Hans Rosling gave a very educational TED talk that uses UN statistics about world health, money and birth rates to destroy the myths about the so-called third world. In the first few minutes, he demonstrates that the developing world has more of the traits that one assigns to the “western” world than previously believed. He then continues to attack other myths through the use of statistics, humor and some really neat graphs.
Tag Archives: statistics
Blink, Blink…”Whoops”
Take a look at the following stats and let me know if you see anything odd.
| Summary by Month | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month | Monthly Totals | KBytes | Visits | Pages | Files | Hits | ||||
| Feb 2008 | 3769739 | 8427 | 24576 | 121569 | 132159 | |||||
| Jan 2008 | 3634098 | 36357 | 131454 | 429936 | 478043 | |||||
Didn’t notice anything odd? Take a look at the first 4 days of the month below (focus on the bold column.)
| Daily Statistics for February 2008 | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day | Hits | Files | Pages | Visits | KBytes | |||||||
| 1 | 12484 | 11167 | 3915 | 1194 | 100.954 | |||||||
| 2 | 14990 | 13412 | 5617 | 1273 | 136.491 | |||||||
| 3 | 41622 | 37873 | 7236 | 2417 | 1.288.875 | |||||||
| 4 | 62827 | 58979 | 7763 | 3544 | 2.242.575 | |||||||
If you noticed, Yah, seriously, but if you didn’t: in two days I used as much bandwidth as the previous months. It turns out that on the SoBe Lizard post I added 5 PNG screenshots to the post. Then I went back to the Super Bowl party. Well, Google found it very quickly, a lot of people searched for it, and the post ranked very high, so that one post got the Google version of the slash-dot effect.
Turns out that each one of those 5 images were about 200KB. It wouldn’t have been a big deal on a normal post, but it meant that each visitor downloaded about a Megabyte of images every page load. (In comparison, the CSS, JavaScript and the HTML files adds up to about 31KB.)
Like I said: blink, blink…woops.
Update: I contacted my host, and asked to buy more bandwidth, and they were kind enough to grant me an extra 3 GB of bandwidth for free. I love this company: I’ve never had an issue with them (unlike most of my previous hosts.)