With great excitement Scientific AmeriKen is proud to announce the end of our 20th year!
Scientific AmeriKen is thankful for all of our support including that from wife (Claudia), son (Brandon), our donors, the many friends who either support through reading our experiments or who are participants in the experiments themselves. Scientific AmeriKen also thanks Hassan Al-Ali and ScienceChatForum.com for graciously hosting our scientific discussions regarding our experiments. Most importantly, Scientific AmeriKen is thankful to our subscribers and other visitors to our site!
Below we shall discuss our highs and lows as well as our future directions. Immediately below we present our data for the number of issues of our webzine published each year (from Oct 8th - Oct 7th). Since 2004, Scientific AmeriKen averages roughly 3 publications a year.
Scientific AmeriKen has ventured into many realms of science. Below we breakdown our range of 12 different disciplines. Although all things biology is likely the most common type of experiment, the joy of mixing two random chemicals to see what happens still percolates to the top ranking.
As of writing this review, Scientific AmeriKen has achieved over 2,000,000 hits since data collection started in 2005. Incidentally, our 20th year edges out 2012-2013 for the most hits of any single year.
Last five years:
In examining our top 15 experiments of all time our older experiments rise to the top, with only 3 post-2005 experiments breaking through. Our lead experiment is our daddy longlegs experiment, though it remains unclear if these hits are from a worldwide interest in whether the daddy longlegs is indeed a spider, or if someone is stealing our fancy spider image by linking to it.
Our most popular experiment in the last year was actually our Sugar and Vinegar experiment, where incidentally nothing happened. Perhaps this demonstrates that a "wow" factor is not always needed to drive interesting science.
YR3 - Sugar and Vinegar Incidentally our biggest single day total was for our Burning Aluminum foil experiment which received over 5000 hits in a 4 hour period. The experiment was featured on a Reddit thread to discuss whether aluminum foil could be used to burn illicit substances.
Donations & Finances: Scientific AmeriKen expresses our sincere appreciation to all of our contributors that help push our science to the next level. Our top donor is actually Scientific AmeriKen's mother. Thanks mom!
Questions made by Scientific AmeriKen for Scientific AmeriKen:
Over the 20 years what the most difficult experiment you have done?
There is certainly a large range of possibilities for most difficult experiment. Experiments that test physical capabilities (Fartlekking for enhanced running, surviving a spartan, surviving habaneros, etc), are certainly all contenders. However, probably the most difficult was Worldwide beverage consumption and health outcomes (2016) - solely because cleaning and sifting through large data sets, somewhat by hand, is quite exhausting. However, quite possibly more difficult was watching the demise of the sea monkey colony - Scientific AmeriKen will always remember these cheery creatures.Will Scientific AmeriKen ever get on social media?
Scientific AmeriKen was originally created in the wild west of the web. In the age of Webcrawler, Altavista, Netscape, and midi music on web pages, Scientific AmeriKen strived to shine via link-swaps and "rings - of - science". However, progress moves on and Web 2.0 is displacing most of the renegade websites with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more. Will Scientific AmeriKen join in? Although it is our opinion that the so called Web 2.0 is merely a passing fad, Scientific AmeriKen may someday partake. A twitter account was created - but no major social media launch is planned at this time. Maybe in the future!Has Scientific AmeriKen ever been hacked?
Scientific AmeriKen has had many battles with hackers, one of which resulted in the loss the science discussion forums. Additionally, hackers identified a vulnerabilty to send millions of emails instantly, which the ease in which this was done was very frustrating because Scientific AmeriKen currently has great difficulty sending off just a few hundred to our subscribers. Finally, to date there has been only one database breach. A hacker successfully gained entry and inserted a single empty table. This was the extent of the damage and the servers were made secure once again. In an outside project, the Seldeen.Vocab education software project was shortly taken down by the Turkish Hack Team, and then permanently by J. Paul Getty Images. The battles continue and from many directions, but Scientific AmeriKen remains vigilant and the uptime never higher!What is up with the Ph.D. Editions?
With the website reboot in 2005, Scientific AmeriKen embarked on publishing "PHD Editions", which would document published works from Scientific AmeriKen's other career. Unfortunately, due to transitions from Miami to Buffalo, the publication of peer reviewed science has been delayed. Scientific AmeriKen is hopeful that many new PHD Editions will be published in the near future!What do you have planned for the future?
Scientific AmeriKen has big plans for the future - as always! Experiments will likely continue at a rate of 3-4 per year, however, there are big hopes to expand new focused sections, such as a web portal devoted to explore the science of why we age. Social media may also take a larger role in our site. Finally, Scientific AmeriKen is also mulling a name change to our site! Indeed, long overdue, a new name will allow the site to pursue new directions (without encroaching on these other little guys known as Scientific American).
Keep subscribed - more is coming soon!CONCLUSION
Thank you all for a wonderful 20 years! We hope to continue Scientific AmeriKen onward for many, many years to come and we hope to see you all at our silver anniversary!
Sincerely,
Ken Seldeen
Scientific AmeriKen
