The ontology of a number or What does it mean to get 1000 hits?

Last week, Google logged 100,000 hits to my blog; time to reflect. The blog exists since summer 2006, and I have managed to burden the world with 315 posts, no more than 10% of them are any good. So it is a minor miracle that the blog has attracted so many hits. One must keep in mind, a lot of my readers were robots – in the last year or so up to 20%. One of the most voracious fans I have called http://vampirestats.com. There used to be fewer robots among us? But hey welcome to the human family, since you came.

Google, the obsessive and meticulous bean counter keeps track of the most popular posts:

The non-linear text	905
Learning with TFA	877
Приключения компетентностного подхода в России	795
Leaving	331
Если вы такие умные, то почему не богатые?	271
Что общего между организацией и кофеваркой?	247
The Value-Added Scandal	233
О доверии	211
The unchecked truth	210
Join the teaching profession, become a selfish bas...	207

I understand about the #2 – The TFA main site picked it up, and they have a large audience. Why did the very top one about the non-linear text picked so many views, I have no idea, none at all. It was not that profound, more of a reflection on the web site we built for NCATE.

It is very hard for me to fathom who in France or Latvia looked at my blogs, which have always been intended mainly for internal audience – for people with whom I worked. Here is the number of hits by country.

United States	79489
Russia	6823
United Kingdom	867
Malaysia	844
Canada	798
Philippines	676
Germany	574
France	372
Ukraine	354
Latvia	331

All numbers are weird. Anything represented as a set of numbers gains in some respect, but also loses in other respects. That’s the game – by assigning something a quantitative characteristic, you make the devil’s pact and strip away all features not measured. Numbers always tell us more and yet infinitely less than stories, pictures, smells, and tactile sensations. Numbers are profoundly autistic, alienating, and just plain strange. If we don’t see this, it is because we have grown up with them, and worked with them for so long. They start seeming more homely and more familiar. But just take a hard look at any number, attached to something you actually experience in your life – the average number of children among your siblings, the rate of divorce in your extended family, and number of teeth your babies had on average by 18 months – you will just see how the quantitative way of understanding the world is distinct, frightening, and yet also weirdly comforting. Numbers are like the blanket a child uses to fend off monsters and wild animals – works well with the former, does not do much to the latter.

As I was working with masters students today and yesterday on their data collection plans, I wish I knew how to explain that with data, the reality is twisted and distorted – and at the same time achieves an awesome clarity and purity, inaccessible to us in any other way. I wonder how this double nature of numbers can be felt and experienced. Numbers are perhaps the strangest human invention, so abstract, it sings like the music of the spheres; it blinds like the sun in the windshield.