My Math Blog Statistics, September 2014

Since it’s the start of a new month it’s time to review statistics for the previous month, which gives me the chance to list a bunch of countries, which is strangely popular with readers. I don’t pretend to understand this, I just accept the inevitable.

In total views I haven’t seen much change the last several months: September 2014 looks to be closing out with about 558 pages viewed, not a substantial change from August’s 561, and triflingly fewer than July’s 589. The number of unique visitors has been growing steadily, though: 286 visitors in September, compared to 255 the month before, and 231 the month before that. One can choose to read this as the views per visitor dropping to 1.95, its lowest figure since March, but I’ll take it as more people finding things that interest them, at least.

As to what those things are — well, mostly it’s comic strip posts, which I suppose makes sense given that they’re quite accessible and often contain jokes people understand. The most popular articles for September 2014 were:

• Reading the Comics, September 15, 2014: Are You Trying To Overload Me Edition, which just everybody read this month. I guess including sample strips from Tiger is just that popular a move.
• Reading The Comics, September 24, 2014: Explained In Class Edition, which includes my mention of the Benchley Principle, one of the great insights of Robert Benchley’s.
• Reading the Comics, September 8, 2014: What Is The Problem Edition, which gave me the chance to talk about symmetry and physics and even mention Jeremy Bentham, one of many poster children for “eccentric philosophers”.
• How Many Trapezoids I Can Draw, which, at the risk of spoiling its popularity, I figure to be: six.
• Something Neat About Triangles, which is from a biography of Donald Coxeter, and really is this neat little theorem with a punch line I bet you won’t see coming, unless you read it already.
• Machines That Give You Logarithms, part of my popular “calculating logarithms” series of posts, and this one showing how to calculate most logarithms with as little calculation as possible.

As usual the country sending me the greatest number of readers was the United States (347), with Canada (29), Austria (27), the United Kingdom (26), and Puerto Rico and Turkey (20 each) coming up close behind. My single-reader countries for September were Bahrain, Brazil, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, and Sweden. Finland, Germany, and Sweden were single-reader countries in August, too, but at least none of them were single-reader countries in July as well.

Among the search terms bringing people here the past month have been:

• zenos paradox joke
• logical fallacies hagar the horrible
• i don’t get the joke of andertoons on september 8, 2014 (A man finds his woman in bed with René Magritte’s famous The Treachery of Images or as it is actually known, famous That `This Is Not A Pipe’ Painting; she explains, “it’s not what it looks like,” which is a pretty good gag, to my way of thinking)
• what are two ways to make a trapezoid
• linear equation disney drawing
• what is the most common answer on jeopardy (“What Is Australia”; it’s also the response with the highest expectation value)

I got to my 17,882nd reader this month, a little short of that tolerably nice and round 18,000 readers. If I don’t come down with sudden-onset boringness, though, I’ll reach that in the next week or so, especially if I have a couple more days of twenty or thirty readers.

What Is The Most Common Jeopardy! Response?

Happy New Year!

I want to bring a pretty remarkable project to people’s attention. Dan Slimmon here has taken the archive of Jeopardy! responses (you know, the answers, only the ones given in the form of a question) from the whole Jeopardy! fan archive, http://www.j-archive.com, and analyzed them. He was interested not just in the most common response — which turns out to be “What is Australia?” — but in the expectation value of the responses.

Expectation value I’ve talked about before, and for that matter, everyone mentioning probability or statistics has. Slimmon works out approximately what the expectation value would be for each clue. That is, imagine this: if you ignored the answer on the board entirely and just guessed to every answer either responded absolutely nothing or else responded “What is Australia?”, some of the time you’d be right, and you’d get whatever that clue was worth. How much would you expect to get if you just guessed that answer? Responses that turn up often, such as “Australia”, or that turn up more often in higher-value squares, are worth more. Responses that turn up rarely, or only in low-value squares, have a lower expectation value.

Simmons goes on to list, based on his data, what the 1000 most frequent Jeopardy! responses are, and what the 1000 responses with the highest expectation value are. I’m so delighted to discover this work that I want to bring folks’ attention to it. (I do have a reservation about his calculations, but I need some time to convince myself that I understand exactly his calculation, and my reservation, before I bother anyone with it.)

The comments at his page include a discussion of a technical point about the expectation value calculation which has an interesting point about the approximations often useful, or inevitable, in this kind of work, but that’ll take a separate essay to quite explain that I haven’t the time for just today.

[ Edit: I initially misunderstood Slimmon’s method and have amended the article to reflect the calculation’s details. Specifically I misunderstood him at first to have calculated the expectation value of giving a particular response, and either having it be right or wrong. Slimmon assumed that one would either give the response or not at all; getting the answer wrong costs the contestant money and so has a negative value, while not answering has no value. ]

Something I Didn’t Know About Trapezoids

I have a little iPad app for keeping track of how this blog is doing, and I’m even able to use it to compose new entries and make comments. (The entry about the lottery was one of them.) Mostly it provides a way for me to watch the count of unique visits per day, so I can grow neurotic wondering why it’s not higher. But it also provides supplementary data, such as, what search queries have brought people to the site. The “Trapezoid Week” flurry of posts has proved to be very good at bringing in search referrals, with topics like “picture of a trapezoid” or “how do I draw a trapezoid” or “similar triangles trapezoid” bringing literally several people right to me.