2022 – nebusresearch

How August 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog: Romania Has Tired Of Me

With the start of another month it’s a chance to use my weekly publication slot to review the previous month. Also I’ve somehow settled on publishing one essay a week. That was never a deliberate choice, just an attempt to keep my schedule in line with my energy and enthusiasm during a time that’s drained most of both. August having had five Wednesdays in it, though, I published five things. Here they are, ranked most to least popular:

There are too few data points to do a real test. It does look like this isn’t just chronological order, though. Also, that Kickstarter has closed, but it was very successful. Denise Gaskin’s project collected more than nine times the initial goal and reached all but one of its stretch goals. You can still donate, though, to support an educational-publishing project.

Bar chart of two and a half years' worth of monthly readership figures. There was a huge peak around October 2019, and a much lower but fairly steady wave of readership after that. It's slightly increased for January 2022, dropped for February, rose slightly for March, and dropped a small bit in April, May, and June again. It jumped up to a new high in July, and fell back below the average in August. — Hey, I was home and puttering around on my computer at midnight Universal Time last week; what are the odds of that?

It was a month of decline in my readership, though. There were 1,760 page views during the month, possibly because whatever drove hundreds of views from Romania in July did not repeat. In fact, there were only two page views from Romania in August. This is below the twelve-month running mean of 2,163.2 views per month, and the twelve-month running median of 2,105.5.

WordPress’s estimate of the number of unique visitors decreased too. There were 1,101 unique visitors here in August. The twelve-month running mean was 1,407.2, for the twelve months leading up to August. The running median was 1,409 unique visitors.

There were 17 things liked here in August, the same number as July. That’s below the mean of 30.9 and median of 29.5. There were no comments in August, for the second month in a row; as you might imagine, this is crashing far below the running median of 5.1 and median of 4. The figures look less bad if you pro-rate things by the number of posts. Then at least the views and unique visitors are between the mean and median numbers. Likes and comments are still low, though.

WordPress estimates that I published 2,617 words in August, bringing my total for the year to 48,472. So my average post length dwindled a bit in August, and it’s reduced my average post length this year to 915.

As of the start of September, WordPress says, I’ve gotten 167,896 page views in total, from a recorded 100,719 unique visitors. And, for good measure, a total of 1,728 posts since I began this blog … eleven? … years ago, and 3,321 comments over that time.

To be a regular reader of my blog, do what you just did right here. You can add my essays to your RSS reader using the https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed address. If you’d rather get messages by e-mail you can use the `Follow Nebusresearch by E-mail’ button in the right-hand column of this page. Or to add it to your WordPress reader, click the ‘Follow Nebusresearch’ button. Thank you for being here for all this.

How July 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog: Romania liked me

I have not given up on my mathematics blog, though I admit to its commanding less attention than I have sometimes given it. I have had less attention to give everything. In a month of writing that comes pretty close to simple maintenance mode, I expect pretty average readership figures. I did not have them.

WordPress says that I received 3,071 page views in July, which is the biggest total I’ve had since October 2019, and I believe my second most-read month ever. This is because for some reason I got about a thousand page views from Romania, mostly in the second week of the month. I don’t know why. I usually get about a thousand page views from the United States — in July there were 860 — so this is odd. There were also 339 page views from India, which is up from the usual of one to two hundred, but not so much more as to be clearly wrong. So, much as I like having a big month, I can’t believe in it.

Because sure, 3,071 is way above the twelve-month running mean of 2,064.8 views per month, and the running median of 2,080 per month. When I look at the count of unique visitors, though? That’s a less exalted 1,193 for July. THat’s close to what June offered me, and below the running mean of 1,418.1 and running median of 1,409 visitors. The things that measure interactions were even more dire: only 17 likes were given around here in July. That’s the lowest figure in at least two and a half years, and below the running mean of 32.3 and running median of 30.5. And finally there were no comments in July, the third time that’s ever happened. My running mean is 7.3 and median 6.5 right now. (Well, there was one submitted comment, on my announcement that I won’t be doing an A-to-Z this year. But it was just a one-word “Nice”. I imagine that’s a spammer doing that thing rather than an attempt to hurt my feelings.)

I would like to report what the relative popularity of July’s posts were. For some reason WordPress won’t tell me. I can get the similar data for my humor blog, so I don’t know what the issue is. Well, here’s what I published this last month:

For the year to date, WordPress figures I’ve published 45,855 words, not counting this post. That’s coming in at an average 955 words per posting, which is dwindling a little. I blame Comic Strip Master Command for not giving me stuff I can go on about all night.

As of the start of August, WordPress says, I’ve gotten 166,185 page views, from a recorded 99,618 unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader of my blog, thank you. You can add this to your WordPress reader by clicking the ‘Follow Nebusresearch’ button on the right hand column of this page. If you’d like to get it by e-mail, you can use the ‘Follow Nebusrsearch By E-mail’ button below that. If you have an RSS reader, you can get my essays at https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed instead. And thank you for considering reading what I come around to writing.

About my 2022 Mathematics A-to-Z

I don’t plan to have one.

Some context. Since 2015 I’ve run a series of A-to-Z essays. This is writing a short glossary about various mathematics terms. Most years they were a complete pass through the alphabet, with some fudging to allow for there being fewer terms that start with ‘X’ than you’d think. For 2021, I changed the format up a little, writing instead one for each letter in the phrase “Mathematics A to Z”. You can read all 198 of the completed essays at this link.

Hard as I thought 2021 was, 2022 has been worse, in wearing down my energy and enthusiasm for big projects. Or projects at all. And an A-to-Z is a big, worthwhile but exhausting project. I am already too late in the year to run one essay a week and complete the full alphabet. Given the lead times necessary even a partial alphabet would be hard to fit in. (I don’t want to run these projects across years, although I accepted that for the 2021 project.) In 2015 and 2016 I was able to write three essays a week, a commitment of time and energy I can’t imagine making now.

So rather than sit idly hoping something will turn up, I accept the situation. I am not up for an A-to-Z this year. I hope that 2023 will be a happier year, one in which I can do a project of that magnitude. I suppose we all hope for that.

How June 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog

The folks who signed up to get my posts delivered by e-mail — it’s a box on the rightmost column of this page — know I used that title last month. A typo, basically; I was thinking of the promise of the new month and did not notice my subject line was a month early. I fixed that old post, and nobody seems to have mentioned it. But I like being open about my mistakes as well as my great moments. Also I would like to have more great moments. In any event, here’s to specifics.

WordPress records me as getting 1,749 page views in June. This is a fair bit below the running averages for the twelve months running up to June 2022. The mean has been 2,128.0 views per month, and the median 2,105.5. The number of unique visitors continued its decline to, to 1,159 visitors, compared to a running mean of 1,467.6 and running median of 1,436. I’m sure there’s something that could be done about these figures but it’s impossible to say what. It is setting up a botnet to send spurious page hits.

I’m staying likeable, at least. 29 posts got liked in June, just about on target for the running mean of 32.9 and running median of 31.5. There were only two comments, but the averages there are a mean of 8.0 and median of 4.5, so it’s not that far off the norm.

Prorated to the scant number of posts made — five this month — the figures look more competitive. There were 349.8 views per posting, on average; the running averages are a mean of 323.5 and median of 302.8. There were 231.8 unique visitors per posting; the mean was 222.2 and median 211.3. 5.8 likes per posting, compared to a mean of 4.6 and median of 4.2. 0.4 comments per posting, the only point where the prorated count was below the average. The running mean per posting was 1.0 and median 0.8.

So here’s the roster of what I posted in June, ranked from most to least popular. Or at least clicked-on; I don’t have the energy to compare how many likes things get.

WordPress figures that I posted 3,256 words in June, an average of 993 words per posting. This is about on par with my recent average, and brings me to 43,706 words for the year to date. That includes a stretch back in January when I was rerunning a lot of material. If you’d like to be a regular reader, I told you up top how to get e-mails sent to you by mail. If you’d rather have them in your WordPress reader, you can use the ‘Follow Nebusresearch button’, in the right column of the page. Or you could set up your RSS reader to use https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/feed. That’s the best option, really, but the one I won’t see in any of my statistics.

How May 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog

The easy way to put this article is, if I don’t read my mathematics blog why should anyone else? There is truth to this. I have mentioned several times that this has been a difficult year for me, and I’ve had to ration where I put my energy. I’ve avoided going a whole week without a post, but it’s only by reposting old material that I’ve managed that. Even the old standby of writing about the mathematics in comic strips has fallen short, as Comic Strip Master Command isn’t sending so many worth my attention these days. These are strange times.

The result is a decline in my readership, although it’s less of one than I had expected. There were no comments at all around here in May, which, have to say, seems fair. There wasn’t much to comment on, especially with just four essays posted. That’s my lowest posting volume in years. It’s also not the first time I had zero comments in a month, which takes some sting off.

So there were 2,057 page views here in May. That’s a bit below the twelve-month running mean of 2,212.3 views per month leading up to May. And below the running median of 2,114.5 views. Per posting, the number looks impressive, though, with 514.3 page views per posting. That beats the running mean of 309.1 and median of 302.8.

There were 1,358 unique visitors recorded in May. That’s again a slight decline from the 1,528.2 running mean and 1,461.5 running median. And, again, per posting the numbers seem impressive. 339.5 unique visitors with each posting, above the mean of 213.2 and median of 211.3. The implication, yes, is if I didn’t post at all I’d have infinitely many readers, a conclusion which hurts my feelings.

There were twenty likes given in May, up from April but still below the mean of 35.3 and median of 33. It’s a per-posting average of 5.0 likes per posting, above the mean of 4.6 and median of 4.2 but there’s no way there’s statistical significance to that. And, of course, no comments, compared to a running mean of 9.7 and median of 7.

With so few essays posted it’s easy to report the order of their popularity. I’m not sure whether their order depends on how interesting the text was or how early in the month they were posted. There’s no way the difference is statistically significant. But here’s the May 2022 pieces ranked most popular to least:

WordPress figures I started the month with a grand total of 1,714 posts. These all together drew 3,319 comments and 161,316 page views from 97,265 recorded unique visitors. It also figures my average post for the month had 876 words in it, bringing my average post for the year 2022 down to 1,037 words per posting. I’ve managed to put together 40,451 words so far this year. This surprises me by being close to half what I’ve managed on my humor blog, where I post every day. There, I have several regular columns, such as story comic plot summaries, that are popular and relatively easy to write.

Having said all that, will this look at May’s figures affect my writing any? I do think I have enough comic strips for a post, that should be next Wednesday, at least. If Comic Strip Master Command works with me, there could be more. But this all will depend on my emotional and energy reserves.

Some of my faithful readers may wonder: am I preparing to say something sad about this year’s A-to-Z? I’m not prepared to say, not yet. What I am is thinking about whether I want to commit to such a big, hard project. I am aware how much it would tax me to do, and while I would like to have it done, there is so much doing to get there. It will depend on how June treats me.

How April 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog

This past month I moved towards the sort of thing that’s normal for my blog here. Mostly, Reading the Comics posts, with another piece that was about a mathematical curiosity. That is a typical selection of posts when I’m not doing something special, such as an A-to-Z sequence. So, with a new month begun, I like to see how it was received. As usual, I check WordPress’s statistics for the past month, and compare it to the running average for the twelve months leading up to that.

WordPress figures there were 2,121 page views here in April. That’s a little below the running mean of 2,286.8 page views. It’s almost exactly at the running median, though, of 2,122 page views in a month. So this suggests April turned out quite average. There were 1,404 recorded unique visitors. This is below the running mean of 1,602.7 unique visitors, and noticeably below the running median of 1,479. This suggests a month a bit below average.

Per posting, though? That suggests an increasing readership. There were 424.2 page views recorded per posting in April, above the running mean of 301.7 and running median of 302.8. There were 280.8 unique visitors per posting, also well above the 211.1 mean and 211.3 median. That’s not to say every post got 281 visitors, since many of the visitors looked at stuff from before April. This is what keeps me from re-blogging even more repeats.

That it was a slow month seems supported by the record of likes and comments, though. There were 19 likes given in April, well below the mean of 39.5 and median of 39. That’s a little less bad considered per posting, but still. That’s 3.8 likes per posting, below the running mean of 5.0 and running median of 4.5. There were an anemic two comments, way below the mean of 11.3 and median of 9.5. That’s just 0.4 comments per posting, compared to an already not-great mean of 1.4 and median of 1.2.

I had thought I posted more in April than a mere five pieces. Not so. Here’s the order of popularity of my posts, which are not quite in chronological order. I too quirk an eye at what the most popular thing of April was:

WordPress figures I posted 3,089 words in April, my fewest since September. And that comes to an average of 617.8 words per posting, again my lowest since September. For the year I’ve published 36,947 words, and have averaged 1,056 words per posting.

I started May with a total of 159,259 recorded page views from a recorded 95,907 unique visitors. But WordPress didn’t start telling us unique visitor counts until my blog here was a couple years old, so don’t take that too literally.

I’d be glad if you chose to be a regular reader. There’s a button at the upper right of the page, “Follow Nebusresearch” which adds this blog to your WordPress reader. There’s a field below that to get posts e-mailed as they’re published. I do nothing with the e-mail except send those posts, but who knows what WordPress Master Command does with them? And if you have an RSS reader, you can put the essays feed into that. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth. You can use the ‘Reader’ page over there for this and any other RSS feeds you might want to follow.

Thank you all for your reading.

How March 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog

I expected readers to be happy I was finishing the Little 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z. My doubt was how happy they would be. Turns out they were a middling amount of happy. So this is my regular review of the readership statistics for the past month, as provided by WordPress.

I published eight things in March, which is average for me the past twelve months. It was a long, long time ago that I went whole months posting something every day. But my twelve-month running mean has been 8.5 posts per month, and the median 8, so that’s just in line. There were 2,272 page views recorded in March, which is below the running mean of 2,336.4 and above the running median of 2,122. So, average, like I said. There were 1,545 unique visitors, below the running mean of 1,640.0 and above the running median of 1,479.

Prorated by posting, the showing is a little worse. There were 284.0 views and 193.1 unique visitors per posting in March. The running mean is 301.9 views and 211.6 visitors per posting. The median, 302.8 views and 211.3 visitors. I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

I have a hypothesis. There were 32 likes given in the month, below the mean of 39.3 and median of 35. But several of the posts were pointers to other essays and those are naturally less well-liked. That came to 4.0 likes per posting, below the mean of 4.9 likes per posting and median of 4.5 likes per posting. Comments were anemic again, with only four given in the month. The mean is an impossible-seeming 11.8 and median 10. Per posting, there were 0.5 comments here in March, compared to a mean of 1.4 and median of 1.2. So it goes.

What was popular in March? Pi Day comic strips, of course, and my making something out of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. Here’s the March postings in descending order of popularity.

Stuff from before this past month was popular too, including several of the individual Pi Day pages. And my post about the most and least likely dates for Easter, which is sure to be a seasonal favorite.

WordPress figures that I posted 6,655 words in March, for an average post length of 1,128. If that number seems familiar it does to me too. I had 1,128 words per posting, on average, in January too, an event that caused me to go check that I hadn’t recorded something wrong. But that was also a month with many more posts (many repeats). This brought my average words per post for the year down to 831.9, close to half what my average was at the end of February.

WordPress figures that I started April 2022 with a total of 1,705 posts here. They’d drawn 3,317 comments, with a total 157,138 views from 94,502 recorded unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader around here, please read. There’s a button at the upper right of the page, “Follow Nebusresearch”. That adds this blog to your WordPress reader. There’s a field below that to get posts e-mailed as they’re published. I do nothing with the e-mail except send those posts. WordPress probably has some incomprehensible page where they say what the do with your e-mails. And if you have an RSS reader, you can put the essays feed into that.

Thank you all for your reading.

How February 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog

This past month I finished my hiatus, the one where I reran old A-to-Z pieces instead of finishing off what I thought would be a simple, small project for 2021. And, after a mishap, got back to finishing things. As a result I published fewer pieces in February than I had since October. I had an inflated posting record in December and January, from reposting old material. I expected that end to shrink my readership again. And, yes, that’s what happened.

In February, according to WordPress, I attracted 1,875 page views. That’s below the twelve-month running mean of 2,360.8 page views leading up to February 2022. It’s also below the running median of 2,151.5 page views. In fact, it’s the lowest number of page views in a month going back to July 2020, around here.

Ah, but what about unique visitors? There were 1,313 of those, figures WordPress. That’s below the twelve-month running mean of 1,661.9 and the running median of 1,534.5. It happens that’s also the lowest monthly figure going back to July 2020. (Although that by a whisker: July 2021 had a couple more views, and unique visitors, than did February 2022. I don’t know what’s wrong with Julys around here.)

The number of likes dropped to 28, way below the mea of 40.9 and median of 39.5. And that was the lowest count since November of 2021. And there were only two comments, way below the mean of 14.9 and median of 10, I haven’t been below that figure since December of 2019. At least these are non-July dates to deal with.

This would all be too sad to bear except that if you look at these figures per posting? Then they snap right back into line. Like, this was in February an average of 312.5 page views every time I posted something. The twelve months leading up to that saw a mean of 301.6 page views per posting and a median of 302.8 page views per posting. February saw 218.8 unique visitors per posting. The running mean was 212.2 and running median 211.3. Even the likes become not so bad: 4.7 per posting. The mean was 5.1 and the median 4.9. In this figuring, the only dire number was comments, a scant 0.3 per posting, compared to mean of 1.9 and median of 1.4. So in that light, you know, things aren’t so bad.

What are the popular things of February? It’s worth running the whole list down. In decreasing order of popularity we have:

Other stuff, from before February, was even more popular, though. It’s getting to be the time of year people look to learn what the most and least likely dates of Easter are, for example. (Easter 2022 is set for the 17th of April. This is on the less-likely side of the band from the 28th of March through 21st of April when Easter is most likely. However, it is one of the most likely dates for Easter in the lifetime of anyone reading this blog, that is, for the span from 1925 to 2100.)

WordPress credits me with publishing 9,163 words in February, for an average post length of 1,527.2 words. This brings my average post length for the year up to 1,237. This is impressive considering I’ve been trying to write my A-to-Zs short for 2021.

WordPress figures that I started March 2022 having posted 1,697 things here. They’ve altogether drawn 3,313 comments from a total 154,866 page views and 92,956 logged unique visitors.

If you’d like to be a regular reader around here, please keep reading. There’s a button at the upper right of the page, “Follow Nebusresearch”, to add this blog to your WordPress reader. There’s a field below that to get posts sent to you in e-mail as they’re published. I do nothing with the e-mail except send those posts; I can’t say what WordPress Master Command does with them. And if you have an RSS reader, you can put the essays feed into that.

Thank you all for your reading, whatever way you do.

How January 2022 Treated My Mathematics Blog

It’s a reasonable time for me to check on my readership statistics for the past month. The current month is maybe fourteen minutes from ending, after all. January was my most prolific month since October 2020, with 16 posts published. Nearly all were repostings of old A-to-Z essays. But if you weren’t checking in here in 2015, how would you know the difference, except by my pointing it out?

I have long suspected the thing that most affects my readership is how many times I post. So how did this block of repeat posts affect my readership? Says WordPress, it was like this:

The number of pages viewed in January rose to 2,108, its highest figure since October 2021. That’s below the running averages for the twelve months ending in December 2021, though. The running mean was 2,402.7 views per month, and the median 2,337 views per month. Ah, but what if we rate that per posting? Then there were 131.8 views per posting. The running mean was 321.8 views per posting and the running mean 307.4. (And none of this is to say that any posting got 132 views. Most of what’s read any month is older material. The things that have had the chance to get some traction as the answer to search engine queries.)

The number of unique visitors rose from December, to 1,458 unique visitors in January. That’s still below the running mean of 1,694.5 visitors and the running median of 1,654.5. Per posting, the figure is even more dire: 91.1 visitors per posting, compared to a mean of 226.6 and median of 219.2. These per-posting unique visitor numbers are in line with the sort of thing I did back in 2019 or so, when I had lots of postings in both the A-to-Z and in the Reading the Comics line, though.

There were 51 things liked here in January, a slight rise and even above the mean of 40.1 and median of 38.5. Per posting, that’s 3.2 likes, compared to a mean of 5.3 and median of 5.6. All of these below the likability count of distant years like 2018, which were themselves much less liked than, say, 2015.

Comments fell again, with only four given or received around here in January. The mean is 15.7 and median 11.5. That’s a dire 0.3 comments per posting, although I grant there wasn’t a lot for people to respond to. The mean is 2.0 comments per posting, and median 1.6, and, you know, I’ve had worse months. (February is looking like one!)

I had a lot of posts get at least some views in January. The five most popular posts from the month were:

And for one I have enough posts it feels silly to list all of them in order of decreasing popularity. I’m a touch surprised none of the A-to-Z reposts were among the most popular. What the record suggests is people like amusing little trifles or me talking about myself. Ah, if only it weren’t painful to talk about myself.

WordPress credits me with 18,040 words published in January, for an average of 1,128 words per posting. That’s more than any month of 2020 or 2021, to my surprise.

WordPress figures that as of the start of February I’d posted 1,691 things where, drawing 152,987 views from 91,642 logged unique visitors. And that there were a total of 3,311 comments altogether.

And that should be enough looking back for now. I hope to resume, and complete, the Little 2021 A-to-Z next week, and after that, let’s just see what I do.

If you would like to see, the easiest way to is to keep reading around here. There’s a button at the upper right of the page, “Follow Nebusresearch”, which should add this page to your WordPress reader. Or you can get posts e-mailed to you, using the ‘Follow Nebusresearch Via E-mail” button beneath that. I do nothing with that e-mail address except send posts. I don’t know what WordPress does with it. Or you can put the RSS feed into your reader, and read what you like without my ability to ever know it, except by your correcting me. However you choose to do it, thank you.

78 Pages and More of Arithmetic Trivia About 2022

2022 is a new and, we all hope, less brutal year. It is also a number, though, an integer. And every integer has some interesting things about it. Iva Sallay, of the Find The Factors recreational mathematics blog, assembled an awesome list of trivia about the number. This includes a bunch of tweets about the number’s interesting mathematical properties. At least some of them are sure to surprise you.

If that is not enough, then, please consider something which Christian Lawson-Perfect noted on Mathstodon. It is 78 pages titled Mathematical Beauty of 2022, by Dr Inder J Taneja. If the name sounds faintly familiar it might be that I’ve mentioned Taneja’s work before, in recreational arithmetic projects.

None of this trivia may matter. But there is some value in finding cute and silly things. Verifying, or discovering, cute trivia about a number helps you learn how to spot patterns and learn to look for new ones. And it’s good to play some.

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