This may or may
not get added to the list of updated pages tomorrow (probably not actually),
but there are two notable updates to the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy today.

Michael Tye has made some updates to the qualia
entry, which qualia-freaks and anti-freaks might be
interested in.

And my Problem of the Many
entry is up!

Those Stanford
entries get a lot of readers. I was checking the counters for my entry on intrinsic
properties (not that I’m fixated with my readership numbers or anything y’all
understand) and I found it has had over 7000 hits in the twelve months or so it
has been up. Now 20 hits a day is not that many I suppose (it’s fewer than this
blog gets), but unlike this blog,
I imagine there are many thousands of distinct readers represented by those
7000 hits. Which might make that entry my most widely read piece. Which is not
what I would have expected when I wrote it.

Here’s a slightly
more surprising titbit. Before September 22, the counters didn’t distinguish
which of the encyclopaedia servers a reader came from. To
that time I had around 4500 hits, which accounted for around 0.17% of the hits
to encyclopaedia articles. Since then, I’ve kept at around that ratio, between
0.15 and 0.2%, on all the servers, except the server in England where I’m
running at 0.32%. Since this involves over 350 hits, it seems there’s something
a bit more than random noise here. Not necessarily a lot more, since it’s only
about 100 to 150 extra hits to be explained, but something more. Is there any
reason anyone can think that intrinsic properties are a hotter topic in Britain
than in Australia, America or Europe?

A
priori I’d have guessed the highest proportion of hits would be from
Australia, because (a) intrinsic properties are a big topic of discussion
there, and (b) more people from Australia would read the article because I
wrote it. Goes to show how valuable a
priori social science can be, huh?