The October Sexperiment and Blogger's Rules

It's high time I coined a word, and "sexperiment" seemed like a good one... except it turns out I didn't coin it. There's a book that was written a few years ago by Ed and Lisa Young with "Sexperiment" being the main word in the title. I've obviously not read the book, so I am not equipped to comment on it. My sexperiment is my previous blog, "My Night In a Cage with a Hot Woman", in which I sought to see if a suggestive title and a bit of teasing, along with accompanying keywords, would boost readership by a significant amount. As of right now- a little more than a day after publishing it, the answer is a guarded "maybe".

The numbers have not been huge, but there's been a bit more geographic diversity than I've seen of late- France, Poland, Canada and a country in Africa (the country in Africa has experienced some unrest over the past few years, so I won't be giving it a shout out). Before I forget Jennifer corrected me on a particular datum from that post- our anniversary is in a few days, not a few weeks. It's not that I don't know the date; I'm not the stereotypical husband when it come to that, at least. Then again, in the U.S. date convention, October 10, 1987, is rendered 10/9/87, so there is absolutely NO reason for me to forget it. Of course 10/9/14 falls on a Thursday this year (it was a Friday when were wed), so chances are good we won't be doing anything special on our "special" date, as Thursday night is our busiest night of the week, and I work nights, so we'll try to do something special on Saturday or, more likely Sunday.

I should also mention a couple of rules I try to follow in blogging. I try to avoid writing anything that may be morally questionable. This is generally not difficult to do, as  I generally filter my writing and have no natural inclination to expound on salacious themes. Whenever I write on a topic that causes the hair on my neck to rise, I ask Jennifer to proof it before publishing. I'm certainly not a prude, but I write under the understanding that- I.R.S. assertions about emails aside- nearly everything that happens on the interwebz is stored somewhere. And I do not want my writing to come back and bite me. I also do not want to embarrass her. I'm also fairly certain that I've never used anyone's name without their permission. Jennifer, Anna and Ryan, for example, have all given me verbal permission to use their names. And apart from Ryan, I never use last names. Ryan D. Reynolds is a special case- he's an aspiring comedian, so this is publicity for him. Mr. T is also an exception of sorts: he's our youngest son. When he was first mentioned in a blog, he was under eighteen (the age of majority in the U.S., a.k.a. "adulthood"), so I felt a certain amount of anonymity was required. He is now eighteen, but his persona of "Mr. T" has been established in this blog, so he remains to be known as Mr. T.  

I've also always had a very compact, terse writing style, so I try to keep my blogs relatively short and readable, although as I look at this particular blog, there are atypically large chunks of words. My writing style has pushed me to the brink in the past.

I've never been a model student, but have always had an interest in history. In high school, even though I was in the top third of my class, I had to beg, plead and petition to get into the senior Advanced Placement European History class (and for the record, I also applied for the A.P. English class, but my high school cancelled the class because they had decided that the incoming seniors' writing skills were deficient). Near the end of the school year, I took the AP History test, and decided to take the English test- even though I had absolutely no idea of what to expect. The AP classes not only taught the subject, but prepared the students for the test. At the time, the tests were graded on a scale of one through five, with a three generally guaranteeing college credit. I scored a four on the history test. On the other hand, I "only" scored a two on the English test. I should mention that I got this score with zero prep or mentoring, and I was the ONLY senior in a class of approximately 330 that even took the test.

Flash forward to freshman year of college.  My then-girlfriend Dolores (sorry, Dolores, I couldn't find you on Facebook) and I were sitting in the Student Government office one day, and she casually asked if I had a term paper that was due soon. I looked at my planner- she was correct.

I had a paper due the next day.

The thing that I often forget to mention in this story (which has been told a number of times) is that the instructor was quite the feminist, so much so that she was know to grade males harsher than females, The college had been, until quite recently, an all-women's institution.

When the assignment was first given, I immediately had an idea for the topic. Each member of the class was  to pick a Renaissance leader and show or prove how they fit the criteria as defined in class. The problem was this: the leader I had picked was Napoleon Buonaparte (as I write this, I have a red squiggly line under the word Buonaparte; however, this is not a misspelling- when he first joined the French army he was a Corsican and only in his mid-twenties changed his name to the more French-sounding Bonaparte). Discounting the popular feeling that he was not particularly "enlightened" and that he came to power at the dawn of Romanticism I felt I could successfully argue my case.

I had my work cut out for me. And the paper was due tomorrow.

Now, in my defense, when the paper was first announced,  I hauled myself over to Rebecca Crown Library, and as was (and still is) my standard practice for doing research, I pillaged the shelves for anything related to the subject. Because of my daily ritual of visiting The Sutlers' Wagon, I had a good background in the Napoleonic period. However, because of my as yet undiagnosed ADHD, those books ended up sitting in a rather tall stack in the Student Government office. What happened next was the stuff  of which legends and epic songs would be written.

As this was in the days of prehistory (that is, before computers), my paper needed to be typed out. I had an outline in my mind, and wrote as I found information to support my ideas. When I finished a page of handwriting on a looseleaf  page, Dolores would type it. We labored for several hours, and in the end I had eight and a half pages of double-spaced text- Sister Kaye Ashe's minimum was ten pages.

To summarize: I wrote a paper the day before it was due, a page and a half short of the minimum, well outside the specified period, and handed in a rough draft which was submitted to an instructor who was known to be a rough grader.

The paper got an "A". Like I said, I'm a terse writer.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

A cautionary tale of fixed values used in calculating extrapolated fields

Since writing A Tale of Two Databases, I've dusted off my Excel worksheet that I use to keep tabs on blog readership. Yes, deep, deep, way deep down inside of me- somewhere- there's a tiny bit of statistician. And this statistician, who lives somewhere on the Continuum-, er, that is, the Spectrum- likes to keep track of statistics about the blog.

A bit of background is in order at this juncture. I've long been a fan of collecting facts and figures- at least since high school. The year I was a freshman in high school, a new store opened that was on my way to school. The shop was named "The Sutler's Wagon", and Jeff Urquhart (the store has long since closed) was the proprietor. It was a hobby shop. Even back then, I LOVED hobby shops.

Prior to The Sutler's wagon opening, there were three shops I frequented whenever I could get my Dad to take me to them. One was Pilot. I don't remember the whole name of the business, but Pilot was more of a hardware store with a pretty bustling O scale and S scale tinplate selection and HO scale model railroading. Pilot was actually pretty close to Jeff's shop, and was derisively referred to as "the Pirate". Stanton in Chicago was a fairly large store, stocking everything from N to G scale railroading, as well as rockets, RC, plastic models, flying balsa planes... pretty much anything one could ask for in hobbies. The last store was Hill's in Park Ridge, which seemed to have a product range similar to Stanton but smaller selection.

The Sutler's Wagon was different. No trains. A couple of rockets. Some model cars. Everything else was military. Books. Models. Boardgames. Paint. Brushes. Miniatures. Miniatures in 15mm, 25mm, 54mm, 1/35th, 1/72nd, 1/144th, 1/700th, 1/1200th  and 1/2400th scale. The 15's, 25's, 1/144th, and 1/2400th were generally diecast metal; the others were generally plastic. He had rules for the games- these miniatures were not just for looking pretty- they were meant for action!

And this has what to do with anything?

I've mentioned this game before. In a very real way, Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame taught me long division. While playing the game is fun. I think I had almost as much fun making the ship (data) cards. In the game, each ship has a point value. The point value is based on a number of data which need to be factored into an equation. That's the easy part. From the total point value, one must then create a damage table which shows how a ship's performance is degraded as she takes damage. So, say a ship has a point value of 10,000  and a max speed of 20 knots. The ship takes 1000 points of damage. 10,000/20= 500, so for every 500 points of damage, the ship would lose 1 knot of maximum speed.  It's not perfect, and is designed to work best with WWI and WWII vessels, but it does work rather well. There are other factors that can make the game quite involved, but overall it is great fun.

From this point, I started looking at music. On the same block as The Sutler's Wagon was a music store called RPM records. Along with Rolling Stone Records in Chicago, I would scour their bargain "cutout" bins. I discovered a lot of great music in these bargain bins, and by the time I got to college, I had a few hundred albums.  My earliest music databases were handwritten on loose leaf paper- I counted an album as being played when I had listened to at least one side.- this worked for both LPs and cassettes. I did have some 8-tracks, but I did not track these.

Flash forward many years. On a normal day I'm on a PC or two at work, and three PCs (simultaneously) at home. In all honesty, a lot of what I do currently is online gaming, but I also write this blog, do a bit of research, maintain a few spreadsheets, and work on my database, Sometimes, I even take a bit of time off to play a game or two on Steam (user= drehenthalerhof).

Here's a lesson for all of you budding data analysts, data scientists, statisticians and anyone else who uses spreadsheets and databases: if the datum doesn't look right, don't assume it is. Check it- even if you are the one that entered it!

So there I was Saturday night, updating the Excel blog readership spreadsheet. This is not a particularly complicated spreadsheet- fifty rows and thirteen columns. As I've repeatedly mentioned, Google's free analytics aren't too deep- they're pretty much stats, and they only show the Top 10. And- because they're real time, if I miss a day or two, I can potentially miss some data. So I've had extrapolate to get a more accurate picture. At some point, though, I accidentally overwrote a formula- and my beautiful table of extrapolated data suddenly was being calculated by a constant instead of a variable! I figured out the error quickly enough, but one can't count on an easy fix every time. When I suspect a problem, or when I need to do a QC on an Excel worksheet, CTRL+~ is my goto.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.