New Savanna Status Report 2

At roughly 6:30 AM on Friday 28 May 2010 New Savanna had it’s 2000th unique visitor. As I draft this post, a bit after 6 PM on 31 May 2010 we have had 2133 unique visitors. Here’s the count for the last 30 days:

The striking thing, of course, is that spike in 19 May. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what that’s about. I did some goggling that day to see if NS got mentioned somewhere that would have driven some traffic here, but I couldn’t find anything. So it’s a mystery.

Things settled down quickly after that spike, with a mild uptake late last week. Was that in anticipation of the holiday weekend in the USA? That is, people began spending more time cruising the web as they pull mental energy from work and sink it into the weekend barbeque, or whatever.

I’ve concluded the series on race in the symbolic universe with a post that links that material to the topic of cultural evolution, which is a major one for New Savanna – it’s what NS is all about. The current series on cultural evolution, which is aimed at formulating a useful conception of the distinction between the cultural meme and the cultural phenotype, will continue through the end of June. And the series on Mark Moffett’s Adventures Among Ants will continue until I’ve finished reading the book, which will be in another week or three – I read these things slowly these days, as I’m more interesting in writing.

I’ve decided to work up a post on the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence from Disney’s Dumbo, but don’t know whether than will happen in a week or a month. I’d also like to publish some old notes in which I argue that W. E. B. Du Bois’ Dusk of Dawn has an overall ritual structure similar to that in, e.g. Shakespearean comedy, and that despite the fact that DD is non-fiction (it’s du Bois’ intellectual autobiography). There’s the passage of “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” that I’d like to play around with, and some more work on anime. And then there’s the 50/50 business model that Ed Beauchamp and C. J. Duffy have come up with for their travel biz; you donate 50% of gross revenues to a non-profit foundation and thereby rake in a bundle. Sounds crazy? It is, but it just might work.

And so it goes.