Evolving Blogs and Significant Figures

As many of you will know, Significant Figures began life on Blogspot as a Blogger blog. It even got a mention in The Guardian as being “often irreverent, but always intelligent”. At the time, it was a secondary outlet for my moans and groans about the misuse of units, conversions, scientific terms, measurements, and other miscellany in the media.

When “version 2″ of Blogger came along, I decided that my sciencetext.com custom domain would be the best place to house Significant Figures and so I went through the various shenanigans of shuffling files, doing 301 redirects etc etc. Initially, in carrying out the move, I wanted to tell you not only that I had done it, but that how I had carried out the move and switched to Wordpress as the blogging software. The process was quite complicated and so what began as a couple of posts about the general process became more than a couple of posts, with each new tweak and hack requiring its own post.

It was not only quite cathartic to outline the process in this way, but also means I have a record of how it was done in case I either want to backtrack in any way or else need to help a client to make the same move.

Ultimately I’ve ended up writing up almost every tweak and hack as a new post three or four times a week on Significant Figures. Again, this is a mental safety valve for me as occasionally I get pulled down in to a quagmire of technicalities regarding blogging, CMS, RSS, subscribers, posts, comments, spam and various Windows problems.

Inevitably, you might say, this has turned out to be a far more popular thing for most visitors to read than my moans and groans about scientific illiteracy in the media, although I do occasionally post about those here too. But, the site is certainly more popular than it ever was in its original form, with around 500 unique visitors each day on average instead of 10.

It was fellow science writer Russ Swan who got me on to thinking about how the site had evolved. In fact, we’d been discussing on the ABSW listserv how Wall Street Journal Asia was claiming a paid circulation of 80,601 and extrapolating that to an estimated readership of 370,765 souls, according to Martin Ince. Those awfully precise figures are simply unreal, especially given than 370,765 divided by 80601 is near as dammit to 4.6. 4.6 is the figure the news industry claims for average readership per issue of a publication on the basis that couples share a paper, and each copy in a library will be read by more than one person. It’s all very silly, 80000 would be a good estimate 80601 is just tooooo accurate to be true.

Russ chipped in with a memory of an atlas published in the 1980s that includes among its data the notion that there are 20,331,694 tractors in the world. “Remarkable,” he says. Indeed. It is physicist Enrico Fermi who is credited with the archetypal back of an envelope calculation, which we now call a Fermi calculation. It might be possible to estimate the number of tractors in the world to the nearest 100,000 say, but we could never count them to the nearest one as they are continuously being manufactured and scrapped, same with human population in fact.

Russ’ own blog is about activities in the laboratory and a fascinating read it is too. I am now scouring it for inconsistencies in measurements, conversions and units, so that I can give them a mention here for old time’s sake.