Which member of the SDMB Science Advisory Board wrote the most guest colums?

About This Message Board
1

I know that I’m definitely not in the running, with just six columns, but I was curious as to which person was the most prolific guest columnist?

2

I love statistics!

3

No answers, or even guesses?

4

Wild guess, @C_K_Dexter_Haven. But I certainly haven’t read all the columns.

~Max

5

It appears there might be 980 Staff reports:
https://www.straightdope.com/search?q=SDSAB#nt=navsearch

This link gives us 9 per page for 109 pages, very odd web page design.
Straight Dope Staff - The Straight Dope and so makes the 980 seem more likely.

Some of them have acquired a default Date and Time of Dec 31, 1969, 1:00am EDT.

Sadly this link is not an index: https://www.straightdope.com/authors/

So all you need to do is go through the 109 pages and build a spreadsheet or database up. Then report back please. :slight_smile:

6

And read all 980 articles, because the byline you can see in the search results isn’t useful (“by Straight Dope staff”, which we already knew).

7

It is basically 1 paragraph down in the articles.

You just need to glance at each one. Not read the entire thing, so no problem at all. Give yourself 3 minutes per article and your still done in 49 hours. I think once you get going it could be a third of that time. So maybe 16 -18 hours of work.

8

This is an exercise in nerd-sniping.

I, for one, understand fully that there is no way I’m ever going to read just a paragraph or two of an SD article. That’s less feasible than eating just one potato chip.

9

I asked Bing’s “copilot”, who helpfully told me it was Cecil Adams. I tried to clarify, asking for the second most prolific author, and it just said lots of people, and then gushed about the general concept of the Straight Dope.

10

Google’s advance search failed me also. I had tried that as I was building my first post.

To get this answer requires either a manual labor data mining or actual access to the database the articles are stored in. Then a few simple SQL statements would probably generate all the possible answers desired.

From what I saw, if you open the article on a computer, the SDSAB for the article comes right after the question. So reading isn’t needed.

Format is like this:

What was the deal with Benedict Arnold?

A STAFF REPORT FROM THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD

By Straight Dope Staff Oct 12, 2015, 2:00am EDT

Question … .
…
…

SDStaff Elendil’s Heir replies:

Article
Article
Article
SDStaff Elendil’s Heir, Straight Dope Science Advisory Board

Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com.

STAFF REPORTS ARE WRITTEN BY THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD, CECIL’S ONLINE AUXILIARY. THOUGH THE SDSAB DOES ITS BEST, THESE COLUMNS ARE EDITED BY ED ZOTTI, NOT CECIL, SO ACCURACYWISE YOU’D BETTER KEEP YOUR FINGERS CROSSED.

I bolded the important line that will pretty much show up on the 1st screen.

11

No doubt.

The hard part would be clicking away to the next article.

12

You could probably just download the entire SDMB archive with curl or wget and do a plaintext search for each staff member’s name. But that would technically violate the site terms of use.

~Max