is he blogging about his blog .. again?

today i wrote the easy part of the introduction (to my thesis). that's the "this paper is organised as follows" part.

i still felt somewhat proud of myself, though.
as for things NOT to be proud of ..

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i think my curiosity has gotten the better of me. in one of my recent blog posts -- specifically, this one -- i admitted to conducting surveillance about you readers. i even made a little map ..

(courtesy of google: here)

.. of places in the world where, for some reason, someone has visited this blog (as of 20 march '08). i became excited whenever i accounted a new place and diligently added it to the map, but then it occurred to me ..

i don't know anyone from there.
how did they find this blog, then?

so i looked deeper into the statistics and realised something. i think most of you have come here by accident. having procrastinated a little, i think i have reverse-engineered the right Google searches will will lead you here, unawares!

1. "maτh j0bs rum0r wiki" and "mathjobs rumors" - the one time i make an idle opinion, it lands me to hits #3 and #2 on google. judging from the keywords, most of you have come around by such a search!
   
   i can't be the only blogger with an opinion on the subject, but happily my opinion is a non-controversial (hence pointless) one and it probably won't get me in any trouble.
   
   
2. ""castles made of $and" analysis" [1] - my love of jimi hendrix has led me astray, i fear. i borrowed the song title for a really old post of mine. somewhere, out there, a jimi hendrix fan is probably seething, because s/he wanted to read about jimi's motivation for writing this song, and instead s/he encounters .. a math blog?!?
   
   
3. ""rie$z repre$entation the0rem" blog" - back in 2006, i posted some thoughts about how measures come out of nowhere when one thinks about the space of continuous functions on the unit interval [0,1] as a normed linear space (with respect to the max-norm).
   
   i am glad, however, that it takes the second page of hits before you find anything related to this blog. if you're going to discuss riesz representation, then you should at least get some actual mathematics first!
   
   
4. "blog "weak $tar"" - this is a rather recent post, actually. i had a question about LaTeX and how to represent weak-* convergence with an arrow.
   
   what makes me laugh about this search is that of all the hits to precede mine, one is a blog about Star Wars toys and on the search it describes this:
   
   "But yes, I agree that the Phantom Menance was a weak Star Wars movie."
   
   nice one! q: another concerns baseball cards, but not being terribly interested in that sort of thing, i'll let you judge the site for yourself.
   
   
5. "CAT, Topono90v" - i could swear that i've never discussed CAT(k) spaces in this blog, because i'm not that sort of geometer (see the wiki), but hit #3 is still this blog, for some reason.
   
   as it turns out, my recollection was wrong: i forgot that in that post i plagiarised m. kapovich.

other searches include "mental inertia" and "mathematics holidays," but that is enough shameless self-promotion for me. let me apologize for those of you who i lured here by false pretenses, and i hope you have not wasted too much of your time here.

in order to confirm my guesses about this, i added a little poll (see sidebar) for additional data. i ask you: fill it out only once!

[1] yes, the quotation marks are included in the Google search. it causes the search to hunt for that explicit string of letters, including the spaces.