2011

Hits: 137,640

Biggest Month: December with 50,568

Biggest Day: January 8 with 20,225

Top 5 Posts:
1. Sarah Palin’s Target List and the Assassination of Gabrielle Giffords – 35,052
2. Why does anyone like Ron Paul? – 33,900
3. Why “In God We Trust” is a Problem – 6,956
4. My Vagina is Destroying America or Love from Ron Paulians – 5,150
5. Columbia Coalition of Reason Hate Mail: Part I – 2,648

Books Read: 100 (posts coming!)

Top 11 Referrers
Facebook 24,960
Reddit 11,985
freethoughtblogs.com 9,758
fark.com 2,625
godlesspaladin.com 2,243
associatedcontent.com 1,350
Twitter 1,261
lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com 1,079
voxday.blogspot.com 1,048
patheos.com 795
npr.org 449

I am most excited about Associated Content and NPR… there was also a Slovenian site I got a lot of referrals from, which is cool.

Some Selected Search Terms
gay hippo 27
big nose women 15
beauty dicks 8
ashley miller porn 8
13 year old tits 5
fat girl with red hair 5
ashley adams tron ass 4
how does the character of ronnie experience prejudice even he is white?why is he discriminted against 2
fat but pretty girls 2
girls are retarded 2
very fat girls with red hair 2

Where I sent people
addictinginfo.org/2011/09/07/10-quotes-that-make-ron-paul-sound-racist 2,444
ashleyfmiller.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sarahpac_0.jpg 2,114
gravatar.com/0d262906b009644fcd4e3e268c6bf5cd 501
ashleyfmiller.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/p7w.png 484
newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/why-ron-pauls-racist-newsletters-matter 480
youtube.com/watch?v=nHoaZaLbqB4 375
ashleyfmiller.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sp.png 362
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_politicians 342
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect 258
ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/statement-of-faith 231
wrongpaul.tumblr.com/post/14067691055/why-i-hate-ron-paul-supporters-they-lie-deny-and 195
ashleyfmiller.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/ch090204.gif 178
prisonplanet.com/articles/january2008/011308_not_racist.htm 146

2011
{advertisement}

World Cup: Fun with Excel

First, here’s the link to the spreadsheet on Google Docs should you want to play.

Basically what I did is make a spreadsheet predicting the winners based solely on their FIFA rank.  It should be immediately noted that, in the past, FIFA rank has meant nothing.  The World Cup is high stakes game playing, and injuries, travel, exhaustion, and carding are all important.  So, the FIFA rank will probably end up being nearly useless at predicting games.  But it’s there and I have access to it.

If you’re unfamiliar with the way the World Cup works, I’ll explain.  It starts out with 8 groups (A-H) of 4 teams (32 teams total, 48 group matches).  Every team in each group plays each other (6 games), and whoever has the most wins in that group moves forward as 1A, whoever has the second most wins moves forward as 2A, the other two teams go home.  There are various tie-breaking things that inevitably matter as soccer is a very low-score sport, but the important thing is that every team has 3 games to prove themselves before getting kicked out.

Once a team has gotten through the group stage, it enters the knockout round, which means every game is win or go home.

Here are the games by group:

It’s fairly self-explanatory, but if you look at the last one: it’s game 48, held on 6/25, Group H, Switzerland has a FIFA ranking of 24, Honduras 38, so Switzerland to win by a 14 rank superiority.

Another interesting way of looking at the data is to group it by how closely matched two teams will be:

So, my guess would be that anything within 6 is going to be a close game, anything within 10 could easily go to the underdog, beyond 15 would probably require extremely extenuating circumstances to turn the game, and finally that N. Korea, S. Africa and New Zealand are probably completely screwed.

So, within each group there are some games that could turn out to be vitally important for the underdog to win to move forward, and where two teams are ranked closely enough that this is possible.

Mexico and Uruguay are extremely closely matched, with France significantly (but not unreachably) higher ranked, it’s likely going to be a fight to move on as 2A.  Likely, Uruguay will be coming off an easy win, and Mexico will be coming off a hard fought loss.

Australia could beat Serbia and move forward as 2D.

The only game in this group that looks even remotely close is Slovakia v Paraguay.  And fortunately for the drama, they’ll be fighting to stay in the competition.  Of course, getting to the knockout stage is probably all they’ll manage, but there’s no small pride in that.

It’s not super close, but the Americas often don’t do as well overseas, Switzerland could be the one to go forward.

So, using this same method, the rest of the Cup looks like this:

If it fell out like this, I tell you the last 9 games would be un-bloody-believable to watch.

World Cup: Fun with Excel

World Cupdate

So, I’m not a sports person generally, and I’m not even a football/soccer fan regularly, but I really love the World Cup.  I mean, I like soccer, I’ll watch it, but something about the countries competing against each other is really cool, and it’s all in the same sport and not as lame as the Olympics.  It’s probably because I actually played soccer, and was still playing soccer when this happened:

So it’s the one sport that the ladies in the US are better at than the men.  We’ve won the Women’s World Cup twice, and never placed below third.  The boys haven’t done so well.  Right now we’re ranked 14th, which is to say we’ll probably get through the first round (weak bracket) but we’re probably not going to do well.

Anyway, the point of this post is that the schedule is up at ESPN and they’re going to air every game live.  Most of the games will also be on their website, which I have to figure out how to get to actually play on my computer.  It’s vaguely complicated.  They are, of course, not showing the finale online.

Schedule: http://www.worldcupblog.org/world-cup-2010/espns-world-cup-2010-tv-schedule.html

My favorite news: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/world_cup_2010/default.stm

Numbers for the Nate Silver in us all: http://www.worldcuppredictions.org/

I really like that last site.  It’s got the odds listed as follows:

Spain (4.75)
Brazil (6.00)
England (7.00)
Argentina (8.00)
Germany (13.00)
Italy (13.00)
Netherlands (13.00)
France (17.00)
Ivory Coast (26.00)
Portugal (29.00)
USA (51.00)

And if you’re worried, don’t be, Nate Silver will have us covered too.

World Cupdate