A bit more than three years ago (on February 3, 2021, to be specific), I posted a Wednesday Wow about COVID-19. Seeing the reported numbers in the news back then inspired me to obtain my own dataset and do some analysis. The results then were jaw-dropping, hence the Wow!
For quite a few months now I’ve been meaning to do an update to see what’s happened since then. Yesterday I pulled a new dataset and re-did the analysis.
The results are still jaw-dropping. And horrific and sorrowful.
This post contains the post statistics charts I didn’t have room for in the 2023 wrap-up post. There are a lot of them, and I don’t imagine they’re of much interest to anyone but me. I post them mainly to document the blog. A set of milestones, if you will.
I confess to being fascinated — and utterly befuddled — by which posts receive attention and which little piggies get none. It’s particularly interesting to me when an old post — especially one that never got many views — suddenly gets noticed and sometimes even slightly popular.
Mostly the stats are similar to previous years, but 2023 did bring a few surprises.
I don’t know why I’m so fascinated that the rational numbers are countable even though they’re a dense subset of the uncountable real numbers. A rational number can be arbitrarily close to any real number, making you think they’d be infinite like the reals, but in fact, nearly all numbers are irrational (and an uncountable subset of the reals).
So, the rational numbers — good old p/q fractions — though still infinite are countably infinite (see this post for details).
More to the point here, a common way of enumerating the rational numbers, when graphed results in some pretty curves and illustrates some fun facts about the rational numbers.
The Wednesday Wow posts have been a bit off the beam recently. Four weeks ago, we were wowed (but not in a good way) by an incited insurrection by an incompetent imbecile. Two weeks ago, we were wowed (in a great way) by the inclusive Inauguration of the incoming Individual.
With all that more or less behind us, I have time to be wowed by interesting (and depressing) information about the insidious infection infesting the country and the world. I mention both because I became intrigued by difference between them.
It all started when I noticed the COVID-19 graphic on CNN.
It’s that time for a reflective reviewing the previous year. On a personal level, it’s been an interesting year, a year of some changes with more ahead. I may (or may not) talk about that more down the road. I’ve already shared some of the more mundane ones. I’m still chewing on some of the more personal ones.
As a blog post, it makes sense to do a blog review, as self-indulgent as they are. This is more a milepost for me; a sort of year-end report to the board — see if it’s worth funding another year. (Technically, the Blog Year starts on July 4, with year zero being 2011. The blog is now seven-and-a-half; 741 posts tall. Plus it just grew one more.)
Stick around if you want, but it’s gonna be long, dry, and narcissistic…
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