Oddly Popular

The other day I was looking at some statistics for this blog, and I decided to look at the blog postings that were the most frequently arrived at. Largely, this comes about through search engines and sometimes very loosely related search strings. I'm not sure I could ever have predicted beforehand that these five pieces would have topped the list.

  1. "Sandwich Thoughts" — For several years this small essay has persisted in my top five. It's merely some ruminations about big sandwiches and Subway sandwich shops changing the style of cutting their sandwich bread from what was known as the "U-gouge" to a "hinge cut". I favored the former, by the way, as do most people who've weighed in on the matter. I think that most people who arrive at this page do so by asking search engines for information on the question of whether all Subway sandwich meats are turkey based, a point I mention in the piece. The rather obvious answer is that some of it is, largely the cold-cut type meats, but things like chicken breast, roast beef, and tuna fish are quite evidently not. Sliced turkey breast is, naturally.
  2. "The Matthew EFfect" — A posting in which I tried to track down the origin of the phrase "The plural of anecdote is [not] data". I only got so far with the question but turned up some interesting things, including the fact that there is dispute even about whether the original aphorism had the "not" in it. Judging by the number of people who read this page, there are quite a number of people who care very much about this question. For the reason behind the name of the essay, look in the final footnote.
  3. "Beard of the Week XVIII: Bulgarian Wedding Bells" — About the wedding of pop celebrity Azis, "Bulgaria's famed Roma transvestite", marriage equality, and the discomfort that some gay mean feel about drag queens.
  4. "Stephen Hawking Erroneously Found Dead in 'Death Panel' Marketing" — A short piece about the very odd kerfuffle during the recent health-care-bill debate (i.e., "Obamacare"), when the peculiar, misdirected notion of "death panels" were invented and marketed by Sarah Palin and her Republican cohorts, in which an editorial explaining "how government-run-healthcare 'death panels' wold imperil your grandmother's life, used as the centerpiece of it argument that famed physicist Stephen Hawking, whose life is challenged with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) would be dead today if he had to live under the UK's socialized healthcare system". Unfortunately, what they got wrong is that 1) Hawking is, actually, British and 2) is still very much alive, thanks to 3) the British National Health Care system.
  5. "When Celsius = Fahrenheit" — Finally, a blog posting with equations! As I explain at the beginning of the piece, quite a few people seemed to arrive at my blog by asking the google this question, something I found odd because I never had actually written regarding the question at all, but apparently I used enough of the words in a combination that made the google think I was relevant. So, since googling is destiny, I decided to write the piece that all these searchers were looking for and explain how to discover the single temperature at which the Celsius and Farenheit temperature scales refer to the same temperature with the same number. By all means, if you don't already know the answer have a go at figuring it out before you look.
Posted on January 10, 2012 at 01.14 by jns · Permalink
In: All, The Art of Conversation, Writing

2 Responses

Subscribe to comments via RSS

  1. Written by James Howard
    on Tuesday, 10 January 2012 at 08.02
    Permalink

    I use the Celsius=Farenheit question in my algebra classes.

  2. Written by jns
    on Tuesday, 10 January 2012 at 12.38
    Permalink

    What a good choice! It's easy, solid algebra but a very interesting question to think a little about.

Subscribe to comments via RSS

Leave a Reply

To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.

I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.