I really like to write about things that catch my interest
Being an enthusiast
Being extremely interested in people/things that are surprising/clever/beautiful/original/funny (not all at once necessarily)
I'd get 10 or 20 comments/post, often.
Then a slow decline until January 2015 when I became clinically depressed and barely functional such that it took everything I had to post one sentence/day just to show proof of life.
I recovered completely in October 2016 and resumed multiple posts daily as is the case today.
Traffic when I started back in in late 2016 on a regular multiple posts/day basis was around 100 pageviews/day.
Current traffic is about 600 pageviews/day, with 5-10 comments/week.
Still, a couple times a year some popular blog/website picks up something I've posted and links to my post which results in a sudden spike to 3,000-8,000 pageviews that day, with a regression to the norm over the next week or two.
One thing I find interesting is that things I post today I would've posted back in 2004, and vice versa.
It's amusing to discover a couple times/year that something I'm about to feature or just featured appeared 10-15 years ago.
Occasionally a reader from back in the day will point this out, to my delight.
As best I can tell, the only popular one-person blogs that still update regularly and go back as far as I do are https://www.swiss-miss.com/ [March 2005] and https://kottke.org/ [1998].
I take pride in publishing daily including weekends and holidays, unlike pretty much every other blog/website.
Always something new at boj if you can just make it through the night till the next morning....
As to making money from the site: when I started I thought perhaps I could do that, so the guy who set up my blog (I have 0 technical skills or knowledge of coding etc.) made it so I had Google AdSense on my homepage along with an Amazon Associate banner/link.
At the blog's peak I was generating about $300/month from each of those two sources, with a couple anomalous checks from Amazon in late 2014 for $2,000-$3,000.
Just when that happened is when I got depressed, and income collapsed to the point that I removed all ads from my homepage and left AdSense up on individual posts.
Currently Google deposits around $120 into my bank account every 6-12 months, though I may have failed to update my AdSense agreement such that my Google payments are kaput.
> How does the theoretical world of quantum physics create our everyday life? "Quantations" explains this with wit and clarity, making the imaginary real.
I also took a peek into the book. I'm sorry to sound negative, but this is just full of fluff that has nothing to do with actual quantum physics. It's all pseudo-philosophical fluff and that stuff is the reason my aunt thinks she is a "medium" and communicates within some kind of "sixth dimension". Sorry to say, but this is all BS.
You don't sound negative to me but, rather, accurate and factual.
I am no physicist but rather a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years until 2015).
The only physics I know I learned in 1966-1967 Physics 1a/2a/3a at UCLA, which was the easier physics sequence for non-physics majors who planned to go on to medical school or graduate study in other scientific disciplines.
I made up the word "Quantations" for my book to describe a compendium of quotations I'd been gathering since I was in college in the 1960s (indeed, I actually used yellowed cuttings from newspapers and magazines I'd gotten in the habit of keeping in file folders back then) that in large part centered around quantum physics.
I included many of my own thoughts, "pseudo-philosophical fluff" being a perfect description and one I'm going to use in the future, BTW.
Since my teenage years the mystery of quantum physics and its related tangents and intersections with so-called "reality" has been of much interest to me.
The philosophical explorations and musings of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, and their peers and successors continue to offer glimpses of other possible ways of viewing the universe and being.
"BS" is a fair way to describe non-mathematical, non-quantitative attempts to render quantum mechanics into everyday language.
As Richard Feynman remarked in 1964 in The Messenger Lectures at MIT, "... I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
I actually crossed paths with Richard Feynman in 1980 when I was an anesthesiology resident at UCLA Medical Center: he was about to undergo surgery for removal of a cancerous abdominal mass and I happened to be standing in a corridor as he was wheeled into the operating room.
He died in 1989 at age 69 of sequelae of that cancer.
He and I are contemporaries: he's a year older. I've followed his career since his early publications in the 1980s when he was an assistant professor at the University of Arizona Medical School Department of Anesthesiology and just beginning his exploration of microtubules that later became the focus of his and Roger Penrose's investigations.
Hameroff's inquiries began with what is still a mystery: how does general anesthesia work?:
https://anesth.medicine.arizona.edu/news/2019/anesthesia-and....
A zillion theories have come and gone and we still don't know.
I suspect that the answer is intimately linked to how consciousness happens, still the "hard problem" as David Chalmers so perfectly described it in 1995.
I don't know of any other anesthesiologist(s) interested in the confluence of QM and anesthesia.
Someone better get on this horse 'cause Hameroff is 75 and I'm 74 and who knows how much longer we'll keep banging on this drum.
Below, a guide to exploring the work of Hameroff and Penrose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hameroff
https://hameroff.arizona.edu/research-overview/orch-or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
Reading the comments on vjk800's comment led me to focus on my state of mind today (I'll be 75 on June 8) as I work on my blog in its nineteenth year.
Though I spend perhaps 2-3 hours/day 3-5 days/week on it now (I post 3x daily, 7 days/week, down from 8x daily 7 days/week when I started), my flow state is as automatic as it was at the beginning.
I feel fortunate to have found something so reliably rewarding that has persisted throughout the ups and downs of everyday life.