Stats 'N' Stuff

Remember this post from a few days back?

It was a somewhat disjointed post.  I informed you all that I was officially six months clean.  There was a photo of the week, and in the end I ran out of steam and just asked a bunch of (fairly) random questions.

We got quite a few responses to the questions, and I wanted to take the time to show you the results.  Keep in mind that many people only answered certain questions.  It was a very small sample of answers.  Not only are the answers not indicative of the population as a whole, but they may not even be truly indicative of the readers of this blog in general.  Even still, I had fun going over the numbers.  Here are some of the results.

To Blog or Not to Blog


Of the people responding to that post, only 4% were shown to be non-blog writers.  22% of respondents made no indication in the body of their comment whether or not they were blog writers.  Here the data had to be skewed slightly, because I knew that some from this group were blog writers.  If someone didn't respond to the "do you write a blog" question, but I was familiar with their blog beforehand, I put them into the "writes a blog" category.  The respondents indicating that they blog numbered 74%.  I believe the "writes a blog" figure would have been higher had everyone given an explicit yes or no answer to this question.

Where Are You From


Readers of In Review who responded on the day of the posting in question proved to be from a wide range of places.  Here they are:

California - 4 readers
Florida - 2 readers
Australia - 2 readers
Trinidad and Tobago - 1 reader
Kansas - 1 reader
The UK - 3 readers
North Carolina - 1 reader
Atlanta - 1 reader
Ohio - 1 reader
Canada - 2 readers
New York - 1 reader
Texas - 2 readers
Pennsylvania - 1 reader
St. Louis - 1 reader
Utah - 1 reader
New Jersey - 1 reader

Again, not all respondents answered this question.  But just glancing at the list of folks who did respond gives us a pretty good idea of the kind of scope a blog can attain in just a few short months of operation. Pretty cool.

How Do You Find Blogs To Read?


I will just give you a quick list of the most popular ways readers responding that day use to find blogs to read.  The most common ones were:

-Word of Mouth
-Blog Rolls (link lists from other blogs)
-Comments On Other Blogs
-Red Means Go! (Annah, you are a connector)
-Blog Of Note (the blogger system's daily blog recognition feature)

There were some other ones but these seemed most signifcant.

How Old Are You?


This data really made me smile.  Quick stats of note regarding respondents to this question are as follows:

Youngest Reader - 17 years old (WOOT!)
Oldest Reader - 63 years old (I am humbled by this)
Average Age of Reader - 30.04 years old

Yay Or Nay On Capital Punishment?


I threw some of these questions in essentially as a farce, but this outcome really surprised me.  First, I should be clear that some of the "yays" and some of the "nays" were teetering on being "undecided" but I tried to ascertain the feeling behind the response and compile a list that was as close to accurate as possible.  I am displaying this stat visually below.

The cartoonishly dead convict indicates the 66% of respondents who voiced support for the death penalty, while the less dead convict (scaled to the correct proportion) indicates the 44% of respondents against the death penalty.  These data took me by surprise.  I would have guessed surely that it would be reversed.  I wonder how this would turn out in a larger sampling of the readers here, but these numbers point to the fact that In Review readers like their child molesters and multi-murderers deader than shit.  What do you guys make of these stats?

Were You Aware That Anthropomorphic CO2 Emissions Account For A Mere 2% Of Global Yearly CO2 Emissions?

Here, the cow represents the 58% of respondents who said that they were not aware of the statistic.  The man in the suit indicates the 42% who were previously aware.  There were a lot of "not answered" points on this question, which leads me to believe that people are either A) not interested, B) skeptical of the stat I gave or C) increasingly aware of stats like this, but not willing to stop watching "An Inconvenient Truth" every Friday night while they burn patchouli and weave renewable grocery bags out of hemp just yet.

With the IPCC recently convening and talking about the need for more "transparency," of which there has been very little (their way of admitting that numbers have been buried or skewed), and with more and more people willing to look at the bigger picture, perhaps soon we will be able to get that cow figure to shrink a bit.  Environmental concerns that don't involve ridiculous cap and trade schemes or complicated hustles to redistribute wealth to bureaucracies that would mis-spend it before they even knew they had it are still very important today.  Perhaps we ought to go back to thinking about getting potable water to the world and eradicating malaria, and worry less about our 2% of carbon emissions.  (Please, God, don't let Al Gore read this.)

Should I Change The Format Of In Review To The "Dear Abby" Format?

38% of respondents indicated that I should try out (occasionally) a "Dear Abby" style thing.  I should be clear though and explain that every one of those 38% had some kind of qualifier regarding how the "Dear Abby" thing would work.  Everyone had great ideas, and no one advocated a straight up format.  Rather I was offered myriad ideas about how to change the "Dear Abby" style into something funnier.  62% responded with a resounding "NO", and the numbers are reflected above.  The figure of Abby on the right is what I figured many of that 62% thought of "Dear Abby" in the first place.

And finally...

Heinz 57 or A1 Steak Sauce?

I quite like this graphic.  I used syrup to represent the people that indicated firmly that they preferred neither A1 nor Heinz 57.  The idea of syrup on steak makes me chuckle.

I don't put anything on my steak aside from raw horseradish and sometimes a dash of salt.

Medium rare for me.

And so I will retire this little post here, asking you guys what you thought of all of this, and if you think I should do some more polling?  I will need to do it in a more clear and concise way next time, because getting the data points out of all of the comments last time was arduous and time consuming.  But I think it would be fun to learn more about the minds behind the readers here.

If you write a blog, would you be interested at all in running a survey concurrently with mine, so that we might get a larger perspective?  

Look forward this week to a couple of guest posts here, by people who are not currently bloggers.  One post is a hilarious writing about an anthropomorphic sperm and his quest to learn from other sperm and, in the end, beat other sperm in order to swim his way up into an egg.  It was written by a high school student who I later befriended.  The other posting will be in the vein of the works of Terence Mckenna and Timothy Leary, psychonaut extraordinaires.  Written by an individual I have known since third grade.  

One more tiny thing:

Fists Who Now?!

Love