Okay seriously WTF

On April 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking12 Comments

The Inexplicable Traffic Surge of Inexplicableness continues apace. I set a record yesterday for unique viewers– over 300– and as of 6:30 AM already have 120 unique viewers today and 160 page views. I have never woken up to numbers like that, ever. And everything’s still coming from overseas, without referrers, and via what appears to be direct clickthroughs to random posts:

I really wish the countries box listed everything; there are probably at least another dozen or so with less than 4 hits, if the last seven days summary means anything. Of that list on the right, only “On thpoilerth” is from the last couple of days. And 88 other hits to posts not on that list.

I ain’t complaining, but man, I would love an explanation for this.

In which I can’t believe that worked

On December 29, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking8 Comments

A quick touch of context– everything I post here gets cross-posted to Facebook, right? I’ve probably got half my friends blocking me by now. I have a friend who is Norwegian, both in the ethnic and the “lives there now” sense. She read today’s post and commented over on Facebook that the lack of Finland was probably because, at least compared to Norwegians and Swedes, Finnish people generally aren’t as likely to be English speakers.

Which is how the last post happened, because I commented– initially as a joke and then I decided to actually do it, because why the hell not– that clearly what was going to be necessary was for me to literally write a post in Finnish and then tag it appropriately.

And then the Internet threw in Iceland as a bonus. Which is hilarious. Which country should I do next? Is Greenlandish a language?

In which I am ignorant: also, blogwanking

On December 29, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Politics, Teaching7 Comments

As of today I’m halfway through Winter Break. Thus far I’m not– at least as far as I know– making myself or anyone else crazy, which is a good thing, because I’m bad at vacations. On the other hand, other than the big renovation project, you may have noticed that I’m kiiiinda starting to run low on viable interesting blog topics since all I’m doing with my life lately is lazing about my house with a book in my hand and occasionally whacking something with a hammer or a saw. I went to work yesterday; it was the first time I’d left the house for longer than two minutes since Christmas.

So, uh, let’s talk about… geography? Sure.

I am, as I’ve already discussed this week, a data nerd. I’m a math teacher in the real world, remember, and apparently I come by that shit honestly. One of the unexpected fun bonuses of running a blog is that it provides me with a never-ending sea of data to play with: how many hits did I get today? Followers? Likes? What’s the ratio of unique visitors to page views today? Have I set any records lately? I posted a comment on that site, it brought me over a dozen visitors!

Stuff, in other words, that is entirely meaningless in any real-world fashion but is fun for me to play with in my head. While I wouldn’t mind more detail, WordPress does a decent job of giving me my site statistics in a nicely visual, manipulable way and I spend more time than I probably should each day staring at my stats.

Way more time, if I’m being honest. Way, way more time.

I said I was a nerd; shuddup.

That said, looky here:

Anybody with a WordPress blog reading this has seen this map already; it’s how WordPress shows you where your traffic is coming from. I’m fascinated by this, and days where I get a new country (six hits from Guernsey today! Finally picked up Thailand yesterday!) never fail to give me a little thrill in my jibbly parts. WordPress is kinda weird about how they determine what is a country or not. For example, I have no hits from China, which does not surprise me given China’s policy on censoring the internet. I do, however, have a number of hits from Taiwan and Hong Kong, which are both part of China, so apparently WordPress is distinguishing the mainland from former territories, or something; I’m not sure. Similarly, to use today’s example, from looking at Wikipedia I get the impression that no one from Guernsey would assert that Guernsey is its own country– yet there it is in my “countries” list.

Some interesting (to me) facts about my traffic:

The biggest countries are entirely unsurprising: the United States, followed by the other three English-speaking democracies: the UK, Canada, and Australia. Fourth and fifth place are Norway and Switzerland.
I have no traffic whatsoever from anywhere in Central America. Not one damn country.
Most of Europe is represented except for some bits of Eastern Europe, mostly former Soviet republics and, annoyingly, Finland. I don’t know why not having a hit from Finland annoys me except for the fact that Sweden and Norway are so well represented. I know Finland was Soviet-dominated to a degree that Norway and Sweden never were, and all of the rest of the European countries I’m missing are former Soviet Union or at least Soviet bloc countries; that might have something to do with it but I’m not sure what.
Way more African countries are represented than I might have expected: Sudan, for instance, which is probably the single most surprising country I’ve gotten traffic from. Ethiopia, also.
Macedonia shows up as “Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic.” Its official name according to the UN is “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” I’m sure that there’s some history behind that that I’m currently ignorant of (mental note: research) but it seems rrrreeeallly weird. That said I may start a movement to rename the US as The Former British and French and Spanish Colony and Before That Indigenous Peoples-Occupied Land of the United States of America. Sounds more fun that way.
I really want someone from Greenland to visit my blog, because Greenland is so damn big. 🙂

One thing that all this has brought to mind is that my geography isn’t what it used to be. I had a teacher in seventh grade who insisted that every kid who passed his class memorize the globe. Which I did, happily. The problem is that that means my geography froze in about 1988– and the Soviet Union didn’t fall apart until 1991. My Eastern Europe and Asia geography is therefore not nearly as good as I want it to be.

Don’t get me wrong: the classical stereotype of Americans ignorant about geography is that they “can’t find XXX on a map.” So long as we’re talking about countries, at least, there’s no place on Earth I can’t find on a map within a few seconds, and I suspect I’d do pretty damn well with capitals and major cities even if I hadn’t heard of them beforehand; I know enough about what languages sound like to be able to pin most places down to a region quickly and after that it won’t take long. What I’m talking about is handing me a blank map and asking me to fill it in. I’m not as good at that as I want to be, and I’ve been reminded of it enough lately (Slovenia! Latvia! Which ones are those, again?) that I need to fix it.

That’ll give me something to do over the next week or so while I’m not pounding on things, right?

Story problem time!

On December 12, 2013December 12, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Have a math problem:

A boat travels 60 kilometers upstream against the current in 5 hours. The boat travels the same distance downstream in 3 hours. What is the rate of the boat in still water? What is the rate of the current?

If you are a reasonably educated person, you should be able to make headway with this fairly quickly: the boat travels 12 km/h upstream (60/5) and 20 km/h downstream (60/3), which means that the boat’s speed in still water is the average of the upstream/downstream speeds, (20 + 12)/2 km/h, or 16 kilometers per hour, and the current is 4 km/h, which is the difference between either of the measured speeds and the average.

I spent about half an hour last night texting back and forth with a former student trying to work her through this problem and becoming more and more bewildered about what it was she didn’t get about it as the conversation went on. She got the math– the math isn’t really that complicated, right? Just division and an average.

What she didn’t get? Rivers. As it turns out, “downstream” and “upstream” are not terribly salient terms to kids who have lived in cities all their lives– and while, granted, the town I currently live in is actually called South Bend because the river bends south while wending through it, the terms “downstream” and “upstream” hadn’t managed to really ensconce themselves in her vocabulary as of yet.

This young lady is generally one of my brightest kids, mind you. I’m not mocking her at all here, although maybe she deserves it a little bit– but the entire conversation got me thinking about how incredibly easy it is to write standardized test questions that you think are questions about math but turn out to hinge on some other kind of non-mathematical knowledge. She could not wrap her head around the idea that the boat wasn’t going at its full speed “downstream” and that the current wasn’t slowing it down by (20-12) 8 km/h going upstream. Which, of course, was one of the answers, because whenever anyone with half an ounce of sense writes a multiple choice test, one of the horrible tricks you do is thinking “Now, how might the students screw this up?” and then writing answers that match what they might have gotten if they did something predictable wrong.

The math? She’s got it. The geography lesson that the writer of the question no doubt didn’t realize was embedded into being able to get the question right? Not so much.

I’ll talk more about this later; just wanted to get the thought down before it fell out of my head. This is part of the longer series of posts I alluded to the other day before hell fell on my face and knocked me out for a couple of days, I think; I’ll get back to it soon.