Yes, that is calculus
If you are trying to figure out what the “dc/dx” stuff is, it is how derivatives are expressed in calculus. dc/dx is the total of comments, and dt/dx is the total of TrackBacks.
If you are trying to figure out what the “dc/dx” stuff is, it is how derivatives are expressed in calculus. dc/dx is the total of comments, and dt/dx is the total of TrackBacks.
Damn, that’s what I thought. It actually made my heart rate climb 20% (just finished Calc 1 for pre-med reqs, having forgotten everything I learned in high school), although I would have thought it would have been dc/dx and dx/dt (or something…it’s all blurry again.)
There are several ways to do it… I am quite biased to “x prime” which is shown as x’ and y’, but they didn’t look so hot. Normally you’d probably have the x on top (dx/dt), but depending on the way you set things up you can have it like I do.
I think it looks better with the c/t on top as that’s what everyone wants to know (number of comments/trackbacks).
I hate to be picky – and heaven knows, my own calculus is badly corroded – but I’m not at all convinced by your pseudomaths. dc/dx would denote, traditionally, ‘the rate of change of c with respect to x.’ It’s not clear to me what ‘x’ is, here.
If you’re looking to sum comments, shouldn’t you be doing something like ‘integral (blog entry) dc’? Except, that’s a slightly weird concept, in that it only really makes sense if people are commenting on subunits of the entry – otherwise, it’s just ‘the number of comments.’
Or maybe you really are interested in the first derivative of comments, looking at the rate of change of comments over time (dc/dt). Take the second derivative (d2c/dt2) and you could tell when interest in an entry is about to peak, since you’d spot the reversal in the rate of commenting.
Er… I’m taking this too seriously again, aren’t I? People have told me about that…