Holy page hit batman. I will readily admit that I am a curmudgeony luddite when it comes to twitter. The format perpetuates what I see as a disturbing trend towards shortened attention spans and disinterest in depth or subtlty. …or even knowing how to spell subtlety. To be honest, though, my feelings may also stem from the question “What has twitter ever done for me?”
Well, this has been a big week for me in the educyberbloggerinterwebmathsphere. Firstly, I was really excited to meet three—count ‘em three—bloggers that I follow at an evening professional development get together where I may or may not have actually made the comment “One-half is not equal to two-fourths.” It’s a long story that may or may not deserve a separate post, but somewhat related to Simpson’s Paradox. I had already put a face to Dan because I was blown away by his presentation last winter at CMC-North and, frankly, he’s sorta’ famous in that “famous within a specific subset of a specific field” sort of way. Nonetheless, it was great shaking his hand (ok, the handshake was actually just ok, but subsequent conversations were great). I had not had a chance, though, to put a face to Jason or Sophgermain (although M. LeBlanc might be more appropriate).
It appears that I also owe Dan and, begrudgingly, twitter a big thanks because my recent post about mathematical habits of mind was “picked up” via twitter by The O’Reilly Radar (and I thought they just wrote nerdy computer science books) and kottke.org (which I had never heard of, but it appears that other people have). Anyway, the table below says it all.
Date | Page hits |
Friday, August 20th | 4 |
Friday August 27th | 10 |
Friday, September 3rd | 33 |
Friday, September 10th | 6449 |
It’s growing exponentially!! And by exponentially, I mean fast. And by fast, I mean something completely different from exponentially.
So don’t fall for that malapropism. With a little data fitting, you can instead see that these numbers fit the function:
f(t) = 1063t3 -6368t2 + 11670t - 6361 (with a little rounding)
where t is the number of weeks after August 13th and f(t) is the number of page hits.
What does this mean? The table below says it all.
Date | Page hits |
Friday, August 20th | 4 |
Friday August 27th | 10 |
Friday, September 3rd | 33 |
Friday, September 10th | 6,449 |
Friday, September 17th | 25,634 |
Friday, September 24th | 63,964 |
December 31st, 2010 | 6,181,370 |
December 31st, 2014 | 12,266,700,000 |
Since this is greater than the United Nation’s projection of the world population at the end of 2014, this is unequivocal proof of either:
1. Extraterrestrial intelligent life in the universe that will be reading my blog
2. A tea party landslide in the 2010 midterm elections leading to a universal ban on contraception
3. Bad math
I’ll let you decide.