Saturday 24 May 2008

Results from the first experiment

Some 12 days ago I talked about what experiments are. Obvously I was not speaking about the sort of experiments that are done in a laboratory, but about the experimenting mind. My goal is having a more experimental behaviour, to be keen to learn things by myself, and not just from books. I want to listen directly to nature, and not just to the people who read about somebody who heard about the interesting findings of somebody else who was listening to nature.

Strictly speaking, an experiment needs more things than what I said: we need a depedent variable (which we have to measure), an independent variable (which must be the only thing that changes in the experiment); the experiment has to be reproducible, and so on...

But speaking about science is not science (is philosophy), and what I like is science, so I will not care too much about the details. I want to learn the details doing the experiments.

So, in my last post, which was also the first one, I made the following statement:

This post will get no more than three different reader's comments within the next seven days


I left more than seven days and... I was completely right! Not even one post. Obviously I didn't tell anybody anything about this blog. I didn't even leave links to this blog in any other website (until one hour ago or so). Otherwise, the experiment wouldn't have been valid.

I put a counter you can see on the right hand side where the visits to this blog are shown. During the twelve days, the only visits from anywhere outside Dublin seemed to be from somewhere in Switzerland (hi there!). But he/she didn't leave any comments.

So now I can say I know something, I am not just believing in something that might be wrong: there are so many blogs around, that most of them are read only by their creators. There are some exceptions with popular blogs, but if they are popular it is because people already know them. But if you don't say anything to anybody, nobody will read the stuff (at least the first twelve days!). I am OK with that, because I am writing to myself (as most of the bloggers, probably), but it is very interesting to confirm this idea.

So, now lets do more interesting experiments...

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