj there. Watch as I give the tally of how many goldfish we’re getting back out to the backyard pond!

How March 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


Well, one thing I know to post this week is my review of what my readership was like in March. Let me go see what WordPress will tell me about that.

Huh.

Not at all sure what happened there but it looks like I might’ve just had my best month ever. WordPress tells me there were 1,779 page views in March, way up from February’s 1,062 and January’s 1,274. Also it tells me this came from what I’m sure is a record 999 unique visitors and now that’s going to drive me crazy for like ever. There were 611 unique visitors in February and 670 in January. I am not positive but think my previous records were in March 2016 (1,557 views) and April 2016 (757 visitors). That’s on 16 essays posted, up from the 13 in February and 14 in January.

A bar chart showing the 1,779 page views and 999 visitors from March 2018, and lower numbers for other months going back to November 2015.
Is this self-indulgent? No; I’ve learned that people are much more interested in posts when there’s any picture, however unimportant, attached. This is self-serving, an important difference.

Had 53 comments made around here in March, my best since the glory days of early 2016. February saw 30 and January 39 comments and oh I did my best to keep caught up, but it’s hard. There were 143 things liked over the month; that’s up from February’s 102 and January’s 112. Greatest number since August 2017 and my last round of A To Z work.

I don’t know precisely what drew so many readers in, as in, why many people were looking for this. But I know what they were looking for. The most popular, by far, essay this month drew 279 page views. I have to guess some forum found the answer to years of argument and posted a link to settle the issue. The top five:

Insights for the year tell me that (as of the 3rd of April, anyway) I’ve had 44 total posts, with 120 total comments and 301 total likes. There’s 36,347 words posted so far in the year, and an average of 826 words per post. I’m averaging 2.7 comments per post, and averaging 6.8 likes per post. This is dangerous stuff to consider: at the start of March I averaged 2.8 comments per post, but a mere 6.7 likes. In fairness, there’s some comments I need to respond to and just haven’t had the chance; Easter and a pinball event ate up a lot of time.

So what countries are sending me readers, suspecting or otherwise? This bunch:

Country Readers
United States 1,278
Canada 72
United Kingdom 52
India 42
Philippines 37
Singapore 28
Austria 24
Switzerland 21
Brazil 20
Hong Kong SAR China 20
Sweden 20
South Africa 18
Australia 16
Denmark 14
Romania 11
Italy 7
Norway 7
Germany 5
South Korea 5
Algeria 4
Belgium 4
Ireland 4
Spain 4
Thailand 4
Argentina 3
Czech Republic 3
Malaysia 3
New Zealand 3
Poland 3
Puerto Rico 3
Saudi Arabia 3
Egypt 2
Estonia 2
European Union 2
Finland 2
Kenya 2
Kuwait 2
Netherlands 2
Pakistan 2
Portugal 2
Qatar 2
Russia 2
Turkey 2
United Arab Emirates 2
Belize 1
Croatia 1
Ecuador 1
France 1
Greece 1
Israel 1 (*)
Japan 1
Kyrgyzstan 1
Laos 1
Latvia 1
Lebanon 1
Mexico 1
Serbia 1
Ukraine 1
Venezuela 1

That’s 58 countries, up from February’s 54. There’s 15 single-reader countries, down one from February. Israel’s keeps me from having a clean break in the single-reader country streak; there was just the one reader from there in February too. April starts with a logged 60,445 visits, from an admitted 28,781 unique visitors.

If you’d like to follow NebusResearch regularly, please do. There’s a button at the upper-right of the page to add this to your WordPress Reader page. You can also follow me as @Nebusj on Twitter, where I routinely post announcements of new essays here and on my humor blog. (The humor blog normally posts between 7 and 9 pm Eastern Time; the mathematics blog, typically, between 1 and 3 pm Eastern Time.) If you’d rather use your RSS reader here’s the feed for that.

If you’d like posts e-mailed to you as they’re made … I’m sorry, I can’t take signups for that just now. I noticed a weird and large number of signups from people, from addresses that were a bunch of random words followed by four digits and all from outlook.com. I don’t know what angle they’re working but that’s got to be some spammer nonsense going on. So that’s turned off for a while at least. If you’re one of the nearly four people who’ve taken out e-mail subscriptions hold on to those accounts! They’re sure to be worth something someday. It’s not necessary to bag them in mylar just yet, but feel free to do that if you think it’ll be fun.

How February 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


It was a less riotously popular month here in February than it was in January. I’d like to blame the shortness of February, but that isn’t it. I know. I’ve got statistics.

The big one that I worry excessively over: total page views. 1,062 of them in February, down from January’s 1,274 but up from December 2017’s 899. And hey, anything above a thousand feels gratifying enough. The count of unique visitors dropped to 611. It had been at 670 in January, but then it was at 599 in December. I’m working on stuff that might affect this. We’ll see. I’d wondered if the readership drop might entirely represent February being such a short month. But WordPress’s insights page lets me know the average number of pages viewed per day. 41 in January (part of a three-way tie for third-highest, alongside September 2017 and November 2015). 38 in February. Still, not bad for a month that went by without a major overarching theme to pull people back in.

It was still a pretty likable month: 102 things clicked on over the course of the month. Down from January’s 112, but still, well ahead of December’s 71. It’s still in the range of liked-essays that I haven’t seen since the last A To Z project. There were 30 comments, once more down from January’s total (39) but up from December’s (24). It seems obvious that all these three data points should track together, although I’ve never tested that and maybe I could have some fun rambling about curve-fitting with it.

Oh, for the one data point wholly within my control: I posted 13 things in February. 14 in January. 11 in December, which was an awful month. (We haven’t found our next rabbit yet. I’ve been gently calling this one rescue every couple days to mention how the person fostering a Flemish Giant we find appealing hasn’t called us back to set a time when we might meet. I have a suspicion the person fostering has decided to quietly adopt the rabbit. And that’s fine, but not being told that gets in the emotional way of looking elsewhere.)

So what all was popular? … Pretty much what I would have guessed without knowing anything about the month:

I’m kind of seriously thinking to take some time off this month and just improve the graphics of the Record Grooves and the Trapezoids articles. And I’m always tickled when what amounts to a self-reblog, like the buy-a-theorem post, comes out more popular than the original post it references. I’m also thinking about setting some day aside to just reblog something from my archives.

What countries sent me readers? This bunch, says WordPress.

Country Readers
United States 703
Canada 47
United Kingdom 44
India 42
Philippines 42
Australia 14
Sweden 14
Singapore 12
France 9
Germany 9
Mexico 8
Pakistan 8
Brazil 6
Puerto Rico 6
Slovenia 6
Netherlands 5
Turkey 5
Algeria 4
Hungary 4
Italy 4
Spain 4
Bulgaria 3
Finland 3
Greece 3
Indonesia 3
Nepal 3
New Zealand 3
Portugal 3
South Africa 3
Switzerland 3
Belgium 2
Hong Kong SAR China 2
Japan 2
Mongolia 2
Romania 2
South Korea 2
Taiwan 2
Uruguay 2
Bahamas 1
Bangladesh 1
Barbados 1
Costa Rica 1
Cyprus 1
Denmark 1
Egypt 1
European Union 1
Ireland 1 (*)
Israel 1
Kenya 1
Lebanon 1
Mozambique 1
Poland 1
Russia 1 (**)
United Arab Emirates 1

That’s 54 countries altogether, if we don’t ask serious questions about the European Union and, for that matter, Hong Kong or Puerto Rico. There’d been 50 countries give or take in January, and 53 in December. There were 16 single-reader countries in February, up from the 14 in January and 15 in December. Ireland was a single-reader country in January too. Russia’s been a single-reader country two months running. And otherwise there’s been a turnover in single-readership countries.

The Insights panel says March started with 58,654 page views here, from an admitted 27,772 unique viewers and aw, isn’t that sweet number? The insights panel is also threatening to ruin me as a person by giving me some new interesting year-to-date statistics. According to these, as of the 5th of March (I didn’t have the chance to check on the 1st, and I don’t know how to find a year-to-specified date) I’ve published 25,359 total words, at an average 845 words per post. 30 posts to date for the year. 207 total likes, 77 total comments. And an average of 2.6 comments and 6.9 likes per post. I just know I’m going to obsess on these, what with how they’re numbers that have decimal points. But this is way more interesting than tracking the most popular day and hour.

If you’d like to be among my readers, congratulations: you’re doing it now. You can follow in your WordPress reader by using the ‘Follow nebusresearch in Reader’ button near the center-right of this page. Or you can get the less-adequately-copy-edited versions delivered in e-mail, using the “follow blog via e-mail” button just underneath that. I’m @Nebusj on Twitter, and I’m closing in on my 10,000th tweet! So this is your chance to be there as it happens. Probably not this month. I’m not that chatty. But sometime.

How January 2018 Treated My Mathematics Blog


First of all, I would like to say this about this tweet:

And that is: I don’t feel threatened at all so nyah.

(And if you want to help them out, please, do send any Calvin and Hobbes strips with mathematical themes over their way.)

Back to my usual self-preening. January 2018 was a successful month around here, in terms of people reading stuff I write. According to WordPress, there were some 1,274 pages viewed from 670 unique visitors. That’s the largest number of pages viewed since March and April 2016, when I had a particularly successful A To Z going. It’s the greatest number of unique visitors since September 2017 when I had a less successful but still pretty good A To Z going. The page views were well above December 2017’s 899, and November’s 1,052. The unique visitors were well above December’s 599 and November’s 604.

I don’t have any real explanation for this. I suspect it’s spillover from my humor blog, which had its most popular month since the comic strip Apartment 3-G died a sad, slow, baffling death. Long story. I think my humor blog was popular because people don’t know what happened to the guy who writes Gasoline Alley. I don’t know either, but I tell people if I do find out anything I’ll tell them, and that’s almost as good as knowing something.

Still, this popularity was accompanied by readers actually liking stuff. There were 112 pages liked in January, beating out the 71 in December and 70 in November by literally dozens of clicks. It’s the highest count since August of 2017 and summer’s A To Z sequence. There were more comments, too, 39 of them. December saw 24 and November 28 and, you see this coming, that’s the largest number of comments since summer 2017’s A To Z sequence.

The popular articles for January were two of the ones I expected, one of the Reading the Comics posts, and then two surprises. What were they? These.

Yes, it’s clickbait-y to talk about weird tricks for limits that mathematicians use. In my defense: mathematicians really do rely on these tricks all the time. So if it’s getting people stuff that’s useful then my conscience is as clear as it is for asking “How many grooves are on a record’s side?” and (implicitly) “How many kinds of trapezoid are there?”

If I’m counting right there were 50 countries from which I drew readers, if “European Union” counts as a country and if “Trinidad and Tobago” don’t count as two. Plus there’s Hong Kong and when you get down to it, “country” is a hard concept to pin down exactly. There were 14 single-reader countries. Here’s the roster of them all:

Country Readers
United States 879
India 89
Philippines 59
United Kingdom 37
Canada 28
Singapore 15
Hong Kong SAR China 11
Netherlands 11
Sweden 11
Belgium 9
Algeria 8
Austria 8
Australia 7
France 7
Italy 7
Switzerland 7
South Africa 6
Brazil 5
Slovenia 5
Argentina 4
Germany 4
Japan 4
Pakistan 4
Indonesia 3
Spain 3
Denmark 2
Egypt 2
European Union 2
Greece 2
Iraq 2
New Zealand 2
Portugal 2
South Korea 2
Thailand 2
Ukraine 2
Bulgaria 1
Czech Republic 1
Ireland 1
Malaysia 1
Mexico 1 (**)
Namibia 1
Norway 1
Russia 1 (*)
Saudi Arabia 1
Sri Lanka 1
Trinidad & Tobago 1
Turkey 1
Uruguay 1 (*)
Vietnam 1

There were 53 countries sending me readers in December and 56 in November so I guess I’m concentrating? There were 15 single-reader countries in December and 22 in November. Russia and Uruguay were single-reader countries in December; Mexico’s been a single-reader country for three months now.

WordPress’s Insights panel says I started the month with 57,592 page views recorded, from 27,161 recorded unique visitors. It also shares with me the interesting statistics that, as I write this and before I post it, I’ve written 16 total posts this year, which have drawn an average two comments and seven likes per post. There’ve been 900 words per post, on average. Overall this year I’ve gotten 39 comments, 110 likes, and have published 14,398 words. I don’t know whether that counts image captions. But this also leads me to learn what previous year statistics were like; I’ve been averaging over 900 words per post since 2015. In 2015 I averaged about 750 words per post, and got three times as many likes and about twice as many comments per post. I’m sure that doesn’t teach me anything. At the least I won’t learn from it.

If all this has convinced you to read my posts, please, keep reading them. You can add them to a WordPress reader by way of the “Follow nebusresearch” sticker on the center-right of the page. Or you can get it delivered by e-mail using the “Follow Blog Via E-Mail” button underneath it. If you’ve got your own RSS reader, you can follow from this feed. There’s probably more ways to follow this, too. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, try @Nebusj, because that’s me and I like having company there.

Reading the Comics, December 30, 2017: Looking To 2018 Edition


The last full week of 2017 was also a slow one for mathematically-themed comic strips. You can tell by how many bits of marginally relevant stuff I include. In this case, it also includes a couple that just mention the current or the upcoming year. So you’ve been warned.

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute activity for the 24th is a logic puzzle. I’m not sure there’s deep mathematics to it, but it’s some fun to reason out.

John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not for the 24th mentions the bit of recreational group theory that normal people know, the Rubik’s Cube. The group theory comes in from rotations: you can take rows or columns on the cube and turn them, a quarter or a half or a three-quarters turn. Which rows you turn, and which ways you turn them, form a group. So it’s a toy that inspires deep questions. Who wouldn’t like to know in how few moves a cube could be solved? We know there are at least some puzzles that take 18 moves to solve. (You can calculate the number of different cube arrangements there are, and how many arrangements you could make by shuffling a cube around with 17 moves. There’s more possible arrangements than there are ones you can get to in 17 moves; therefore, there must be at least one arrangement that takes 18 moves to solve.) A 2010 computer-assisted proof by Tomas Rokicki, Herbert Kociemba, Morley Davidson, and John Dethridge showed that at most 20 face turns are needed for every possible cube to be solved. I don’t know if there’s been any success figuring out whether 19 or even 18 is necessarily enough.

Griffith: 'Here we are, Zippy, back in the land of our childhood.' Zippy: 'Are we still in the ninth grade?' Griffith: 'Kind of ... although I still can't remember a thing about algebra.' Zippy: 'So many spitballs and paper airplanes ago!!' Griffith: 'Why did I act up so much in school, Zippy? Was it a Freudian thing?' Zippy: 'It was a cry for kelp.' Griffith: 'Don't you mean a cry for help? I don't think kelp was even a word I knew back in the 50s.' Zippy: 'Seaweed is the fifth dimension!'
Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 26th of December, 2017. This is not as strongly a memoir or autobiographical strip as Griffith will sometimes do, which is a shame. Those are always captivating. I have fun reading Zippy the Pinhead and understand why people wouldn’t. But the memoir strips I recommend even to people who don’t care for the usual fare.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 26th just mentions algebra as a thing that Griffith can’t really remember, even in one of his frequent nostalgic fugues. I don’t know that Zippy’s line about the fifth dimension is meant to refer to geometry. It might refer to the band, but that would be a bit odd. Yes, I know, Zippy the Pinhead always speaks oddly, but in these nostalgic fugue strips he usually provides some narrative counterpoint.

Larry Wright’s Motley Classics for the 26th originally ran in 1986. I mention this because it makes the odd dialogue of getting “a new math program” a touch less odd. I confess I’m not sure what the kid even got. An educational game? Something for numerical computing? The coal-fired, gear-driven version of Mathematica that existed in the 1980s? It’s a mystery, it is.

Ryan Pagelow’s Buni for the 27th is really a calendar joke. It seems to qualify as an anthropomorphic numerals joke, though. It’s not a rare sentiment either.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 29th is similarly a calendar joke. It does play on 2017 being a prime number, a fact that doesn’t really mean much besides reassuring us that it’s not a leap year. I’m not sure just what’s meant by saying it won’t repeat for another 2017 years, at least that wouldn’t be just as true for (say) 2015 or 2019. But as Frazz points out, we do cling to anything that floats in times like these.

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