A little while ago, John Lynch asked what really draws readers to ScienceBlogs, and listed his top twenty posts. In a similar vein, here are the top twelve Uncertain Principles posts of the past year, ranked by number of pageviews:
- SAT Challenge: Bloggers Dumber Than High-School Kids
- Local Realism, Loopholes, and The God Delusion
- SAT Challenge: They Sound Like… Bloggers
- Bugs Aren’t Features
- How to Score Well Without Really Writing
- SAT Challenge: My Entry
- All That I Want
- How to Tell a True Lab Story
- Top Eleven: Time to Vote
- How to Do a Good PowerPoint Lecture
- Dawkins and Theology
- Deep Thoughts from Pop Culture
If anything, the conclusion is even more starkly obvious than it was for John’s list…
A full third of that list are posts associated with the SAT Challenge (“How to Score Well Without Really Writing” was the original post about the essay test that kicked it off). Two more are about Richard Dawkins, and a third is a Chuck Klosterman quote that pissed off the hard-core athiests. “Bugs Aren’t Features” is me insulting the entire software industry. There’s also advice on the correct use of PowerPoint, the post announcing my tenure decision.
Out of that list, there are a total of three posts about science or life in science, and the only one with signficant scientific content gets there because it wraps a swipe at Richard Dawkins around a discussion of quantum optics. The other two are the voting thread for the Top Eleven, and “How to Tell a True Lab Story,” which is a colorful Tim O’Brien pastiche about big explosions.
The post about physics funding that got picked for the Best Science Blogging anthology is another three spots down (at least– I wasn’t too careful about the count at that level). It’s just behind a post consisting of a graph of my weight for the first six months of last year. The one post about religion that I’m actually really proud of (“Atheist Church Socials“) managed less than a third of the pageviews of the Chuck Klosterman thing.
I’ve always known that the physics content doesn’t really draw that much traffic, but seeing it laid out like this is… well, kind of depressing, really. Fortunately, I enjoy writing those posts a lot more than I enjoy taking cheap shots at atheists (which is occasionally viscerally satisfying, but doesn’t really produce any worthwhile conversation), or else I’d be tempted to hang it up completely…