My husband and I have some extraordinarily (and I mean EXTRA-ordinarily) generous friends and were recently gifted Jawbone UP bands. It’s basically a bracelet you wear that tracks your activity and sleep patterns… and it’s awesome. (Well, mine has been awesome. The hubs seems to keep breaking his over and over and over again. Perhaps he’s too active or something. I haven’t had that problem.)  Anyway, when you first get it you have to sign up for an account and when you’re all done signing up, this is what shows up on your screen:

Boom. Sexy data. I LOVE THAT! What a clever thing to say!!  (And seriously, I’m so excited that I get to show off that screen shot right now!!)

And the best way to think about data??? GRAPH it! Everybody loves a good graph! (Don’t pretend like you don’t. Graphs are the bomb-diggity and you know it.)

My UP band graphs all sorts of things for me and it’s super fun to see patterns in my sleep and number of steps and such. (Apparently, I’m a bum on Fridays, but I go way over my daily goal when I mow the lawn. Good to know.)

So, when I started blogging my cousin Steven (well, he’s my mom’s cousin, my second cousin, but he’s an excellent blogger regardless) recommended the WordPress plug-in Jetpack to help me do lots of blog-like things, including… TRACK DATA! Yay!! More data!!

So, I’ve been watching visitors and views and clicks and searches and such over time, and I noticed an interesting pattern over the past two weeks:

(Yes, I removed the axis labels. Number of views is on the y-axis, date is on the x. The numbers themselves are irrelevant, but the pattern is interesting, isn’t it?)

Clearly, views are cyclic and they seem to decrease considerably on the weekend. I totally get that, I rarely check in on the virtual world from Friday night through Monday morning because I’m too busy interacting with the actual world (read: vacuuming my house, getting my laundry done, and sleeeeeeeping and sleeping and sleeping…) so based on these* data, I thought I might do well to change up my blog format just a touch. I’m thinking that I will focus on posting my primary material Monday through Thursday and then I’ll check in over the weekend with photos, short notes, and funny things.

BUT, I’ll save the real thought-provoking (and hilarious) stuff for during the week. Deal? Deal.

*You know you’re a scientist when… “these data” — not a typo 🙂

PS: I could have sworn there was a PhD comic at some point about how to get out of trouble with your advisor by making a graph.  Did I imagine that?  I couldn’t find it, even with the Google…  anyone else know what I’m talking about?