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There was an error on the website which lost any votes made in the past 48 hours. I’m working to restore these, but it’s possible that they might be lost forever. It’s not as easy as just restoring from backup: it was the sort of error where data wasn’t properly saved in the first place!

I’m pretty sure it’s working again now though. Unfortunately, sorting this out means that I won't have time to upload some new graphs to celebrate that it’s 20/10/2010 today, at least for those of us who use DD/MM/YYYY-formatted dates!

(Personally, I prefer ISO 8601 dates.)

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On an unrelated note, I should probably set up a better News page someday!

(sorry if this shows up twice in RSS readers: I pressed the wrong button when I first tried to write this article!)

Two things prompted this update:

1. Continued stagnation of the website. This has become somewhat embarrassing, to be honest. My excuse is that I’ve been quite busy lately, and haven’t had much time to make new graphs.
2. It’s the 10^th of October 2010! In other words, it’s 10/10/10.

Spurred on by these realisations, I decided (perhaps foolishly) to upload ten new graphs. Yes, ten. It took a while. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait a while: the graphs are listed and linked below!

• The number of text messages sent worldwide per month
• Number of Tweets per day
• Number of companies acquired by Google per year
• The ever-declining revenue of AOL
• Unemployment rates in France
• Unemployment rates in Germany
• The claim rate of US-Government-provided unemployment insurance
• The ever-increasing cost of college tuition in the US, relative to 1978
• The CPI (Consumer Price Index) in the US, relative to 1978
• US house prices over time

Note: You can also go to the list of all graphs sorted by age. These ten new graphs will, conveniently enough, fill the entire first page of this list!

It seems that I’ve let this website stagnate for a couple of months. Sorry about that! I had been planning on making its return to activity slightly more impressive than this, but I realised that this would lead to the following endless spiral of procrastination:

1. Oh no, I haven’t done anything for a while. I should plan on doing something big when I return to make up for it.
2. Hmm, this big thing is taking a while. I’m too lazy to finish it all at once.
3. Argh, now it’s even later. Now I definitely need to do something cool.
4. GOTO step2;

So, nothing too impressive yet, except for five new graphs I've uploaded. Be on the lookout for bigger changes in the future though! (one of which, I think, should be to enable comments on News items )

Something interesting has happened, which may amuse those of you who are comfortable with simple algebra.

Earlier I uploaded three new graphs, bringing the total number of graphs on the site to 37. I then felt like finding out how many possible combinations of two graphs there now are.

You may be aware that the number of unique combinations of two items chosen from a set of n items is given by ½n(n - 1). So, the number of possible pairs of graphs that exist now is given by:

(possible pairings) = ½ × 37 × 36 = 666

There now exist six hundred and sixty-six possible pairs of graphs.

Coincidence? I THINK NOT.

As you've probably gathered, we've just moved to a new server! Now I don't need to worry that getting too much traffic could knock out the website. Also, it means the “testserver” bit of the URI isn't needed: we're now “coincidenceithinknot.com” rather than “testserver.coincidenceithinknot.com” or “ouch.my.hands.this.is.a.long.uri.can.i.stop.typing.soon.coincidenceithinknot.com”. Thumbs up for that!

Thumbs down for the lack of new graphs recently. I'll try to throw together a couple of graphs today and have those up for your amusement later.

(As always, dear reader, you are also welcome to make and submit graphs via the form at the bottom of the voting page.)