Persons cited in Populscience

Poisson distribution of person names

I enjoy compiling statistics on many things. Naturally, I also do it for this blog. One of the statistics I often compile is that of the names of people (scientists or otherwise) most frequently mentioned in the blog, which now has 564 posts. I presented such a table in January 2024, when 449 articles had been published, in the post titled Ten years of Divulciencia-Populscience, and I think it's time to update it. Here is the corresponding table, showing 40 people who have been mentioned at least 10 times.

A Language Model Trained with Populscience

Since this blog has almost 550 posts, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the information you're looking for, my friend Manuel Márquez suggested allowing readers to ask questions to a Language Model (LLM) trained with the blog's content. I thought it was an excellent idea, so I used Google's NotebookLM tool, and you can use it from now on.

One of the features this product offers is the automatic generation of blog posts. To test it, as an experiment, I requested it to generate one, without specifying a particular topic. Of course, I’ll go on writing my posts without the help of the LLM. Before publishing it here, I corrected it manually, because there were many references to my name (which I removed), and also some curious errors, such as making its title 5 Keys to the Universe, 'AI,' and Evolution and then dividing the text into six points. The following is the resulting post, which summarizes the content of this blog in just two pages:

Nine years of Divulciencia-Populscience

Nine years after the creation of the blog Divulciencia (whose English version is named Populscience), I have published more than 400 posts, which is equivalent to about 45 posts a year (in summer I take vacations and do not publish).

These posts are classified into 25 thematic threads, of which the most visited is What is man?, one of whose posts, Is man just an animal? is the most visited post in the blog, with more than 55,000 visits.

Thematic threads in PopulScience

Just now, without counting this one, the blog PopulScience contains 267 posts. Some time ago, one of my readers pointed out a problem that can be paraphrased with the following words:

This blog contains many posts, published without following a plot line, so they form a chronological string where it’s difficult to get one's bearings. Therefore, I suggest you should prepare a set of basic threads that would allow the reader to classify the posts and follow them in a more orderly way than is now possible.

I found this an excellent idea. Of course, preparing those thematic threads that make it possible to follow posts associated with a topic from the beginning of the thread to the end, is a lot of work, since it was necessary to modify every post previously published in the blog, by adding at the end information about the thread or threads to which the post belongs, with links to the previous and the next posts in the threads.