OK, I’m obsessed….. nerd, moi?

OK, I admit it, I’m obsessed. Ever since I started this site I’ve had a graph (pictured at the end of this). It plots how many new recipients of the weekly email there are. I update this diligently every day with the midnight figure….. OK, that’s a lie…. I update it about every thirty minutes to see the change. Worse still over the last few years, I’ve added lots of little extra lines to the graph. These are:

1. The Daily New Recipients
2. Total Recipients
3. Recipients during the last year
4. Average daily recipients during the last year
5. Rolling 7 day average new recipients
6. Rolling 49 day average new recipients
7. Rolling 100 day average new recipients
8. Daily percentage increase in recipients
9. Average daily percentage increase in recipients over the previous 50 days
10. Annualised version of the days’s percentage increase in recipients
11. Annualised average daily percentage increase in recipient over past 100 days
12. Percentage of recipients who have joined in the last year
13. Plot of the average number of people still needed per day to hit 700,000 by 31 December (though I can alter the target number and frequently do – actually 800,000 would be closer)
14. The average daily new recipients this calendar year.

I have to say there’s a surreal beauty in the way the lines harmonise. The daily chart vibrating with high frequency, resonating through to the rolling, averaged rates, it’s a cacophony of colours and statistics which I deeply enjoy. You must understand, while I’m incredibly proud of how the site grows, it genuinely is the movement and changes in the graph that I find particularly thrilling.

There are so many different interactions. Until a few weeks ago the shortest rolling average was 10 days. Then I noted that this caused an anomaly, as less people join the list at weekends; and thus on weekend days the average would plummet rapidly. Hence now there’s a 7 and 49 day rolling average – which adds a certain purity to the harmonics.

Ah the joy. Then again reading back on this I’m perhaps beginning to understand why the MSG looked at me strangely last night when returning in the car from Manchester – I was explaining our different average speeds each hour and how the sat nav’s predicted arrival time was impacted by this….

Nerd, moi?

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The graph itself (actually its one of three graphs mapping the same data, as different scales are needed)