2006-12-11

Happy Birthday to Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! (and by "Me", I mean "my blog")

Welcome to "The Third Edge of the Sword", my personal (and at the moment, anonymous) blog.

What I won't be doing much of here is linking to amazing stories, breaking news the mainstream media missed (I'll miss it too), presenting long critiques of things I know little about (of which there is a subject or two), or boring my non-existant audience with tales of minutia.

What I will do in this blog is I'll be discussing science, conservatism, baseball and hockey, Alberta Indepedence, food, women, life, good books/movies, and anything else that comes to mind. For now, things will be kept relatively private about me. That may change later.
And so went the first post of Third Edge of the Sword one year ago today. Over the past 365 days you will have found me more or less living up to my stated aims. Nothing particularly fancy, I wasn't aiming to be a specialized blog dedicated to a single cause or topic because I'm not a specialized person dedicated to a single cause or topic.

Conservatism is probably the most common topic I've dedicated myself to on this blog, not only because it comes with the best built-in audience but also because one of the biggest motivations of this blog was reading the Edmonton Journal and wanting to retort to almost every single letter in there (excepting my own, of course). To be fair, if you want to know the difference between this blog and a dedicated conservative topical blog, its that I often will digress into hockey or baseball or bad humour, and I post more often and with less substance. Every once and a while I break this rule and post things of significance. And nobody comments on them, while some one-liner about Kristen Dunst nets me 15 spam comments and one real one. Que sera, sera, right?

So this is a post to celebrate the first year of this blog. Feel free to contribute your favourite Third Edge of the Sword memories in the comments section.

Back in Post #200, I wrote:
The proper way to calculate it all would be to make a pseudo-graph of the postings as they occur in timespace. That is, treat the minute-times as positions in relation to the smooth progression of posting number. Then a formula describing these plots (or roughly describing them, MatLab is fairly good for this sort of thing) could be ascertained. The first derivative w.r.t. posting number would give you the frequency of the posts, and the second derivative would then give you the speed increase of that frequency. Using it one could then extrapolate all sorts of neat things. But that's a whole lot of work!
Well, its still a whole lot of work, but I did end up finally doing some of what I discussed above. Namely, I used the date/time for each post, calculated the time difference between them, and then plotted that time distance as a function of post number. There wasn't a whole lot as a "trend" when looking at it that way. Looking at the time taken for 50 or 100 posts worked better. So without further adieu, lets look at a graphical representation of the past year at Third Edge of the Sword.
Above is the posting rate per 50 posts discussed above. The curves on the image are perhaps deceiving, but it does show some peaks and valleys.


And here is the per 100 posts. This provides even less accuracy than the per 50 post graphic, but it does provide a neat sinusoidal wave and show how the posting rate is being maintainted lately against a "natural" dip.


Here's an interesting one that needs a bit of an explanation. Every post has been found to occur X minutes after the previous post (for ASCII notation, lets number them X(n) for post #n with n running from 2 to the 566th post to date). The speedchange is the difference between X(n) and X(n-1). Once I find it, I graph the results. They probably don't mean much, but here it is anyways.


Here's another interesting graph whose actual value is perhaps circumspect. As I discussed before, I have speedchanges for the posts I have made (minus the first two, for reasons anybody who's taken sequences and series will understand). What I then did was create an IFCONDITION for each speed: if the speed was negative (namely, I slowed down my posting rate) the post received a value of -1. An increase in posting rate left me with a +1. The result is as you see here. These two graphs probably aren't of much value, but they look neat, so I'm including them.

Ah, you say, but how does just the raw times look when graphed? The result is here below, and may not look particularly impressive.

This is a chart showing the raw number of hours between each post. As you can see, there's some incredible variation from a low of 0 to a high of 534. Also, this gives us some visually counter-intuitive results: the longer the time between posts, the higher the bar. But we want the lower bars to indicate longer times between posts.


This graph rectifies that error. What is being graphed here is the quantity 1/H with H(n) being the number of hours since post n-1 was made. Extremely high values of 1/H were factored down to 10. Values of H=0 were interpreted as H=1xE07 to keep the math workable.


This is the same graph shown above "zoomed in" on the lower values. This mainly shows how the posting rate varies quite dramatically locally, but globally mostly oscillates around the 0.2 and 1.1 ranges.

So that mostly covers the global stuff. I then did this all on a month-to-month basis. This produces 26 graphs, since I contain both the "schedule" (the time from post to post) and the "rate" (the inverse 1/H of the time from post to post). I link to these graphs below, but to keep this page from taking hours to load on a modem (and fill the blog entirely) I will link to them below.
What's in store for the 2nd year of Third Edge of the Sword? Well, more popularity. Slow increases in site-traffic are bound to occur as more people hear about this corner of the globe. Technoratti currently reports that this page is Rank: 88,588 (63 links from 38 blogs). Maybe next year I can report some improvement in that department. Also right now there are only 4 sites permalinking to mine: Woman Honor Thyself, ABFreedom, Tales from the Great White North, and The Poltiics of Life in Canada. 566 posts in a single year. That's quite the achievement, and for that I am proud.

(Check the 100,200,300,400, and 500th posts to read some of the year's highlights)

Update, December 12 2006 10:03pm: The rate per 10 posts has been completed.

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by Feynman and Coulter's Love Child at 10:44 pm

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