I was planning to blog about an interesting thing I’d noticed in my blog stats. It’s this:

It’s my post on Valerie Shrimplin’s excellent Michelangelo book, which seems to be getting more and more popular. I’m pleased because I think she’s done a really interesting and exciting piece of work. The trough on the right is the period when people were reading the blog post on the Clioaudio server, so whatever the stats were, they weren’t registered here.

The reason I bring it up now is that John Hawks had an interesting post arguing that science is the draw to ‘science blogs’. This has a response post at Uncertain Principles where Chad Orzel reads John Hawks’ claim that he doesn’t do much non-science blogging as he does zero non-science blogging than then lambasts him for not having a comparison sample. I’m assuming that’s a misunderstanding from not following John Hawks’ blog and not seeing that non-science posts sometimes appear rather than something sinister.

To be fair Chad Orzel does have the data to show that people don’t want to read about Physics. What I would say is that the population that doesn’t read about Physics on Uncertain Principles is not the same population that does More >