Head Ramblegate
I was musing over my site figures for yesterday when a though occurred to me.
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could predict how many people will be reading Head Rambles in say a year’s time?
Now, who would be the best people to advise me on future trends, given an existing set of figures. In a moment of sheer genius, I had the answer.
I phoned the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and asked for their help.
At first they were a little reticent, so I muttered the magic password – Freedom of Information. It surely is a magic password, because immediately they couldn’t do enough for me.
I sent them my figures, which apparently they call ‘raw data’. Almost at once, they had a few excellent suggestions. They didn’t like the first figure, for a start. They said it was much too high, as nobody browses the Interweb at one in the morning, and that obviously it was in error. I deleted it. They also weren’t too happy with the zig-zag bit and told me to smooth it out. They apparently call that ‘adjusted data’. I smoothed it. They then gave me the formula [or model, as they called it] and I put that in.
The result was quite staggering.
By extrapolating my figures, every single person IN THE WORLD is going to be reading my site by the end of the year. Isn’t that amazing? By the end of next year, every single human will have to read my site 1.496 billion times a day, just to keep up.
You have to hand it to the C.R.U.
They really know their figures.
And they are a university.
They couldn’t possibly be wrong?
Does this mean that we can all forget climate change Groandad… I’m with you on bad science and deliberately skewed science in order to shock-doctrine people down the road you want them to go … but the fact that some scientists looked for short cuts to come up with damning summaries does not mean that climate change isn’t going to happen in fairly drastic fashion.
The atmosphere and the oceans are part of an enclosed biosphere. You can’t add toxins to that closed system over a period of a few hundred years in the way we have without distorting the function of the system itself.
For example the rise in asthma cases among children in urban areas … anyways its no skin off my nose as I won’t be around to deal with the fallout. I think the chances of humanity saving its own skin by avoiding a tipping point which is pretty much on us now are very slim.
We may come up with a cleaning system based on nanotechnology- perhaps. But a major problem is looming but happily for myself it won’t be blindingly obvious for a few decades yet.
So thats me off the hook and out of the arena.
You already have about 2 billion readers per day. Don’t be greedy, Grandad.
I don’t deny that the climate is changing. I would be a right idiot to do that, as the climate has been changing since the formation of the Earth. What I do question is whether it is warming or cooling, and there is considerable debate over this one, I also have grave reservations as to whether man has anything to do with it. There is an even stronger debate over this.
Prediction of the future is very like my little bit of whimsey above. The site has been running for nearly four years, yet I am trying to predict future traffic based on less than one day. One day out of four years is a massive chunk compared to one hundred years out of billions. Even then, the temperature records for the last hundred years are questionable at best.
Anyhows, as you say – I won’t be around to see the outcome of their predictions.
A simple process of extrapolation would suggest that the increase in traffic to your web site is probably down to a sometimes innate public awareness of the content. Statistically, this would reflect upon curiosity (how many actually revisit after the first hit); a median response in mild agreement to the content; or a positive correlation between that which is written and total agreement … Would I have written this if I’d been drinking Jamesons instead of Teachers’ … who knows – will have to go outside for a smoke!!!
Shit – thought I’d left all this academic drivel behind ….
Grim – You mean I have more readers than The Woman’s Weekly? Wow!
Cardi – That’s pretty much what they said. Except for the bit about the whiskey. Or the smoke.