Ben Best's Blog

More on the 2011 decline at benbest.com

2012-01-18T23:28:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday, January 18, 2012 Wikipedia was blacked-out for 24 hours in protesting SOPA and PIPA, which caused me to wonder if my website statistics would jump for the day. In checking my Urchin statistics on Thursday I saw there was some increase over what would be expected for a Wednesday, but it was not great. More relevant, I think, is the fact that my FireFox brower (or Urchin) would not let me enter benbest.com until a security exception was registered in which I acknowledged that there are risks to visiting the site. If this kind of barrier is now in place for my website on many browsers, that could explain a precipitous decline. On the other hand, the restriction may only apply to the Urchin browser access to my website statistics.

2011 Statistics for BENBEST.COM

2011-12-31T19:49:00.000-08:00

My website has become decreasingly popular, which has decreased my interest from what it was when I could see it growing. 2011 saw a significant decline in sessions on my website compared to previous years, with Urchin reporting:

2007: 1,548,099

2008: 1,505,117

2009: 1,483,335

2010: 1,744,189

2011: 1,074,481

Pageviews were closer to 1,500,000 in 2011, because many people look a more than one page during a single session. Website sessions were about equal in each of October, November, and December of 2011 at about a hundred thousand per month, according to Urchin. Google Analytics reported that I got closer to 800,000 unique visitors in 2011. Unique visitors would be a smaller number than sessions, insofar as some visitors may return to my website on different sessions. According to Google Analytics, about 13% of the visitors to my website have visited the website before, and about 75% of the visits come from searches, and about 15% come from referrals.

According to Alexa.com at the end of December 2011, my website had a global 3-month average ranking of about 520,000, as opposed to a world ranking of 300,000 in 2010. My USA 3-month average ranking did not decline as much, 152,000 at the end of December 2011 compared to 130,000 at the end of December 2010.

Normally hits on my website increase from January to April, but in 2011 they declined. I believe that my website is losing out to Wikipedia. In particular the most popular page on my website has been Causes of Death. In previous years Googling "Causes of Death" brought my website on top, but that ceased to be the case early in 2011. Currently, my website is fourth, following the CDC and Wikipedia websites.

I don't have much more that I am inclined to blog about concerning my website, this year. But that certainly doesn't mean I have lost interest in my website, quite the contrary. In 2011 I have added many more pages to my website than I have added in a long time, especially in the Philosophy and Health sections.

2010 Statistics for BENBEST.COM

2010-12-31T06:34:00.000-08:00

Last year I believed that traffic on my website had peaked in 2007. But 2010 exceeded the previous few years in number of unique sessions, according to Urchin:

2007: 1,548,099

2008: 1,505,117

2009: 1,483,335

2010: 1,744,189

The pattern of website hits climbing gradually from August to December was not repeated in 2010, as distinct from the previous few years. In 2010 peak activity was in October:

______2009_______2010

Sept__122,079____145,345

Oct___145,846____159,538

Nov___148,209____153,481

Dec___155,701____143,629

In December 2010 my website had a 3-month average world ranking of about 300,000, compared to about 230,000 in December 2009, and about 170,000 in December 2008. In December 2010 my USA 3-month average ranking was about 130,000 compared to about 90,000 in December 2009. But on October 17, 2010 my USA ranking was about 73,000.

My The History of Christmas page was responsible for increasing my late Fall hits considerably in the past, but was less influential in 2010. Googling "history of Christmas", "the history of Christmas", and "Christmas history" still shows my webpage on the first page of Google, but the ranking is not as high. In 2009 my The History of Christmas page peaked at 1,312 hits on December 15, but in 2010 it peaked at 1,110 hits on December 24. Possibly there was enough of an increase in home computers in 2010 to make home sources exceed school sources for the first time.

Around March 2010 I began tracking pages on my website with Google Analytics as well as with Urchin. A visual inspection of visits to my website on Google Analytics in the Fall of 2010 indicates a series of "hills", where each "hill" corresponds to hits over 4,000 daily on weekends and under 4,000 on weekends (especially Saturdays, less drop on Fridays and Sundays). The general trend is upward to mid-October and fairly level (though slightly downward) to mid-December. The peak in October was Monday, October 18 with 5,225 hits (not an extreme variance from the following days). The second half of December was mostly below 3,000 hits per day, with the exception of Monday, December 27, which had 7,934 hits. For December 27, 5,865 of those hits were to the single webpage Is Longevity Entirely Hereditary? , which according to Urchin were nearly all from the bing.com search engine. There was no special spike from google.com searches on that day. Usually, a "one-day wonder" for one of my webpages is the result of some blog or newspaper article mentioning the page, so it is mysterious to me that a "one-day wonder" for a webpage would come from a particular search engine.

Google Analytics recorded about a million visitors to my website in the last ten months of 2010 from 222 countries. The only countries obviously missing were North Korea, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, French Guiana, and some African countries. On a percentage basis, my source of visits was:

United States 60.8%

Canada 7.8%

United Kingdom 7.1%

Australia 4.2%

India 3.9%

Philippines 2.3%

Germany 1.3%

Malaysia 1.1%

Singapore 0.8%

New Zealand 0.7%

According to Google Analytics, the average time spent on one of the pages of my website was 41 seconds. But 13,785 pages were listed. I only have about 190 pages on my website, so the count must be including every graphic, of which there are many (but not that many). Time spent on the more popular pages, however, is more in the range of 3 to 6 minutes. Below are the percent popularities and time spent on my most popular pages according to Google Analytics. I have converted number of unique pageviews into percentages based on an estimation of one million visitors in the last ten months of 2010. This means 197,724 unique page views become 20% of total visits. (You have
to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger)

**Webpage Percent and Time Spent**
Webpage	Percent	Min:Sec
Causes of Death	20%	4:51
Brain Neurotransmitters	13%	4:59
Death by Murder	13%	5:01
The History of Christmas	3%	4:56
The Uses of Financial Statements	3%	5:26
Brain Areas Supporting Cerebral Cortex Function	3%	2:39
Figuring the Odds (Probability Puzzles)	2%	8:52
Mechanisms of Aging	2%	4:20
Basic Cerebral Cortex Function Other than Vision	2%	1:52
The Amygdala and the Emotions	2%	3:51
Melatonin	2%	4:35
Is Caffeine a Health Hazard?	2%	3:59
Fats You Need — Essential Fatty Acids	2%	3:54
Does Excess Protein Cause Kidney Damage?	2%	5:00
Alcohol — Health Benefit or Hazard?	2%	4:22
N-AcetylCysteine (NAC)	2%	3:56
Phytochemicals as Nutraceuticals	1%	2:43
Lessons for Cryonics from Metallurgy and Ceramics	1%	3:01
Perfusion & Diffusion in Cryonics Protocol	1%	1:49

2009 Statistics for BENBEST.COM

2009-12-31T20:32:00.000-08:00

Traffic on my website peaked in 2007 with 1,548,099 unique sessions, declining slightly in 2008 to 1,505,117 and then to 1,483,335 in 2009. I attribute this to competition from Wikipedia. My use of unsophisticated HTML and the "old fashioned" appearance of my website may also be a factor. I am mainly interested in content rather than form, and I have not bothered to learn how to produce better-looking form.

According to ALEXA.COM on December 31, 2008 the 3-month average world-wide ranking for BENBEST.COM was 170,071, but only got to as high as 237,651 in December 2009. Three month ranking in the United States peaked at 90,096 on Christmas Eve. At the end of December, BENBEST.COM was receiving 1.3 ten-thousandths of one percent of website hits in the world.

Alexa.com is now giving demographic information on the sources of sessions. The overwhelming largest source of sessions to BENBEST.COM is school browsers. That makes sense of the fact that that largest education category of my users is "some college" and the second largest age category is 18-24. But it does not explain why the largest represented age group is 45-54 and why female visitors are over-represented, whereas male visitors are under-represented. Although I can understand how Alexa can distinguish school browsers from home and work browsers, I am skeptical that it can determine gender or age group with accuracy.

As usual, October (145,846), November (148,709), and December 155,688) — in that order — were the months with the highest session counts in 2009. As usual, there were about twice as many sessions in the first half of December as in the second half. Most of the year, Causes of Death is the most popular page on my website. The History of Christmas averages 30-40 hits per day during most of the year, but on December 14 this year it peaked at 1,312 hits. Every year, Death by Murder becomes the most popular page on my website between Christmas and New Year's, peaking just before New Year's and never the most popular during the rest of the year.

Here are my comparisons of the PageViews I got in December 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 for some of my favorite pages:

**December PageViews**
Webpage	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
The History of Christmas	44,446	39,842	27,477	15,642	23,500
Mechanisms of Aging	4,105	6,392	7,873	3,603	7,103
Alcohol — Health Benefit or Hazard?	2,943	2,829	2,408	2,002	2,084
Cryonics — Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)	973	1,311	1,105	1,520	1,217
Vitrification in Cryonics	772	1,110	959	1,133	1,154
Say's Law and Economic Growth	568	619	651	806	812
An Austrian Theory of Business Cycles	471	634	651	1,245	656
Schemers in the Web	416	767	462	506	416

The decline of many of my long established pages is offset
by the rise of other pages. In December 2009

Causes of Death got 19,675 hits,

Death by Murder got 16,387 hits,

Brain Neurotransmitters got 12,093 hits, and

Perfusion & Diffusion in Cryonics Protocol got 5,054 hits

**December PageViews by Search Phrase**
phrase	2006	2007	2008	2009
history of christmas	7,954	2,442	1,805	3,175
melatonin	80	1,532	136	117
neurotransmitters	823	468	1,319	804
christmas history	747	494	548	1,056
causes of death	565	805	956	370
cryonics	119	153	131	85
vitrification	70	46	80	71
deprenyl	73	87	46	29
diogenes	275	136	131	88
essential fatty acids	90	77	107	177
say's law	86	65	126	155
n-acetylcysteine	81	293	507	180

2008 Statistics for BENBEST.COM

2008-12-31T18:11:00.000-08:00

Traffic on my website seems to be declining
slightly. In 2008 there were 1,505,117 unique
sessions as opposed to 1,548,099 unique sessions
in 2007, 1,491,845 in 2006, and 1,252,175 in 2005.
Pageviews were 2,127,350 in 2008 as opposed to
2,137,172 pageviews in 2007, 2,197,133
in 2006 and 1,668,890 in 2005. In seeming
contraction to these stats, according
to the traffic rankings at

ALEXA.COM on December 31, 2008 the
3-month average world-wide ranking for

BENBEST.COM
was 170,071, which was more than three times as high as

Alcor Life Extension Foundation (565,401) and more
than six times as high as the

Cryonics Institute (1,116,857). My highest country ranking by Alexis.com
was in Sri Lanka, for some reason: 12,592 followed by the
Philippines: 42,097. My rankings in the United States,
Canada, China and the United Kingdom were 80,264, 101,348,
121,743 and 180,585 respectively. Overall, 45.8% of my
traffic came from the United States and 9.8% came from China

Below are some tables that summarize comparative
statistics for my website in the last few of years.
All of the data may be understated because I have heard
that some ISPs like AOL do caching of websites, so I would
not record many AOL hits (actually I never see AOL as a
source in my statistics).

Here are my comparisons of the PageViews I got in December
2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 for some of my favorite pages (you have
to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger):

**December PageViews**
Webpage	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008
The History of Christmas	20,179	44,446	39,842	27,477	15,642
Mechanisms of Aging	1,850	4,105	6,392	7,873	3,603
Alcohol -- Health Benefit or Hazard?	1,142	2,943	2,829	2,408	2,002
Cryonics -- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)	670	973	1,311	1,105	1,520
Vitrification in Cryonics	511	772	1,110	959	1,133
Say's Law and Economic Growth	482	568	619	651	806
An Austrian Theory of Business Cycles	329	471	634	651	1,245
Schemers in the Web	243	416	767	462	506

The decline of many of my long established pages is offset
by the rise of other pages.
Causes of Death at 13,346 in 2008 has been a very popular staple on
my website for a long time.

Brain Neurotransmitters at 10,527,

Diffusion and Perfusion in Cryonics Protocol at 4,092 and

Cancer Death at 3,714 were very popular in 2008.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the most popular page on my website year-round is generallyCauses of Death. The second most popular page on my website is usually
Death by Murder (although Brain Neurotransmitters sometimes is second). But I have noticed that during the period between Christmas and early January, Death by Murder will be the most popular page. My speculation about why this happens is that people browsing the web during that period are mostly looking for entertainment, whereas during the rest of the year there are more people doing research.

The search phrases now distinguish between "history of christmas" (1,805) and
"the history of christmas" (1,709) which may have affected the "history of
christmas" statistic. A couple of other popular terms/phrases in 2008
were "glutamate" (1,162) and "amygdala function" (374).

Monthly Sessions
(thousands)
month	2005	2006	2007	2008
January	88	125	130	124
February	98	125	129	135
March	116	148	139	140
April	114	136	147	148
May	114	126	133	137
June	69	98	114	119
July	66	92	106	100
August	75	92	101	88
September	97	114	117	119
October	128	145	143	137
November	140	148	149	134
December	147	143	139	124

**December PageViews by Search Phrase**
phrase	2005	2006	2007	2008
history of christmas	6,164	7,954	2,442	1,805
melatonin	69	80	1,532	136
neurotransmitters	1,024	823	468	1,319
christmas history	1,134	747	494	548
causes of death	222	565	805	956
cryonics	92	119	153	131
obsessive love	75	15	100	16
vitrification	62	70	46	80
deprenyl	68	73	87	46
lipoic acid	96	300	115	102
diogenes	621	275	136	131
dha	42	186	247	213
essential fatty acids	124	90	77	107
say's law	115	86	65	126
n-acetylcysteine	201	81	293	507

2007 Statistics for BENBEST.COM

2007-12-31T22:40:00.000-08:00

There may have been some growth in visitors to my website in 2007:
1,548,099 unique sessions in 2007 as opposed to 1,491,845
unique sessions in 2006 and 1,252,175 in 2005. Pageviews
were 2,137,172 in 2007 as opposed to 2,197,133 pageviews
in 2006 and 1,668,890 in 2005. According
to the traffic rankings at

ALEXA.COM on December 31, 2007 the
3-month average world-wide ranking for

BENBEST.COM
was 240,723, which was more than twice as high as

Alcor Life Extension Foundation (498,520) and about
four times as high as the

Cryonics Institute (962,108). That is far below

Wikipedia (rank 8 on the same date), but still pretty
impressive. I actually think that Wikipedia is responsible
for much of the erosion of my popularity growth. To a lesser
extent, the lack of professional looking quality (due to my
handwritten HTML) is another factor cutting into my popularity.
My ranking on the "History of Christmas" search in Google
has dropped from near the top of the first
page to near the bottom of the first page. Nonetheless,
I got a plug on December 21 from WhatReallyHappened.com
that gave my Christmas page 2,398 hits, probably the
most hits any page on my website has ever experienced
in a single day. My highest country ranking by Alexis.com
was in Jamaica, for some reason: 13,911 followed by the
Philippines: 31,344. My rankngs in the United States and
Canada and Germany were 112,124 and 180,113 and 480,891,
respectively.

Below are some tables that summarize comparative
statistics for my website in the last couple of years.
I have just discontinued my use of Superstats in favor
of Urchin as a source of data because Superstats is so
expensive and does not really give me much additional
information other than comparison of past months and
years -- and I have reason to believe the data is suspect.
All of the data may be understated because I have heard
that some ISPs like AOL do caching of websites, so I would
not record many AOL hits (actually I never see AOL as a
source in my statistics).

Here are my comparisons of the PageViews I got in December
2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 for some of my favorite pages (you have
to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger):

**December PageViews**
Webpage	2004	2005	2006	2007
The History of Christmas	20,179	44,446	39,842	27,477
Mechanisms of Aging	1,850	4,105	6,392	7,873
Alcohol -- Health Benefit or Hazard?	1,142	2,943	2,829	2,408
Cryonics -- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)	670	973	1,311	1,105
Vitrification in Cryonics	511	772	1,110	959
Say's Law and Economic Growth	482	568	619	651
An Austrian Theory of Business Cycles	329	471	634	651
Schemers in the Web	243	416	767	462

Monthly Sessions
(thousands)
month	2005	2006	2007
January	88	125	130
February	98	125	129
March	116	148	139
April	114	136	147
May	114	126	133
June	69	98	114
July	66	92	106
August	75	92	101
September	97	114	117
October	128	145	143
November	140	148	149
December	147	143	139

**December PageViews by Search Phrase**
phrase	2005	2006	2007
history of christmas	6,164	7,954	2,442
melatonin	69	80	1,532
neurotransmitters	1,024	823	468
christmas history	1,134	747	494
causes of death	222	565	805
cryonics	92	119	153
obsessive love	75	15	100
vitrification	62	70	46
lying	14	0	58
deprenyl	68	73	87
lipoic acid	96	300	115
ubiquinol	11	290	45
diogenes	621	275	136
dha	42	186	247
history christmas	124	180	68
monetary system	20	79	28
best homepage	82	95	105
essential fatty acids	124	90	77
say's law	115	86	65
n-acetylcysteine	201	81	293
fixed income securities	125	50	33
ischemia reperfusion	14	20	29

2006 Statistics for BENBEST.COM

2007-01-01T01:40:00.000-08:00

I have become increasingly disinterested in the statistics on
my website, possibly because growth does not seem as great as
it once was. Nonetheless, there does seem to be growth and my
interest in my website statistics is still great enough to
be called an obsession.

There was growth in popularity of my website in 2006: 1,491,845
unique sessions in 2006 as opposed to 1,252,175 in 2005. Pageviews
were 2,197,133 in 2006 as opposed to 1,668,890 in 2005. According
to the traffic rankings at

ALEXA.COM on December 31, 2006 the
3-month average ranking for

BENBEST.COM
was 205,547, which was more than twice as high as

Alcor Life Extension Foundation (453,805) and more than
four times as high as the

Cryonics Institute (969,367). That is far below

Wikipedia (rank 13 on the same date), but still pretty
impressive. Even more amazing, my one-week average rank on
December 31, 2006 was 139,480. I think it would be cool to be in
the top 100,000, but I am expecting my ranking to drop in
January. The last week of the year is one of the slowest for
internet use (comparable to July and August) and I think that
I am still benefiting from the extreme popularity of my

The History of Christmas page, which swamps all of my
other pages in popularity during December (and to a lesser
extent in November), but not during the rest of the year.

Here are my comparisons of the PageViews I got in December
2004, 2005 and 2006 for some of my favorite pages (you have
to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger):

**December PageViews**
Webpage	2004	2005	2006
The History of Christmas	20,179	44,446	39,842
Mechanisms of Aging	1,850	4,105	6,392
Alcohol -- Health Benefit or Hazard?	1,142	2,943	2,829
Cryonics -- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)	670	973	1,311
Vitrification in Cryonics	511	772	1,110
Say's Law and Economic Growth	482	568	619
An Austrian Theory of Business Cycles	329	471	634
Schemers in the Web	243	416	767

Monthly Sessions
(thousands)
month	2005	2006
January	88	125
February	98	125
March	116	148
April	114	136
May	114	126
June	69	98
July	66	92
August	75	92
September	97	114
October	128	145
November	140	148
December	147	143

**December PageViews by Search Phrase**
phrase	2005	2006
history of christmas	6,164	7,954
neurotransmitters	1,024	823
christmas history	1,134	747
causes of death	222	565
lipoic acid	96	300
ubiquinol	11	290
diogenes	621	275
dha	42	186
history christmas	124	180
cryonics	92	119
arachidonic acid	87	106
best homepage	82	95
murder rates	71	91
essential fatty acids	124	90
say's law	115	86
n-acetylcysteine	201	81
fixed income securities	125	50
ischemia	115	41

Website Traffic Update, late Spring 2006

2006-05-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

My predictions about Spring traffic for my website in my posting on the first week of January 2006 were excessive. This year Spring growth of my website traffic was less dramatic than it has been in former years. Traffic was somewhat level from late March to the first week of May, just below 35,000 per week. Typically, site traffic declines after May and is fairly tepid until September -- clearly a refection of the impact of the Northern Hemisphere school year.

During this Spring I have added more "interactive" content to my website, notably the Playground of Computer Programs and Life Extension Values Clarification Survey and Results. I highly recommend the latter.

More about the Wikipedia Life Extension entry

2006-01-11T10:32:00.000-08:00

Despite my former claim of withdrawal, I made substantial revisions in an attempt to create a clear expression of fact on the Life Extension page (particularly on the subject of cryonics) that would be less open to challenge. Others have participated in revisions to some extent. I now feel more at peace with the current version of the
Wikipedia Life extension page. I can live with some fighting and compromise, but I do have my limits. At the moment, at least, there is some compromise and no fighting, and I feel that the page is conveying a fairly accurate overview of life extension. And I am hopeful that I can help maintain this situation.

BENBEST.COM statistics for first week of January 2006

2006-01-07T21:57:00.000-08:00

Typically the last week of December and the first week of January represent deep dips for the number of sessions visiting my website -- comparable to the lows of the summers. After peaking at around 13,000 PageViews per week in January, PageViews
for my www.benbest.com/history/xmas.html page dropped in the first week of January to 1,768. Even without the otherwise slowness of this period that would represent a significant drop. Of course most schools are not in session during the last week of December and the first week of January in Christian-associated countries. Nonetheless, the "bottom line" figure for the first week of January was 24,169 sessions. That compares very favorably with the peaks of last Spring, which were around 27,000. Typically the weekly number of sessions climbs from the first week of January to a week sometime between late March and early May. So my prediction is that mid-Spring highs in 2006 will approach 50,000 per week.

I have done some more careful analysis of the meaning of session time. I have come to the conclusion that of the 24,169 sessions in the first week of January, approximately 20,000 of those sessions were for less than 10 seconds. About 500 would be for 3−10 minutes, another 500 would be for 10−30 minutes and about 150 would be for more than 30 minutes. Speaking personally, I would rather print a page than look at it on-line for more than 30 minutes. So I would guess that number of people actually looking at my website pages long enough to get meaningful information is in the area of 2,000 to 5,000 per week.

In the past I have paid much attention to the search terms leading to my website (because at least 75% of the PageViews come from search engines), but I am finding this matter less interesting now than previously. I used to be impressed that the search phase "neuron physiology" would return one of my web pages as the top site on all of the search engines. But the fact that I only get 5 PageViews per week for that search phrase indicates that it is not invoked very often. The search terms "neurotransmitters", "ischemia" and "vitrification" return 200, 48 and 13 PageViews per week (respectively) and I am on the first page of searches on those terms with Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines (but not top). I used to be top on all of the search engines for "vitrification", but now have been displaced by Wikipedia -- a bitter irony insofar as I wrote much of the text for the Wikipedia vitrification page.

2005 Statistics for BENBEST.COM

2006-01-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

(I have tried to format these tables nicely, but this Blogger is VERY unfriendly
to HTML, so it looks a mess. And a vast amount of space appears between the tables.)

I get statistics on my website
(www.benbest.com) from two independent sources: Superstats
and Urchin. I get slightly different kinds of information from both sources
(and there are sources of error on both sources), but where there is
agreement I believe that the data is reliable.

There were over a million unique sessions on my website in 2005 and
each session visited an average of one-and-a-half pages -- for a total
of about a million-and-a-half PageViews for 2005. I believe that the
average time spent on a page is between 3−4 minutes, but I also
believe that a very high proportion of PageViews is less than 30 seconds.
Just because a page is loaded does not mean it is being read. It may
stay loaded over lunch or dinner.

A table below shows how many thousands of sessions there were
on my website for the months of 2005. Another table below shows how
many PageViews I got as a result of some of the most common search
phrases on all the search engines giving me more than 100 hits
during December of 2005.
About three quarters of the hits I get on my website come from people
doing searches with search engines -- and the overwhelming majority
of these are combinations of words that produce fewer than 100
PageViews per month. All of the data may be understated because I have heard
that some ISPs like AOL do caching of websites, so I would not record
many AOL hits (actually I never see AOL as a source in my statistics).

In December 2005 I had 44,000 hits on my

The History of Christmas page, more than a quarter
of all the PageViews on my entire website. I had approximately 175 pages
on my website in December 2005. The number of PageViews on the
Christmas page peaked at nearly 3,000 on December 20 and fell
precipitously thereafter (especially after December 25th). I typically
get less than 200 PageViews per month on the Christmas page during
the summer. Aside from December, November and January, the Christmas
page is not usually very high on my list of pages. During the
beginning of December 2005 I was getting over 40,000 sessions
per week, with nearly 100 pages on my website getting at least
100 weekly PageViews. (Saturday is always the slowest day, whereas
the busiest could be Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.)

Aside from the Christmas page, my

Death by Murder,

Brain Neurotransmitters
and

Causes of Death webpages get the most hits, but
these are not among my own favorites. I pay most careful attention
to the number of PageViews and the numerical trends in PageViews
of my favorite pages. Pages become my favorites on the basis of
how much work I put into them, on the basis of how pleased I am
with the content and on the basis of how much I would
like them to make an impact on the minds of other people.
Here are my SuperStats comparisons of the
PageViews I got in December 2004 and December 2005 for
some of my favorite pages (you have to look WAY DOWN in this silly Blogger):

**December PageViews**
Webpage	2004	2005
Mechanisms of Aging	1,850	4,105
Alcohol -- Health Benefit or Hazard?	1,142	2,943
Cryonics -- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)	670	973
Vitrification in Cryonics	511	772
Say's Law and Economic Growth	482	568
An Austrian Theory of Business Cycles	329	471
Schemers in the Web	243	416

**Monthly Sessions**
month	thousands
January	88
February	99
March	116
April	114
May	114
June	69
July	66
August	75
September	96
October	128
November	140
December	147

**PageViews by Search Phrase**
phrase	PageViews
history of Christmas	6,164
christmas history	1,134
neurotransmitters	1,024
diogenes	621
causes of death	222
n-acetylcysteine	201
serotonin	179
bavarian illuminati	159
fixed income securities	125
history christmas	124
essential fatty acids	124
eric fromm	120
ischemia	115
say's law	115
murder	103

Wikipedia withdrawal

2005-12-29T08:31:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned before, I wrote Wikipedia entry on LIFE EXTENSION and "took ownership" of it. But I am now more conscious of how much "policing" and "argumentation" this can require. I don't want to be reverting the material of others and I don't want to be arguing with them about it. There are too many ignorant people who are ignorant of their ignorance who make silly & ignorant revisions. I don't want to bear the cost of time, energy or argumentative upset to keep the LIFE EXTENSION page to a high level of quality and a source of pride. I do want people to be well-informed about life extension, but I think it is better to use my energy and time in areas where I have more control over the product, such as my Mechanisms of Aging webpage and the writing I do for the Cryonics Institute.

Therefore, the last version of the Wikipedia entry for LIFE EXTENSION for which I can take pride and of which I regard as an excellent overview of the subject is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Life_extension&oldid=31948154

SAGE KE debate with Aubrey de Grey

2005-12-09T22:55:00.000-08:00

In October I engaged in a month-long debate with Aubrey de Grey on the
SAGE KE Community Bulletin Board (Bulletin Board in the Science of Aging Knowledge Environment at the SCIENCE MAGAZINE website). This news is probably not too helpful for most of the readers of blogs insofar as access to the SAGE KE website is only available to those who have full access to the SCIENCE website and have paid for access to SAGE KE.

Nonetheless, the debate was distinctive in a number of ways. The first of which is that it is the most sustained debate that has ever appeared on the SAGE KE Community Bulletin Board. (This is visually very obvious just by looking at the postings.) The second is that it was a sequence of 11 postings (6 by me, 5 by Aubrey) over a period of about a month, Aubrey and I replying to each other in turn. (No one else got involved in the debate.) Most amazing, however, is that Aubrey seems to have given-up and has allowed me to have the last word (despite the fact that some of my "last words" were questions). I didn't really expect it to go on forever, but I wasn't finished quite yet. But without further comments from Aubrey, I will let the matter drop. I am not particularly counting this as a "victory". It is actually a somewhat frustrating puzzle.

Despite all of the work I do on and for cryonics, my studies of biogerontology during 2005 have been the most extensive of any year I can remember. I have made very many additions to my Mechanisms of Aging webpage -- more than any previous year. The page is now getting over 1,600 hits per week, which gives me more satisfaction than I get from hits for any other page on my website. Calling it a "page" is somewhat of a misnomer because it is actually a book. It could easily be 2 or 3 times as long as it was when it was published in the Anti-Aging Clinical Protocols 2004-2005 of A4M.

************************************************************

So far there have been 2 comments to this posting and at least one is SPAM (one promoting stock, the other promoting their own blog). -- Ben

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I have just noticed how to delete comments. Whether this is a new feature of one I had not noticed before, I am glad that I have the capability to delete the SPAM. The stock promotion SPAM is now gone. -- Ben

Wikipedia contributions

2005-11-27T13:16:00.000-08:00

I have gotten increasingly involved-in -- or drawn-into -- Wikipedia. Hours can go by easily in making Wikipedia entries. I do not feel it is a waste of time, but it does distract me from achieving goals I have set in other areas. To lose consciousness of time is in some sense a loss of control over life. As a workaholic, I am always very focused on achieving, so loss of control over my goal-seeking activities can be a toxic temptation.

Anyway, anyone interested in tracking my Wikipedia work can check-out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Benbest

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Benbest

My most satisfying achievement to date has been my virtual re-write of the "Life extension" entry. This has given me a somewhat territorial or "ownership" feeling about that entry. I keep the page on my Watchlist (along with Cryonics and a number of others) and check my Watchlist almost as frequently as I check my e-mail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_extension

Beg the question

2005-06-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

Although I am not a diarist, a blog might give me an
emotional outlet for some pet peeves.

I find myself experiencing great anger when I hear people
use the phrase "It begs the question..." when they could say
"It raises the question...".

To "beg the question" is the logical fallacy of covertly
assuming the point you are presuming to prove. The argument
from design would be among the worst arguments for the
existence of God on the basis of this fallacy. To say that God
must exist because the world is too complicated not to be
created begs the question. If the world is so awesomely
complicated then the Creator of the world would have to
be even more awesomely complicated. Why does the
person not say: God is too complicated not to have
been created, therefore God must have been created?
There are better arguments for God's existence, although
whether they are valid is another question.

In my essay Why Life Extension I give a common answer to the question "What is the purpose of life?" -- the common answer being "To help others." This purported answer doesn't really answer the original question because it does not explain what is the purpose of the lives of others, ie, it still leaves the question open. A journalist reading my essay interpreted my comment that the question was being begged to mean that the "To help others" answer raises the question of the purpose of the lives of others, as if "beg"="raises".

If I am puzzled about a friend being madly in love with
someone who I do not find to be attractive or even likable,
I might ask "Why do you love him/her?" If I am given the
answer "Because he/she is lovable!" that would be begging the
question. It assumes the answer rather than answering the question.

Possibly a more marginal example is a debate I recently heard concerning the amyloid cascade hypothesis of Alzheimer's Disease. The defender of the hypothesis did little more than repeat the assertion "the amyloid cascade hyptothesis has stood the test of time". This assumes the evidence has been validated, rather than justifies the evidence.

Professional lexicographers have duly noted this new
corroded use of the phase "beg the question":

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-beg1.htm

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19970627

I believe that the abominable use of the phrase came from people who are ignorant of logic hearing the phrase "beg the question" being spoken by literate people and then used the phrase so they could pompously impress others by sounding literate. I resent the abduction and possible loss of a good logical distinction. There was no need to steal this phase when "raises the question" is an unpretentious and easily understood way of communicating the same idea.

Good lexicographers are descriptive and not prescriptive. I am not a good lexicographer -- I cannot control my emotions well. I am morally outraged by corruption of language grounded in pretentiousness. And yet at the same time I am somewhat shocked by the intensity of my own emotion, which is mostly futile. It only gets me upset and my upset accomplishes nothing positive. I know that I should have the wisdom not to waste my energy on things I cannot change. Perhaps now that I have expressed myself I can feel a little better about the matter.

Unfortunately, things have reached the stage that "begs the question" is so much more used "wrongly" than "rightly" that my listening now automatically interprets the "wrong" usage rather than the right one when I hear the phrase.

April 2005 Website report

2005-04-16T06:38:00.000-07:00

My main blogging interest in my website, so I might as well post a
blog about my website developments.

I added a new page "Some Philosphizing about Lying" in February:

http://www.benbest.com/philo/lying.html

It took about a month-and-a-half before I was able to do a Yahoo
search on my own website domain (!!) to find that page when entering
the keyword "lying". Google was able to do that within a few days. In
fact, within a week of adding that page to my site, Google was listing
that page as the top response to the phrase-search "lying to enemies"!
Yesterday, Yahoo was also listing that page as the top response to the
same keyword/phrase search.

For the last month, along with my many other projects, I have created
a whole new area of my website -- the Nutraceuticals Topic area:

http://www.benbest.com/nutrceut/nutrceut.html

I have long been wanting to document the rationale for the supplements
I take -- for my own memory and understanding as much as for any other
reason -- and I am delighted that I have done so. Most of the pages are
completely new, based on up-to-date peer-reviewed journal articles. I have
put these pages at the top, with older pages (existing relevant links from
other topic areas in my website) lower (generally) on the Topic Index page.

It is fascinating watching the visitor patterns to new pages -- I monitor
my page hits with Urchin and independently with Superstats. I monitor
visitors to the whole site with Urchin. I will report on my most recent
monitoring:

For the first half of April 2005 (to midnight, April 15th) my website
had 55,309 visitors. Three quarters of the visitors were on my site
for less than ten seconds. In table form:

Time Number Percent
0-10 sec 42,202 76.3%
11-30 sec 3,809 6.89%
31-60 sec 1,978 3.58%
1-3 min 2,404 4.35%
3-10 min 2,302 4.16%
10-30 min 2,119 3.83%
over 30 min 495 0.86%

About 86% viewed one page, about 9% viewed two pages, about 2% viewed
3 pages and fewer that 3% viewed more than 3 pages.

-- Ben

Some "hands-on" cryonics

2005-02-20T06:01:00.000-08:00

I have been involved in cryonics for over fifteen years, and am the
President of the Cryonics Institute (http://www.cryonics.org/). But
this month was only my second experience with "hands-on" cryonics
-- and it was with a dog rather than with a human. This experience,
however, was start-to-finish -- from pre-arrangements with the
dog owner to euthanasia and cooldown to final placement in liquid
nitrogen. The case is described on the CI website:

http://www.cryonics.org/reports/Dog_Thor.html

my previous case -- with a human in Toronto -- is described
on my own website:

http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/toronto.html

-- Ben

Blogging and me

2005-01-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

I am not much of a diarist -- I find the practice boring. I have tried from time-to-time in my life to keep a diary, but cannot maintain the practice. I know what I did and see no reason to repeat it to myself. On the other hand, I must admit that I find it interesting to read later.

I don't much like it when people ask me "what's new?" or "how are you doing?" because that puts me in the position of being a diarist -- telling people what I already know is not interesting to me. I would rather hear about them. Not because I am not self-centered -- I am intensely self-centered -- but because I already know what has happened to me but do not know what has happened to them. I prefer new information to old news.

I have written more than my share of travelogues and autobiographical snippets. They do preserve memories that would otherwise be forgotten. My website has a "travels and experiences" section: http://www.benbest.com/travel/travel.html
I originally thought that this would attract the most attention to my website, that people would be less interested in my scientific writing, but I have been pleasantly surprised. I find it boring and tedious to recount my experiences, but I find it fascinating to digest, think-about and communicate scientific ideas -- attempting to solve scientific puzzles and formulate scientific concepts.

Similarly, writing history and philosophy have a greater appeal. This year I became positively obsessed with updating my history of Christmas webpage:
http://www.benbest.com/history/xmas.html
This year in late November and early December I was getting five to six thousand hits per week on that page, compared to about a hundred per week in July -- about five times more hits than any other page on my website. I kept trying to stop writing about the subject, but each time I thought I had finished, I would start pondering some subject -- like the effect of the Reformation on the Puritan rejection of Christmas -- and jump back into my researches. It was addictive.

Anyway, the idea of an on-line "diary" does not appeal to me, but I am willing to keep an open mind and experiment with it -- and see where it goes.

There is lots to see on my website

2005-01-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

Go to http://www.benbest.com/