Bean soup

Bean counting, like bean soup, can be very satisfying. You count every bean you can find, tote the results up by category, and you have hard facts. You can take it to the bank. You know where you stand. You have the skinny. Except when the math goes fuzzy on you.

One fuzzy example: if you know 10,000 tennis balls are sold in the county each year, and that the average tennis player buys 10 balls each year, you might think that there are 1000 tennis players in the county. But if you work at NCPR, across from the physical therapy office, you will see ten people with walkers go by the door each day, each with two tennis balls impaled on the back legs. And in the parking lot, you might see another five balls doing duty as car antenna flags, and another five in back seats as chew toys. You might as well base your estimate of tennis players in the county on the number of paunchy middle-aged guys who tell their doctors they work out on the courts three times a week.

All stats are more or less like this: web visitors, balance sheets, census data, economic forecasts. 64,387 visitors came to ncpr.org last month--Yay! 45,760 stayed for 10 seconds or less--Yikes! I spend more and more time poring over numbers--audience data, download counts, page views, loyalty trends, day-part stream graphs. There's enough information out there for two of me, resulting in enough ignorance for three. So how are we actually doing? It will be sunny and 70 tomorrow, sunny and 80 on Saturday. You can take that to the bank.