Because of “Andy’s examples”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/NoCDT.pdf a lot of people have been thinking again about the _Death in Damascus_ case in Gibbard and Harper’s causal decision theory paper. The story is famously an old story, but there has been some uncertainty about how old. Now Jordan Howard Sobel has written up “notes on its origin”:http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~sobel/PuzzlesDEATHSPEAKS.pdf. (Warning – PDF in both links.)

Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I? Here’s the January numbers.

15336 Unique Visitors
49386 Visits
110140 Pages viewed
135972 Hits

To give you some pause as to how seriously to take those numbers, in January I started putting on major protections against referral and comment spam, mostly sending 403 (i.e. page forbidden) errors to spammers. In January I had 23,572 attempts to access the page that resulted in 403 errors. Those aren’t included in the above stats, but in that time there were plenty of spam attempts that got through. And of course if I hadn’t put any defences in they would all have gotten through. So be careful how seriously you take page viewership numbers on high profile sites, because a large percentage of the ‘readership’ may be automated spammers.