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I must :-) read the following newsgroups:
I have automated this a bit with a filter for DejaNews, but that is not as much fun.
Other sources:
| Section | Jokes | Lines | Lines/Joke |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 3132 | 71809 | 0.00 |
| TOTAL | 3132 | 71809 | 22.93 |
If this looks like nonsense you could look at a preformatted table.
| Jokes including: | Number: | |
|---|---|---|
| mathematics | 883 | |
| physics | 939 | |
| chemistry | 383 | |
| biology | 344 | |
| engineering | 92 | |
| computer science | 33 |
If you like to calculate the statistics for your own downloaded file, you can use the awk-script jokes.awk, which gives you the information, you see here. If you also wish to see the statistics for the subsections, you can use the script jokesub.awk.
The statistics as generated by XS4all are a bit difficult to follow, as only the filename and not the title of a page is mentioned. In december 1998, I organized it in a way to be able to understand what was happening on the site. Here is the hit list of November 1998 in the order of the sections with some conclusions.
| Section | visitors |
|---|---|
| main page | 5158 |
| zipfile of list | 292 |
| new jokes | 263 |
| Humorous science poetry | 8 |
| Humorous science quote | 18 |
| meaningless picture on main page | 4433 |
What conclusions can we draw from this? Chemistry is by far the most popular, followed by mathematics, pranks and physics. This is a far different order than the number of jokes, which is mathematics, physics and then chemistry with pranks far behind. In the mnemonics section the order is a bit different. Chemistry again on top, followed by biology. Physics and mathematics lie behind that. So mathematicians like to make jokes and chemists like to read them. And apparently lots of people like pranks. ;-)
Sections with general names have few hits - miscellany at the bottom, above that combined sciences and other sciences. Maybe I should make new sections for jokes from these sections.
Two of my favourite sections, "the mathematician, the physicist and the engineer" and the anecdotes are not much above that.
5% percent of the visitors downloads the zipfile to read the jokes offline or put them on their webpage (Yes, I noticed! ;-) and do not mind)
Also about 5% reads the new jokes, regular visitors I guess.
The picture entry is there to show that 14% of the visitors of this site uses a browser without pictures or with pictures off. Just a hint to site builders.
As a result of these measurements I created the new section Earth Sciences for geology and such and 25 new subsections for mathematics, physics, academic life and miscellany to make it easier to select a subject.
If you are only interested in some jokes, I can offer you some awk programs to select them. Of course, you can read only the section on your favourite subject, but there is another possibility. If you first download the collection you can use the following filter programs on it.
The awk-script select.awk selects the jokes on the categories in the first line of every entry to select for mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology or if you like engineering and computer science jokes, though the last two do not really fall into the scope of this collection.
The program newjoke.awk selects the new or changed jokes since the last time I posted the collection on the net. Those jokes are from the last two months.
Awk should be available on all unix-sites as awk, nawk or gawk. For the PC you can download a DOS version from the nearest Simtel-mirror. I personally use the Gnu version gawk.
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