This is the five hundredth post on this blog.  The first 21 posts were published randomly between July 11th, 2012, and January 4th, 2013; and the weekly posts only started on January 7th, 2013, so I have another 48 posts to publish before I can claim a decade of weekly posts.  Nevertheless, I feel it is worth shouting about 500 posts.

I am a little surprised to realise that I have written five hundred posts and it has made me pause to think about why I write them.  A number of answers came to mind, including because I enjoy writing – it empties my mind and allows me to move on to new thoughts or, on other occasions, it allows me to arrange my thoughts into some sort of order.  I also write posts to communicate ideas, to disseminate research, to entertain and to fulfill a commitment, initially to funding bodies (I started the blog as part of commitment to Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award) but increasingly to readers of the blog.  I am amazed that for the last five years the blog has been read in more 140 countries.  While I have a handful of statistics about the readership, beyond the small handful of readers who correspond with me or who I meet in person, I have no idea who reads the blog.  Most of time I do not give much thought to who is reading my posts and my intended reader is a rather vague fuzzy figure who barely exists in my mind.

The map shows the distribution of all readers over the 500 posts with the darker colour indicating more readers per country.