Myths about the developing world.

aaron — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:38:38 +0000

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.

Blink, Blink…”Whoops”

aaron — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:44:58 +0000

Take a look at the following stats and let me know if you see anything odd.

Summary by Month
Month	Monthly Totals
Month	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.)

Anthology of Ideas » statistics

Myths about the developing world.

Blink, Blink…”Whoops”