Field of Science

The Pharyngula Bump

I've been meaning to point this out for awhile, but have been much too busy to play around. However, I did want to point out what happens when you get a link from a blog like pharyngula, no offense to greg laden who I believe actually linked to me first.

Here are the immediate ramifications


You might fail to notice that for about 5 months, my blog was hovering around 10-30 hits/day. Then PZ goes and links to me and now the Y-axis scale is blown all to hell and back. Now if I get 50 hits it looks like 0. Its so depressing.

On another lighter note, this little tidbit reminded me of an old Garfield cartoon, the Saturday morning cartoon, not the newspaper cartoon.



The cartoon featured Garfield in an educator role pointing to a map of the US and saying the Wyoming is an Indian word meaning "No state Here." Based on my assessment, that definition seems to fit. OK, maybe this is a population issue, Wyoming is the smallest state by population...let's see if that fits the data.

Wyoming - 0 hits - 522,830 50th smallest state
Vermont - 9 hits - 621,254 49th smallest state
N. Dakota - 6 hits - 639,715 48th smallest state
Alaska - 9 hits - 683,478 47th smallest state

Based on these numbers I would predict at least 5 hits from Wyoming. Not too many that 0 is statistically significant, however this data does not allow us to rule out that hypothesis that Wyoming does not really exist. This could go a long way towards explaining Dick Cheney.

5 comments:

Ian said...

Um, yeah, but that would mean that Minnesota should have what, 10 times the population of California? :)

Anonymous said...

My first Pharyngula bumps (or, as I call them, "Pharyngulations") also occurred, a year earlier, in relation to the Twin Cities Home Schooling Creationist Science Fair.

The Lorax said...

Well it helps the Minnesota hits that I make my son click on my blog in exchange for Clifford cartoons. That's probably contributing to the disproportionate hits. :)

The Lorax said...

Greg, well at least we have two data points suggesting creationists are good for something.

Ian said...

I'll add a third - my first big bump was off a Pharyngula link. It was an order of magnitude smaller though. As Abbie said, it's like heroin, and when it goes away you find yourself going into withdrawal.