500 Posts: I’m Bad at Statistics and Talk About Myself a Lot
This is the 500th post on MA101.
Since that makes the math fairly straightforward I thought I’d run some statistics for fun, forgetting that “fun” and “statistics” should never be used in the same sentence. It took a bit longer than I’d planned.
But I did learn some entertaining things. For starters I looked at the first word in each post. The split between first words that I used only once in the whole 500 posts and first words that got repeated multiple times was almost exactly equal:
And an analysis of the ones I used more than once showed, basically, that I like talking about myself too much:
I suppose that shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone. Anyway, a few other stats for your idle enjoyment:
So the moral of this story seems to be that I am better at writing than I am at using Excel to make graphs. Also that my posts tend to be heavily self-referential and don’t include enough fuzzy ponies.
And that’s 500 posts of MA101. I’m glad you’ve all been along for the ride. What were your favorite posts? I may post a collection of my favorites tomorrow, just to get out of thinking up an actual topic for another day. But for now, feel free to reminisce about the good old times down in the comments.
Or critique my graphs. I could probably use the help there, too.
I just wanted to say that I enjoy your blog. Also, I hope the writing thing is working out well. Also, I have a baby now!
Thank you! I am always surprised by how many old friends, relatives, and acquaintances have ended up reading it along with the rest of their RSS feeds. Good to know it is appreciated, even if it needs more fuzzy ponies.
I’m a bit of a maths geek too… can I ask what you used to get your stats?
Flipping through the archives manually, unfortunately. It took a bit.