Que's Blog Reaches 10,000 Visits !!

Sure, that 10,000 total is nothing compared to similar blogs, but it is significant for me! When I started the blog on August 2, 2008 I had no idea how successful it would be - or if it would get any visitors at all! I remember being pleased when it attracted 250 visits! I even posted a list of the countries of those visitors on August 9, 2008; and then again for 500 visits on August 29. (Back then it was a total of 23 countries -- now there is a grand total of 101 countries!)

These were the first six posts :-
Space Exploration by NASA
"End of the World" in the Year 2012 ??
"The Firmament" Video
Survivors of Destructive Cults
Mind Control by Cults
and, Have They Been Recruited by a Cult?
They were a combination of posts I had made on a forum called Ironwolf, and a few articles on religious cults I had found on a website that belongs to the Spotlight Ministries in the United Kingdom. I was pleased to get permission from Spotlight to use their articles.

I was also pleased that other similar blogs created links to this one. It certainly helped to get the blog established. The [now deleted] Ambassador Watch blog even posted an article about this one! It was rather 'tongue-in-cheek', and humorous, and showed a little North Island bias -- a good natured banter between the two main islands in New Zealand.

This year the blog started to explore subjects that aren't directly related to Armstrongism, Church of God, or religious cults. But I think the new subjects still came under the broad heading of debunking -- or attempting to prove that the idea, theory, or prediction doesn't have a basis in fact, and can often be described as being pseudo-science. (Pseudoscience does not adhere to the scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, and often lacks scientific status. In other words, it is wild speculation.)

The name of the blog - Foresight of Hindsight means you can predict that if you take part in a risky project, gathering, team, movement, abusive religious group, or cult, you will eventually regret your actions, and you will wish that you hadn't been so foolish. In other words, based on your experiences, maturity and intelligence, you are able to have fore-knowledge, or insight into the likely adverse effects of taking part in those risky activities. The blog attempts to help people with their foresight of hindsight. (If you have foreknowledge you are forewarned.)

Some visitors might be puzzled or confused by the photographs at the top of the blog pages. They are supposed to be a visual representation of the name of the blog. The main photo is actually two photos that were carefully 'stitched' together. The right hand side was originally a copy of the left hand side. It has had the image of the man digitally removed. The small photo is intended to be very similar to the photo that the man is in the process of taking. I imagine that he is using some foresight (based on his knowledge of photography) of what the photo will look like - in addition to what he sees through the viewfinder. (He isn't a part of the scene -- hence the right hand side shows the scene without his image.) Looking at a photo is a form of hindsight -- you aren't looking at the scene as it appears right now in real life. You are looking at a facsimile of the scene as it appeared in one instant in time -- you are looking back in time.

I have identified which visitor made visit number 10,000.
These are the details of the visit as recorded by the Sitemeter program :-


























(You can click on it for a larger image.)
Notice the search words were: "scientisi 2012". Google suggested that "scientist 2012" were the intended search words. The first result in the search, out of about 3,150,000 possibilities, was the page in this blog with the title: 'Scientist Responds to 2012 End-of-World Hype'.
...And yes, it is the most popular page in the blog. Further, any Google search that includes the words 'scientist(s)' and '2012' will usually hit that page as the first result in the search.
Note. The visit length could not be recorded because the visitor didn't click on anything while he/she was viewing the page.

This is the City of Montreal in Quebec, Canada -- where the 10,000 visitor's Internet Service Provider is based :-



















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Anybody willing to predict that the blog will reach 20,000 visits before December 21, 2012 ??
Which city will visitor number 20,000 come from? As you are reading this, 66% of the visits have been from North America, 56% have been from the United States, and the most popular states within that country have been California and Texas. So I would guess Los Angeles or Houston. Is that logical ??
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Asteroid Apophis - reduced risk in 2036

NASA news release: 2009-151
Oct. 7, 2009

NASA Refines Asteroid Apophis' Path Toward Earth

PASADENA, Calif. -- Using updated information, NASA scientists have recalculated the path of a large asteroid. The refined path indicates a significantly reduced likelihood of a hazardous encounter with Earth in 2036.

The Apophis asteroid is approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields. The new data were documented by near-Earth object scientists Steve Chesley and Paul Chodas at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They will present their updated findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Puerto Rico on Oct. 8.

"Apophis has been one of those celestial bodies that has captured the public's interest since it was discovered in 2004," said Chesley. "Updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter in 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million."

A majority of the data that enabled the updated orbit of Apophis came from observations Dave Tholen and collaborators at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy in Manoa made. Tholen pored over hundreds of previously unreleased images of the night sky made with the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter (88-inch) telescope, located near the summit of Mauna Kea.

Tholen made improved measurements of the asteroid's position in the images, enabling him to provide Chesley and Chodas with new data sets more precise than previous measures for Apophis. Measurements from the Steward Observatory's 2.3 meter (90-inch) Bok telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona and the Arecibo Observatory on the island of Puerto Rico also were used in Chesley's calculations.

The information provided a more accurate glimpse of Apophis' orbit well into the latter part of this century. Among the findings is another close encounter by the asteroid with Earth in 2068 with chance of impact currently at approximately three-in-a-million. As with earlier orbital estimates where Earth impacts in 2029 and 2036 could not initially be ruled out due to the need for additional data, it is expected that the 2068 encounter will diminish in probability as more information about Apophis is acquired.

Initially, Apophis was thought to have a 2.7 percent chance of impacting Earth in 2029. Additional observations of the asteroid ruled out any possibility of an impact in 2029. However, the asteroid is expected to make a record-setting -- but harmless -- close approach to Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029, when it comes no closer than 38,300 kilometers (23,746 miles) above Earth's surface. [distance increased 29 Nov 2013]

"The refined orbital determination further reinforces that Apophis is an asteroid we can look to as an opportunity for exciting science and not something that should be feared," said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL. "The public can follow along as we continue to study Apophis and other near-Earth objects by visiting us on our AsteroidWatch Web site and by following us on the @AsteroidWatch Twitter feed."

The science of predicting asteroid orbits is based on a physical model of the solar system which includes the gravitational influence of the sun, moon, other planets and the three largest asteroids.

NASA detects and tracks asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground and space-based telescopes. The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them and plots their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.

JPL manages the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., operates the Arecibo Observatory under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va.

For more information about asteroids and near-Earth objects, visit:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch/
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Also, more info here :-
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/
An article on Apophis is here :-
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/apophis/
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