If you’ve been watching my blog, you’ve noticed that my posting frequency has dropped off tremendously in the past week. That’s mostly because I’ve been scrambling to finish a presentation on my research. It’s now over, so in theory I have more time to make blog posts, but still I think it’s past time to call National Blog Writing Month officially over.

Let’s look back over the past 5 weeks and see how it went. Not counting this one, I managed to get in 25 blog posts, most of which were decidedly nontrivial. For fun, I decided to estimate a word count for each of these posts — now, I can’t get an exact count easily because of the formatting, including math and especially pictures, but I can just run p.text_src.split() and it spits out some rough numbers. I want to get a sense of how this compares to the task of actually writing a 50000 word novel:

• Nov 1: “National” Blog Writing Month: Take 2, 104 words
• Nov 3: Local measurements: the Rosslyn escalator, 351 words
• Nov 4: Not really a simple regularization analogy, 391 words
• Nov 6: On the magnitudes of vectors, 199 words
• Nov 6: The win-more effect of indirect elections, 1298 words
• Nov 8: The Collapsed Wavefunction, and other links, 191 words
• Nov 9: Math: Painful? Apparently so, for real, 478 words
• Nov 12: I have a problem. Pun intended., 371 words
• Nov 13: A reminder to always check your definitions, 106 words
• Nov 14: B meson decay and the calculation of cross sections, 1277 words
• Nov 15: Writing notes in the cloud, 316 words
• Nov 15: Extra! Extra! Higgs results from HCP 2012, 2184 words
• Nov 16: Why, oh Y(4140) are you so tantalizing?, 982 words
• Nov 18: Quick start with TORQUE on Gentoo, 196 words
• Nov 20: A simple regularization example, 854 words
• Nov 21: Our scientific community is in TROUBLE, 235 words
• Nov 22: B meson oscillations and the CPT theorem, 3277 words (really, though, this should count as two)
• Nov 22: The gift of versatility, 361 words
• Nov 24: Sudakov parameters, 182 words
• Nov 25: The Gini coefficient for distribution inequality, 662 words
• Nov 27: More on scale invariant functions, 887 words
• Nov 28: New type of matter?, 253 words
• Nov 29: Checking in on NaBloWriMo, 157 words
• Dec 3: Color Glass Condensate, 1946 words
• Dec 5: Absolute positioning in TikZ and Beamer, 260 words

Total:17518 words. Not exactly a novel. That’s okay though, how many NaNoWriMo novels are going to include equations and pretty pictures? Like this histogram of the word counts above (100-count bins up to 3500):

Hmm… what if I try this with all my posts, since the beginning of this blog?

Looks exponential, maybe? I think one of this month’s projects is going to be to figure out what distribution that is. :-)