2012 in review for Taking up Spacetime

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 36,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Spreading the brand: “Taking up Space”

Somebody who organizes a conference in London this summer was sufficiently inspired by the name of this blog that they decided to name their conference after it: “Taking up Space” is their not very original homage to this blog. We at Taking up Spacetime wish them a productive conference!

50,000 hits!

On Monday, 16 April 2012, this blog has reached the milestone of 50,000 individual hits! Thanks a lot to all our readers–more posts will come soon.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 27,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

25,000 hits!

The counter for Taking up Spacetime just passed 25,000–that’s more than 1,600 per month since we started in early 2010. Way to go, Taking up Spacetime! Of course, I take this as encouragement to continue our work. I hope to have more time to post more intellectually substantive content in the future. If you have any suggestions as to what you would like to be discussed at Taking up Spacetime–comment below or shoot me an email.

Thank you, reader!

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2010. That’s about 31 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 83 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 84 posts. There were 10 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was September 29th with 631 views. The most popular post that day was Pittsburgh: Assistant Professor.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were alphainventions.com, philosophy.ucsd.edu, soulphysics.org, digg.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for taking up spacetime, logic methodology and philosophy of science, what is structure, itamar pitowsky, and robert batterman.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Pittsburgh: Assistant Professor September 2010

2

Philosophers of Physics February 2010
2 comments

3

CFP: 14th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Nancy, France March 2010

4

Help wanted: wave function realism April 2010
6 comments

5

What is structure? February 2010
4 comments

Over 10,000 hits

Dear reader, there’s some reason to celebrate: a few days ago we passed the mark of 10,000 hits since the beginning of the year when this blog started (the official kickoff was on 16 December 2009, but the first real post was only published on 11 February 2010). This means 34 hits per day on average for Taking up Spacetime–a pretty good start. If there is one thing that I have learned from doing Taking up Spacetime, it’s that the philosophy of physics community is much larger than I thought it was, and that there are many more people interested in it from what I had imagined. Cool!

Of course, I will continue to improve the content by having more posts and more posts on recently debated issues in the philosophy of physics or thoughts I have about things I am working on. If you would like to see something different from what we have so far, or more (or less, for that matter) of something we already do, please let me know!

New Page: Library

I have just added a new page to this blog. It’s a very inchoate attempt to list the major works in philosophy of physics over the last thirty or so years. The reason I did this is because I wanted to see a bit more systematically which publishers published most of these works. Unsurprisingly, CUP and OUP are clearly the most copious publishers, followed by Kluwer and Springer. But since this may be the result of some selection bias, I would like to encourage you to send me proposals for additions to this very incomplete list. Please email them or leave them as comments!

Update (14 September 2010):

Sam Fletcher has pointed out many omissions in the list; thanks to him for taking the time to give me a long list of titles.

Eventually, I would like to make the bibliographic data fully searchable, and not just listed as a dumb list of books ordered by publisher. Perhaps the best things would be to make them available as a .bib file. Any suggestions? Anyone any experience with how this might be implemented directly in the web design?

New authors: Manchak and Smeenk

Until very recently, I have been the only author on this blog. But two others have joined me now: I am very happy to welcome

John Manchak, University of Washington, username “manchak”
Chris Smeenk, University of Western Ontario, username “smeenk”

as occasional authors on Taking up Spacetime. I am very much looking forward to their contributions!

P.S.: From now on, the author of a post will be identified by an additional category shown at the end of the post.

Over 100 visitors today!

According to the automated statistics of the site, Taking up Spacetime has had 146 visitors today, the first day in its history with more than one hundred visitors in one day! This is great news, although still a long shot from the ten million visitors announced by the Leiter Report about ten days ago… Thanks to Bryan Roberts at Soul Physics and Greg Frost-Arnold at Obscure and Confused Ideas for linking to Taking up Spacetime.