Impeachment Day ... --- ... or Tecumseh?

Just how do you get rid of the unloved pResidents? This is the question that patriotic Americans are asking themselves today. Today being Impeachment Day in the good ole US of A.

Both George Dubya Bush and Dick Cheney have lied the USA into an illegal war of aggression, spy on their own citizens in open violation of the law, and have openly sanctioned the use of torture from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay. These are high (war) crimes that demand accountability. Since these are not men of honour, the only just way of removing them from office is by impeachment. The first step has been taken. On April 24, 2007 Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D) introduced Articles of Impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. However this takes time and 2/3 of the Senate must vote to boot them out. However the Dems only have a narrow majority in both Houses, not 2/3. So what are the alternatives?

Americans being a violent folk - worshipping death and guns - the traditional alternative has been assassination of the President by one of their own citizens. Indeed the Indian Chief Tecumseh cursed the then american President and his successors to just such a fate. So today I'll tell you about the Tecumseh Curse.

Seven American presidents did not live to see the end of their mandates - once every 20 years - as predicted by Tecumseh. Tecumseh was distinguished among his people for his prowess in battle (although he greatly opposed the practice of torturing prisoners), exactly the opposite of both Bush and Cheney who carefully avoided fighting for their nation in Vietnam. Tecumseh foretold an eclipse in 1806 and an earthquake in 1811 correctly, it is said he could see far into the future. His most famous 1836 prediction included the phrases "But I tell you he will die; and after him, every great chief [=president] chosen every twenty years thereafter will die".

Harrison - who won in the presidential race in 1840, although the majority did not support him (that sound familiar?) - died within a month of appointment. 20 years later Abraham Lincoln was killed by southern sympathiser John Wilkes Booth. 20 years after that James Garfield was elected in 1880 and then shot dead by Charles J. Guiteau. 20 years after that William McKinley was elected in 1900 then killed by Leon Czolgosz. 20 years after that (1920) Warren Harding - considered one of the worst American presidents before Bush - died of a heart attack in San Francisco. 20 years after that (1940) Roosevelt was elected the third time. He died from a brain aneurism soon after he was elected a president the fourth time. 20 years after that John F. Kennedy became president in 1960. On November 22 1963 he was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. John Hinckley shot him 69 days after he took up office, but he survived. Is George Bush next? He was appointed in 2000 after rigging the election (many say). The possibility of Bush being the target of assassination is rather high, Tecumseh predicts. Bang on target as usual?

Bush is not only unpopular at home, his foreign policy has made him unpopular in Europe and elsewhere. Pravda reports that Bush is the worst 'President' in U.S. history.

I became curious about who the diehard Bush voters are and tried to draw a picture in my mind of the ultimate pro-Bush faction. Obviously they come from a red state background, so their flag must have this background colour. His supporters are predominantly a circle of white men, so their flag must look like this. Within this white circle Bush is known by his good Ole Boy nickname(sic!) of Dubya, and so the 'Dubya' pennant is modified to include his middle initial, thus. Now many of his followers consider that Dubya should be more like a king for life rather than a temporary president, and so this is announced heraldically on his flag by a symbolic crown above the 'W'. The flag now looks like this. The Christian fundamentalist fraction amongst his supporters just know that 'W' talks to God - and vice versa - and so 'W' must be holy in his own way. And so a Halo is put on the flag above the crown. The final flag of the ultimate Dubya fans thus looks like this. Having deduced perfectly logically what their flag looks like, I googled to see who Dubya's ultimate fans were, who use this flag. My worst suspicions were confirmed ;-) Enough already. IMPEACH the B*st*rds!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 28th April 2007 at 06:28 CET permalink Comments Email

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Daisy, Daisy, show us your leg...

This macro photo is a 20x magnification of an 8mm daisy in my garden. If you look closely at the 9 o'clock position you can see a ¼mm long insect trying to hide from my intrusive camera. Amazing what you can do with the macro facility. On the 28th (Impeachment Day) I'll add the 6x digital zoom to get a shot of Dubya's brain ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 26th April 2007 at 06:26 CET permalink Comments Email

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Doing it the Hong Kong WEI ;-)

When I wrote the archery article for Wendy last friday I lead off by saying Hallo (harro?) in Mandarin, it being one of the only a dozen words of Chinese that I know. The others are Goodbye, Yes, No, Please, Thankyou and of coarse(sic!) half a dozen rude words like (see also this old blog entry).

Now Wendy has sent me a comment so hilarious I reproduce it below (with her permission) in its entirety. Apparently, my use of Mandarin was wrong anyway, because they speak Cantonese in Hong Kong. But let's hear Wendy Templeton :-

Not to be pernickety, but here in HK not many people speak Putonghua (Mandarin). Well, they do, but in the same way people in the UK can speak French (ie: in that way that people always pretend they can speak just that little bit more than they can ;-).

HK is a Cantonese speaking place, and not only that - they speak slang, which morphs at an alarming rate: it's quite a dynamic language. And when I say they speak slang, it's not like a bunch of school kids behind the bike shed/ outside the office, texting Pauline/ traumatising old people or French students, I don't mean that. I mean everyone speaks a special HK talk. Most interestingly, news reports on the local TV stations are read it in "proper Cantonese". And to be frank, the majority of people admit they can't understand 100% of what is being said in these news reports - imagine if you couldn't understand (not) the Nine o'clock News. Of course, people get the gist; but I get the feeling it must be like sitting in on a Steven Hawkins lecture. Oh, ok, maybe a Bush speech. The point is: this is one crazy language. And I take my hat off to them for their creativity.

One thing that always confuses new-comers is the oft-heard "Lei sik fan!", which literally translates to "You eat rice?", which then translates to "Have you had lunch yet?", which, as you eventually find out, actually means, "How're you doing, mate?" and doesn't require the answer: "Yes, thank you; I had Devils on Horseback, Seared Black Cod and lychee mousse". This is one of the few colloquialisms I can actually report without being crude (10 points and one gold star, and possibly 20 guilders, if you can guess what "shooting at aeroplanes" means). The list is endless.

Anyway, the point is: in HK, we wouldn't say "Ni Hao" (Putonghua); it's way too sophisticated, and it's just not right (proud lot). HK people will say: HALLO! or "WEI!" (translate as "hey!" or "oi" in a friendly way ... usually), or to be fair, "Lei ho?" (lit: you good?). And oddly, when answering the phone, people say: WEI ??!!!?? in the loudest voice possible (kudos if you can drag it out for more than three seconds (WWWEEEEIIIIII????? (rising tone, as you go). Actually, only women over the age of 68 who cannot speak a word of English (no shame in that) can do this: they must be wearing green spandex leggings; have a very tight perm; be wearing a baggy sweatshirt with a surprisingly good picture of the immortal Mickey Mouse ("MICHAEL MOSUE") which is written just above her breasts. Below that is the always endearing, yet slightly cryptic FUCK (in magenta). You always know they've just come from the "wet market" because they are casually swinging a wildly animated pink plastic bag. "Ah, that would be dinner, then," you surmise, as the eel makes a bid for freedom over your Nikes.

But back to the phone. People (especially the women), will repeat WWEEII??? several times before anyone's got a chance to get a word in edgeways. It's like they're constantly trying to scare off the landlady/ triads/ mother-in-law.

Never really seems to occur to them that they ARE the landlady of the triad's mother-in-law. I tell you - it's one crazy city.

Wendy

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 24th April 2007 at 06:24 CET permalink Comments Email

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A Piece of Paradise Perhaps?

B logfriend Anna Pashen tells us about a great piece of property going for a song in Australia. So if any blogreaders are thinking of retiring or emigrating to Oz, you can read about this piece of paradise in Anna's blog. Here's the link.

Can't afford the place? Watch the Lyrid meteor shower tonight, and make a wish! :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 22nd April 2007 at 06:22 CET permalink Comments Email

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Why I gave up Archery ;-) . . .

... or "The bows and arrows of outrageous fortune...." ;-)

Ni Hao, Wendy. Wendy Templeton reads this blog in Hong Kong (China), so that's me trying to say Hallo in Mandarin, because I can't set Chinese characters on this machine :-( Wendy sends occasional, nay, all too rare, comments and has now requested that I write on a specific subject (archery), which used to be a hobby of mine.

As it happened, I needed to use both hands on a CAD task when her mail arrived and so I had piped the Email through the (mediocre, american) text-to-speech module, so that I was getting my mails read to me. Also, 'cos I was concentrating on the CAD, I wasn't really paying attention. So I thought at first that Wendy wanted me to write about the recent sinking of the cruise ship Sea Diamond off Greece, because she wanted a post about "Bosun Errors" ;-) My second attempt at parsing her mangled message (the text-to-speech SW has a strong american accent) understood that she wanted me to write about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet ("Beaus and Arras" ;-) Only when I read the text did I parse it as Bows and Arrows; Wendy had noted that archery is (still) listed as one of my hobbies, but that I never blog about it.

Now there may be Brits reading this who thought that Walter Gabriel was the grumpiest old Archer (Jeffrey aside), but they've never encountered me on a losing streak! And thereby hangs this tale.

About a decade ago, my doctor had said I needed to take up more (or, indeed, any) sport to get my blood pressure down. So I chose archery, 'cos it consists of standing as still as possible for a large part of the time, interspersed with leisurely strolls of 180 yards or less to get the arrows back ;-) By coincidence (pace C.G. Jung) a nearby evening school was holding introductory lessons with borrowable gear. Lesson one was to hit a door at three paces! And some folks missed! ;-) But of the two dozen starters, three of us stuck with it. Harry later specialised in Compound Bows, I in the Olympic Bow, and Peter in the Longbow. And so we formed a village team and eventually worked our way up (over six years of weekly practice) to interstate level.

Then one winter I got ill and so was out of practice. Worse still, for lack of practice, my shooting muscles had atrophied somewhat and so I was overbowed at the start of the season. 'Overbowed' means that you can no longer pull a bow of that draw weight (mine was 38 lbs) and hold it stably at full draw. I should really have bought a pair of weaker bow arms (say 34 lbs or less) and forgone the 90 yard (longest) range. But I didn't, hoping to regain my strength quickly instead. Wrong decision!

And then came "The bows and arrows of outrageous fortune". Much too early for me, we went to shoot at the Hessen state championships. Harry came 4th in his compound class, Peter came second in the longbow class, & I blew it in a big way :-(

Suffice it to say that I was awarded a special prize for "The archer with the most room to improve" :-( It was a red lantern such as are used to mark the ends of trains or convoys. Oh the burning shame! Even the compensatory Magnum of champagne couldn't console me, especially since the specialist press and the local papers all printed the results list in full. Yours truly trailing behind, 516/600 :-(

And so I changed hobbies, 'cos I'm a bad loser at sports. However, once during those 6 or 7 years I DID manage - by chance - to shoot a "Robin", that is to split my first arrow with my second one. Unrepeatable! Wilhelm Tell would have been proud ;-)

There's a fun side to the hobby too. I enjoyed shooting Clout, which is trying to hit a pole at 180 yards (Agincourt range). Our team also played against a local golf team (we were going for a beermat placed on their greens), we counted arrows used, they strokes taken. We won :-) And we played against a squaddies' pub darts team, our dartboard being 2½ feet in diameter, 10 yards away. We lost, despite staying sober!

So now you know why I'd not told you Much about archery; nor shall I Tell again^* ;-)

Aside about accuracy : At national level you should be able to hit a golf ball at the short indoor ranges (18 meters) every time. A tennis ball at 25 meters (see photo at the top of today's blog). A watermelon at 50 meters and a chairback at 90 meters (100 yards). Repeatedly. For 130+ exhausting arrows (+ = practice).

Aside about strength : Medieval archers pulled to the chest rather than to the chin as we do today (take a look at the Bayeaux tapestry). And the archers then were of a shorter stature. Nevertheless, I've tried to pull a reconstruction war bow (108 lb Agincourt replica); no way! Those guys were pulling twice what I can pull. True they weren't going for accuracy, just (a 200 yards) range, and so had no holding/aiming phase, but still! Respect! Those guys were the medieval equivalent of machine guns, 6 arrows per minute!

Aside about the V-sign : captured archers and those on the losing side (Bonjours mes Amis de Crecy et Agincourt) got their draw-fingers lopped off so that they could never shoot again. And so the victorious archers returned home, two drawfingers aloft to show they still had them, in what has now become known as the victory sign ( = up yours, or the Churchillian V-sign). There's nothing new under the sun, Winston...

^* : Wendy, we archers never get old, we just get bowed, (k)nock and quiver ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 20th April 2007 at 06:20 CET permalink Comments Email

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Helgoland mon Amour

The world's biggest man-made non-nuclear explosion took place on this very day - April 18th - in 1947, c/o HM Royal Navy, on a small north sea island, Helgoland.

6.8 kilotons ! That's ca. 50% of the 1^st nuke.

Helgoland comprises two small islands in the North Sea, about two hours' sailing time from Cuxhaven at the mouth of the River Elbe in Germany. The small one is just a beach dune with a small airfield on it (the longer runway is only 400 meters!) The larger island - around one sq. km. - has two levels, on the plateau and the village at the base of it.

Until 1714 ownership switched several times between Denmark and the Duchy of Schleswig, with one period of control by the Hanseatic City of Hamburg. In August 1714 it was captured by Denmark, and it remained Danish until 1807. But in 1807 Helgoland was seized by the British during the Napoleonic Wars. Eight decades later, Britain gave up the islands to Germany in 1890 (as part of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty) which they regretted during the two World Wars. In WW1 Helgoland became a major naval base. At the end of WW2 on 18 April (sic!) 1945 over a thousand Allied bombers attacked the islands flattening all the buildings whilst the population hid safely in caves and the really solid WW2 bunkers.

After WW2 the Brits decided to demolish all of those robust bunkers. On 18 April (again!) 1947, the Royal Navy detonated 6,800 tons of explosives trying to destroy the island. While aiming at the fortifications, the island's total destruction would have been accepted. The blow shook the main island several miles down to its base, changing its shape (the Mittelland was created). But (some of) the bunkers held! In fact they are now a tourist attraction, worth a visit there. A pleasant day's outing :-)

P.S. Liz sez I didn't make it clear enough : the 1000 bombers in 1945 translate to 2 per minute all night long, whereas in 1947 (peacetime) the Royal Navy stuffed the bunkers etc full of explosives and unused munitions & mines and then set them off all at once by remote control to get a single 6.8 kiloton bang.

P.P.S. Doug linked me to a 4 minute video of Canada's biggest explosion at Ripple Rock, at 1.2 kilotons.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 18th April 2007 at 06:18 CET permalink Comments Email

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Maximum Lift

On this very day in 1949 there were 1383 landings in Tempelhof, Gatow and Tegel as the Berlin Airlift reached its logistical peak : "Up yours, Stalin!"

At the beginning of the cold war Berlin was an island in the soviet zone (which became the GDR). In the early summer of 1948 Stalin had cut off all access to Berlin by road, rail and canals. And so, from June of 1948 through September of 1949 American and British planes airlifted 2.3 million tons - I'll say that again, 2.3 MILLION tons - of goods into Berlin : food, medicines, spare parts, even coal. And of course sweets for the children, tossed out of the freight doors on final approach into Tempelhof (a small airfield in the middle of the city), whence the DC3s got their name of "Rosinenbomber" (raisin bombers), beloved by all Berliners.

Takeoffs were in Lübeck, Celle, Hamburg and Fassberg for the Brits and Frankfurt and Wiesbaden for the Americans. There was an endless chain of planes using the three air corridors through the soviet air space. By the time the Berlin Airlift was over there had been 277,264 flights at the cost of 79 lives in accidents. The Douglas C-47 - the military version of the DC-3 taildragger twin (see photo above) took the brunt of the work, 3 tons at a time (no A380 back then!). Later the DC-4 (4 engines, nosewheel) joined in. West Berlin was saved from communism thanks to great airlift logistics.

And so today, April 16th, peak lift day, Germany remembers, and says Thankyou !

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 16th April 2007 at 06:16 CET permalink Comments Email

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Atom-Heart Mother......

Tuesday's article about isotopic thermometers has been taking some flak for being too highbrow. It varied from Cowtown Pattie's complimentary "you make me feel like a mental midget..." via Four Dinners' "Rain is complicated?? How the hell have I survived this long??" to Sven's aggressive "What kind of STU-pid geek uses uranium enrichment as an analogy? Most readers don't understand that either! Nor do we know what an isotope is! "

OK, Sven et al, let me try explaining those two.

Isotopes are any of the several different forms of an element each having different atomic mass (mass number). Isotopes of an element have nuclei with the same number of protons (the same atomic number) but different numbers of neutrons. Therefore, isotopes have different mass numbers, which give the total number of nucleons (=the number of 'protons plus neutrons' in the nucleus of the atom. Thus U₂₃₅ has 235 nucleons but U₂₃₈ has three more neutrons than U₂₃₅. All clear now?

Uranium Enrichment can be done by a number of methods, the one described here uses a Zippe centrifuge. Enriched uranium is a critical (sic!) component for both nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons. No, I am NOT going to tell you how to build an atomic bomb! Natural uranium has over 99% of the U₂₃₈ isotope, but it is the U₂₃₅ which is fissionable. So the proportion of it needs to be enriched from less than 1% up to 3 to 5% for a light-water (power) reactor or over 85% for a weapon. No I'm not going to say the critical mass for the chain-reaction to become selfsustaining.

Since uranium is a metal, firstly you need to get it in a gaseous form to centrifuge it. Usually the compound uranium hexafluoride is used. It is fed into fast-rotating drums which centrifuge the isotope mixture in the gas. The heavy isotope tends to move to the outside of the centrifuge. The lighter U₂₃₅ molecules tend towards the centre. A heater at the bottom causes convection, moving the central lighter U₂₃₅ gas up to the top where it can be pumped off. Each step makes a small enrichment, so this gas is fed into the next centrifuge and the process repeated through several stages. This is the method that Iran and North Korea use (Pakistan too, for that matter).

Was that a clear (non-classified) explanation for the layperson? Or still too geeky?

Meanwhile, on the iPod, I am playing the 1970 Pink Floyd album Atom Heart Mother.
You'll have to guess the additional six letters I added in the title today as dots ;-)

I bet Liz skipped this blog-entry and did some baking (yellow cake?) instead ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 14th April 2007 at 06:14 CET permalink Comments Email

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Lewis Hamilton, loser !

Ron Dennis (McLaren-Mercedes F1 racing team) once said "The second place driver is the first loser!" or words to that effect. And in last weekend's F1 race McLaren-Mercedes came first and second (congratulations!), with Alonso in first place and Hamilton coming in second. So Ron Dennis thinks he is a loser. And so do I. Because, as you can see in the press photo shown on the left, Hamilton doesn't even know how to fly his own national flag correctly. He is shown here holding it upside down :-( Indeed none of the others in the McLaren team seem to know this either, and so all are guilty of Lese´ Majeste´ :-(
Perhaps he should be demoted to driving for a symmetrically flagged japanese team ? You can do that if you are (on the) Button ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 12th April 2007 at 06:12 CET permalink Comments Email

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The million year old thermometer

Global warming was the subject down at the pub at the weekend when one climate-change sceptic asked "How do they know what the climate was like back then anyway? Like how hot or cold? I mean - like - thermometers weren't invented until 1593!" So I explained. And since it seems that million-year thermometry is not common knowledge, I reproduce my explanation here for you all.

Water is H₂O, i.e. it contains oxygen. Oxygen has two isotopes, O₁₆ and O₁₈. Now when the water evaporates there is a slight tendency for the lighter molecule to evaporate more and stay longer in the vapour phase. The heavier molecule has a tendency to condense back into the ocean first (e.g. as rain). So as a tendency, the molecules in the atmosphere that move to the polar regions are the lighter ones. This cycle is repeated over and over, more moisture being in the air when the climate is warmer. Thus the ice at the poles is tendentially made of the lighter molecules. That is, the ratio of lighter to heavier water molecules (the different isotopes of oxygen) correlates strongly with the temperature of the planet ( = climate) at the time that ice froze. And so by taking ice core samples drilled from the polar caps you can measure the climate temperature over millions of years (the deeper the ice from which your core sample was taken, the older the ice there is).

In fact this is the same kind of diffusion that is used in the centrifugal method of enriching uranium for nuclear reactors. The centrifuges merely accentuate the mass differences of the molecules. But still multiple steps are needed, as occur naturally in the process I outlined above. Same method, merely different atoms' isotopes.

Polar ice oxygen isotope ratio is our million-year climate thermometer :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 10th April 2007 at 06:10 CET permalink Comments Email

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Easter cancelled this year ;-)

It is with superficial regret that we announce that Easter will have to be cancelled this year (2007), pre$$ing commercial interests notwithstanding.

As you can see in the photo on the left, a certain Dark Angel - call him Azrael - proved to be a little bit faster than the Easter Bunny, who was slowed down by a sack of sinfully dark and disproportionately expensive chocolate Easter eggs [whose expire-by date had run out and were thus going cheep] with which he was polluting the environment.

Of course there is nothing sinfully commercial about the modern worship of easter eggs nor the Easter Bunny. The latter - according to an unpublished Dan Brown theory - is symbolic for the fecundity and fertility of Mary Magdalene. This theory is not recognised by The One True Church^™ which insists that only their religious trash memoribilia be on sale (at inflated prices, as ever) at Easter, Xmas and all other days.

In fact, the immoral prophets profits of the One True Church^™ made by selling absolutions and (the specifically forbidden) Graven Imagos Images^® can only be calculated using vector multiplication instead of scalar multiplication. You may well ask : Why do they use vector multiplication? 'Cos we're talking cross-products^* ;-)

^* : This pun may only be understood by mathematicians. Sorry if you don't get it, but get cross instead ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 6th April 2007 at 13:26 CET permalink Comments Email

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Deathly Hallows?

Or should it be called Heady Fellows (that's a potfest, right?) or even Hadleigh Gallows (an address in Suffolk, UK, nr. Ipswich)? None of these, it was the annual Zombie Walk, held inter alia in Brisbane, Oz, on april 1st. People(?) dress up(?) as the soulless undead, covered in gore, and stagger through the streets frightening people. Think of them as your average politician ;-) No, wait, that would be Al Gore, US Dem hopeful, now into Hollywood horror movies ;-) Perchance also John Howard in one of his good moments? ;-)

A zombie is one of the undead who rise in bleeding agony from an unconsecrated tomb in a corporal manifestation, seeking the souls of the living. The tradition thus goes back about 1974 years, Dan Brown might hypothesize ;-)

Sounds like something which Terry Pratchett would have liked, featuring - as he does - the occasional soulless zombie in his Discworld^® novels. My blogfriend and pTerry fan, Anna Pashen, who lives in Brisbane, XXXX, has sent me links to some photos and videos of this year's zombie walk, which I wish to share. Have some bloody fun, mate!

But of course, these zombies are mere imitations of poorly made Hollywood B-movies and as such are harmless. Our soul-seeking real zombies Rove through the White House corridors of power, sucking (upto) Dick, who goes around shooting people in the face with a shotgun in best B-movie tradition. Even worse are the priests of the One True Church™ (whichever) who - not satified with being dyslexics who bugger the choirboys every year - advance(?) to seducing and murdering lady members of their congregation and then hiding their bodies beneath the church. Now THAT is a Zombie! Deathly Hallows would be an appropriate name for that pervert's church, I guess :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 4th April 2007 at 09:30 CET permalink Comments Email

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Get Better Blogstats and more blog-visitors

A couple of people on my blogroll have been moaning about how few visits their blogs get, and I promised them to review my own blogstats to see what we might learn from them. They get 20 to 35, I now get up to 1900 visits/day.

Doug Alder, who started blogging just 9 months ahead of me, wrote "My blog is five years old today. Five years ~3500 posts and ~3100 comments. In all that time I haven’t seemed to grow my readership at all. Still about 20 to 30 visits a day..."

Liz Hinds, a nice Welsh woman whom I often tease about her faith, wrote "A few questions while I'm away: Misskris comments that she gets 500 or so visitors a day. I'm lucky if I get 35. What am I doing wrong?! How many do you get? Do you care? How many comment? What subjects get the most response? (My answer to that is ladies' underwear.)..." Lee commented "I have no idea how many visit my site. I have no way of finding out. Maybe I should change that one day." My tip? Sitemeter :-)

Starting with Doug's remark, the number of daily visits to my own blog has grown as shown in the diagram on the left. In November 2006 the folks at Sitemeter lost a whole week's data. Correcting for this by interpolation, there were ˜34,000 visits in november 2006. The dip in june and july occurs every year, I suspect it is a college vacation phenomenon, with less students and schoolkids visiting my site. Whatever.

Having corrected for the november 2006 data dropout, I then divided the visits per month by the number of days in each month (february=28, march=31, etc) to get the average number of visits per day, as shown in the diagram on the right above.

The current average of 1260 daily visits is however only an average. There are more visits on weekdays and less at weekends, i.e. people are reading the blog from the office, I suspect. You can see this cyclical effect in the diagram on the left below, which shows the last month. You should ignore the number on the far right as I didn't wait until midnight to get a full day's visits when I took the sample :-( The diagram on the right shows the most recent week's visits, which may or may not be typical. In summary, a peak weekday gets 1900 visits and saturdays are the weak-end (sic!) with just 1100 regular visitors. So 800 (ca. 40% ) are reading from work;-)

Next, I wanted to see if people follow the links I provide, especially in my more technical postings. Surpringly, no! The average visit depth (onsite links visited) is pretty constant at around 1.6 pages per visit (see diagram on the left, below). Slightly more follow the external links, e.g. to Wikipaedia. As for the duration of the individual page views, these have been averaging about 36 seconds, it only went up to 50 seconds recently because I wrote a longer article about aviation accidents near the end of last month (see diagram on the right, below). Write in 45 sec chunks!

In order to keep the blog from growing too large (e.g. > 90kB per month) and thus being a slow loader, I archive the blog every month and then start over. Thus the number of archives and archived blog entries grows linearly over time. So I took the diagram at top right (daily average visits) and correlated it against time. And yes, indeedy, the correlation coefficient is R=0.8 which means that 64% (=0.8 * 0.8) of the visit rate variance is explained by the number of blog-entries I've made so far. This confirmed my suspicion that 80% of my visitors come here via search engines. So only 20% come here via bookmarks, and even less come from blogrolls. Indeed Technorati reports only 70 links from 37 other blogs. So bloggers and their blogrolls don't generate much traffic (for me), they are only a token politeness it seems. So I then looked at the usage of outgoing links from MY blogroll(s) and found that almost no-one actually uses the blogroll; nevertheless I shall leave it up, if only as a token of recognition to the folks I read on a daily basis. And thus it seems that my Random Walk idea is a flop, only a few actually follow it :-( Oh well, it was worth a try to promote some lesser known blogs and increase the variety of the stuff I recommend.

And of course some of the visits to the site are by bots :-( These bots scan the site for Email addresses (there aren't any, only GIFs thereof) in order to send them spam. Scumbots! Never put Email addresses in your blog! Use GIFs of them instead!

Now let's look at the second part of Liz's questions and see what the implications are. She asked "What am I doing wrong? . . . How many comment? What subjects get the most response?" Well, I don't allow comments directly in the blog (see Comments Policy), if you want to comment, you have to do so via Email to me. There are about 90-100 of you who do that on a fairly regular basis, and about 5-20 new commenters per month, i.e. really LOW feedback from 1900 daily; I'd like more. Almost no-one has requests for specific subjects; when you do, I try to comply on fairly short notice.

So what do I do differently from Doug and Liz? Well, Doug puts his complete blog entry into an RSS feed, so he may be getting lots of invisible readers via syndication of his RSS feed. I don't. I just put a one-liner in the RSS feed so that syndicated readers can tell there is something new here and then click on the one-liner to come to read my blog here. That way my blog-stats count them and they are not invisible.

We just saw that 80% of my readers come via search engines and thus go directly into the archives to read what interests them. And so I instrumented each monthly archive so that those get counted too. If you (Liz?) are not doing that, then you miss counting all those visitors and only count those coming in the front-door as it were. Those visitors come for what interests them, not necessarily what I wrote about. Therefore if I use (key)words for popular subjects and write about stuff likely to interest people, then it gets more traffic. Writing about domestic issues (baking, family, dog), Liz, is not likely to generate as much interest as more global interests; for example : politics, Harry Potter, and maths puzzles (although I have doubts about the latter, ha ha!). So maybe you need to widen your blog's scope more?

Now in all honesty, my wife shares this site (with her Bulldog Blog) and so contributes about 130 to the daily count, even if she does write about our dog. But she writes about ALL bulldogs, not just ours, providing an advice column AND she welcomes guest-bloggers too, who in turn generate more readers. So what I'm saying, folks, is : broaden the scope of your content and expect to get more readers :-)

Liz asked : "What subjects get the most response?" implying "which get read most?" It's often a surprise! I find that some themes are unexpectedly well received and cause almost a step function in the number of readers, but only about 25% of these new readers return, the others were just interested in this one blog-entry. Examples of such themes vary from The Death of Harry Potter to the poem I wrote last month for PI-day. Each brought a couple of hundred new readers as an upward blip in the blogstats, but a passing blip :-( And as far as memes are concerned, my best meme was the panoramic skyline photo meme, running from sep/04 to nov/05. Go look. Unfortunately, many participants did not (and still do not) use permalinks and so the meme has suffered from link rot, leaving some great photos unreachable :-(

I hope that this has been helpful to y'all, and hasn't sounded TOO overbearing. I wish you ALL blog-success; but it's the writing that's fun, regardless of hit-count :-)

Addendum : Doug Alder comments "I switched my RSS feed to feedburner and now I know how many grab my feed each day which is currently averaging between 105 and 113." And Liz tells us proudly that she got a Google hit for having "profound thoughts"; now THAT could never happen to me, blogging at the speed of dark ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 2nd April 2007 at 06:02 CET permalink Comments Email

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