Years ago, when recruiting for a tech support position, I had an agency send a bunch of 'pre-screened and qualified' candidates through. Most were fine, and we could start straight away with conversations about debugging AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS (this probably dates the time period!) One candidate, however, looked like a deer-in-headlights, and was clearly out of his depth. In the end, I asked "There is a computer in this room, can you point to it?", and he sheepishly pointed to the fridge!
I felt really bad for the poor guy; it was not his fault. We finished the interview early, had a friendly chat, and I sent him on his way with some bus fares.
I then got on the phone and tore the agency a new one. They had wasted his time, and my time, by 'doctoring' the qualifications. I never used them again.
Author of article here. Thanks for kinds comments.
Yes, it's possible to stabilize bottle rockets with fins (to adjust the CP), but as the article hints, the stick is multipurpose in helping with launch, as well as stability (plus being easy to manufacture with low precision).
Aeronautics is a complex science and my articles are intended to pique interest, not oversimplify or belittle. It's a hard balance to explain things in a few hundred words. I hope you enjoy them and, if there is interest, they become the catalyst for you to learn more. It's a fascininating subject.
1. Process: I keep a task list (using google tools) with a list of topic ideas. When I think of something I want to write about, or find interesting links, I place them there. There's typically about two dozen ideas at any time incubating.
2. Start: I started the blog about a dozen years ago as a way to add depth to my website that was the front-end for my consulting business. I stopped consulting shortly after starting, and am now retired, but I keep the blog up on that site; I've built a following. It was easy to start. Ideas are easy; the hard part is finding the free time to write!
3. Motivation. I love doing it. I get pleasure from writing. When I was a kid, I loved reading the works of Martin Gardner. I hope my blog could be seen some way as an homage to his works.
4. No real struggles, but I made a conscious choice to not enable comments on my site. Comments will get you down. Everyone is a critic. Jerks will say "that's not special, I could have don that" (hmmm, but you didn't). My email address is not hard to find on the site if you want to get in contact with me. Don't fret too much about publishing; do what is right for you. There is a whole spectrum of 'advice' from people saying regular rapid cadence (even if you have nothing to say), through to only publish gems. I typically average about one post a week. Some of my posts are lightweight, others are heavyweights.
There's currently about 360 articles about math, science, programming, data-mining, geekery ... in style similar to a hero of mine, the late Martin Gardner.
I make about $50-$70/month from Adsense on my blog. I use a single Auto ad unit in the middle of each article. It would be nice if it were more. They payout every couple of months when the balance gets over $100. When they payout I get a 'report' that tells me they reduced my payout because of 'invalid traffic' (with no details about what/how/when). This deduction varies from about 5-20% of the payout.
It depends on how you intend to 'score' the estimate.
Are you looking for the answer that is the 'most likely', or one that has the 'lowest least squared error', or maybe one that is 'unbiased' (mean error)?
Matt, I'm very sorry. It was a genuine mistake. I always try hard to attribute sources (as you can see from the references in the doc, and on the couple of hundred other articles on my blog). It was nothing personal, it was an oversight :)
I've corrected this now on the site. Sorry again. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.
I’m happy to share my data too. I’ve been blogging for half a dozen years at http://datagenetics.com/blog.html and have slowly built my traffic up to about 300k PV a month.
A couple of years ago, I installed a single Google Adense skyscraper advert on each page. As others have mentioned, it doesn’t pay much more than a couple of beers a week. On a good month I’ll generate about $100/month from these adverts (which is, at least, enough to cover hosting costs).
I’ve had an RSS feed forever, I’m not sure it does a lot. I’ve recently put up a link allowing people to sign up for a newsletter. This mailing list has grown to about 750 recipients. Open rates on mailings are 30%-40% and click-through rate has a higher variance and ranges from 8%-20% (If you are going to experiment with email, I highly recommend a product called Sendy, it works great). Of course, I have a Facebook page to promote each article, and I also tweet a link to each article (where I have just a couple of thousand followers). The biggest generator of traffic is being featured on places like here on Hacker News, Reddit, or being featured on one of the large portals/news sites; these bring supernovae spikes in traffic for the time the links are in the sun. I also get a non-trivial amount of traffic from localized versions of my pages; People seem to like to translate my articles into foreign languages and usually put link-back credits, which is how I find out (I guess there could be people who do it without giving credit, and for those, I’m just ignorant about!)
I’ve embedded the occasional link to Amazon to allow users to purchase, if I mentioned a book I like. Amazon’s affiliate program gives me a small percentage cut of anything a user buys within a short time after following the link of my page. It works, and I get some revenue, but in total, it’s not yet broken $100 total lifetime earnings.
As regards content, I try to publish a new article every week.
Bottom line - until I can get, at least, two orders of magnitude increase in traffic (or CPM), it will remain a hobby
I felt really bad for the poor guy; it was not his fault. We finished the interview early, had a friendly chat, and I sent him on his way with some bus fares.
I then got on the phone and tore the agency a new one. They had wasted his time, and my time, by 'doctoring' the qualifications. I never used them again.