Hello hello...coming out to play?

Hello again. I've just had nearly two months off from blogging (Lord, I've missed you lot!). It wasn't really planned but we had a couple of weeks away camping in September which broke my blogging routine (and separated me from all my books!).  I have also been spending a lot of time on a PC at work for a big environmental website project that I'll be telling you all about in a few weeks and I couldn't really face spending the evening on the PC at home as well. So, it's been quite nice really but I've missed it and ... I see there's a few new folk following so a hearty welcome and I hope you enjoy the new stuff. Please feel free to comment. I've also been getting in to Twitter over the last couple of months (@scot_nature_boy. If you're on Twitter, come and play!) so hopefully that might attract a few more views and comments from the Twitterati now that I can promote posts over there too.

Anyway, lots of posts bubbling up, and my fingers are twitching at the prospect of writing and so time to press on. There's only really one classy way to return after a long break, and that's the in the manner of Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson from the movie 'The Color of Money'...

Myriad celebrations! 10,000 hits and rising...

Sometime around 1pm British Summer Time today, the Flag Counter on this blog registered the 10,000th viewing of the blog. I was working in the garden and missed the actual moment but managed to take a screenshot shortly afterwards:

Thank you to whoever that mystery reader was, but thanks also to everyone who has taken the time to read, comment or follow my blog since I started in early 2010. It is very gratifying for me when people read and enjoy what I write. Apologies if it has been a bit quiet through April as I have been very busy at home and at work.

So, 10,000! A big number. I'd never looked up a number on Wikipedia before, but I did for 10,000... and what a wealth of wonderful trivia there is there for the number 10,000. The word "myriad" in the title of this post comes from the Greek numerical prefix "myria", meaning ten thousand.

A myriagon is a polygon with 10,000 sides. I imagine that, to the naked eye, a myriagon the size of a tennis ball would be virtually indistinguishable from a perfect sphere as each of the 10,000 sides must be tiny. In fact, I did a quick calculation and I think that each face would on average be about 4x4 mm in size [Addendum: actually, I recalculated that and the dimples would be even smaller, at about 1.1 - 1.2 mm across], although what the actual shape would be I have no idea), so it would probably look like a sphere with tiny (itny!) dimples. That might be the first and last time you ever read a blog post about a myriagon.

Other good things about 10,000? In anatomy, each neuron in the human brain is estimated to connect to 10,000 others.

The ancient Greek general Xenophon led an army of 10,000 mercenaries against the Persians in 401 B.C., immortalised in his book Anabasis ("The Expedition" or "The March Up Country"), his account of the whole expedition against the Persians and his journey home.

In language,  the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese phrase "live for ten thousand years" was used to bless emperors in East Asia.

(I like this one) In literature, Man'yōshū (万葉集 Man'yōshū, Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) is the oldest existing, and most highly revered, collection of Japanese poetry.


In athletics, 10,000 metres, 10 kilometres, 10 km, or 10K (6.2 miles) is the final standard track event in a long-distance track event. My own personal best time for a 10 km race road race is 35 minutes and 8 seconds, a time I will almost certainly never run again!
 
And finally, to round off a celebration of 10,000, here's a video from 10,000 Maniacs, for whose singer Natalie Merchant, I used to have a bit of a soft spot in my youth. As I haven't listened to them for years, I wanted to post this and convince myself that it has aged well:
 

 
Here's looking forward to 20,000 hits!