Didja win? Didja win? Didja win?

500,001. Ha!

Boy, this honesty stuff is expensive, you know?

You could have hinted that you had a lock on the judges' decision, and that small but significant gifts have been known to sway you.

I have a really nice little MagLite LED flashlight I would have sent you.

I'm just saying.

No way, PZ. We ain't your chumps.

You promised a random big number generator, and I'm not playing ball 'til we get one.

Of course, that should say "...our data are correct..."

I'm a bit perplexed at how a random number generator will give us a goal to aim at that might make us suffer through the toils of commenting

Obviously if there is a goal it can't be random. There must be design if it is going to function. I guarantee you that randomness could never explain how I got to point of being able generate the 500,000th comment.

Well, what if the random number generator always produced a number that was at least as big as the previous post's number + 1 every time a commenter posted? There would be a likelihood, however small, that the generator would produce the number of your comment, at which time you'd win a prize.

That'd be goal enough for me. I have little ambition.

Heck, I'd be happy watching it go from 99,999 to 00,000, like an old VW bus.

Anyone taking bets on how ftk will spend her 5 days in Cambridge?

Superfluous comment to raise counter toward 1 million.

Re: 1,000,000th comment

Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?
Are we there yet?

I figured the contest would create a flood of gassy, pointless comments intended merely to raise the commenter's chances of scoring the 500,000th comment. Strange to say, I noticed no influx of additional vacuous comments -- just the usual number.

I think this could be one.

The official rules say that the count is adjusted to exclude spammers.

Well, that eliminates me.

I'm really more interested in the number of commenters over the number of comments. Any arbitrarily small community can generate 500,000 comments over a long enough period of time. Perhaps it could even be broken down into educated commenters and trolls/creationists/denialists/etc.

(And I would really enjoy a trip to Cambridge. Didn't get a chance to visit when I was in England.)

o.oooooo99% of Dilbert is correct.

For all my raining on everyone's parade, I think it would be awfully funny if I actually posted the 500,000th comment. Perhaps we could pester the Seed people into telling us EXACTLY how many spam comments were deleted from consideration, then go check all the permalink URLs on everyone's comment until we find the "real" #500,000. Then the "winner" can giggle uncontrollably for however long they see fit.

Uncontrollable giggles shall also be permitted for anyone who gets a comment on the front page.

Perhaps my memory is betraying me, but didn't posting at or prior to the 500,000th comment merely put you in a lottery? (I just checked the rules, it does.)

Those that were trying to score the 500,000th comment should be informed that their efforts gained them no advantage over those of us who merely commented when we actually had something to say. I am curious just how many people were actually entered in the contest. It'd be interesting to know what the actual odds of winning are, now.

I hadn't bothered to see what costs will and won't be covered when you win the trip. I might be better off not winning (though I'm certainly not going to entertain any expectations of victory as it is). Maybe I'll get one of the mugs.

The "real" 500,000th comment was made on July 16, 2007 somewhere a bit before 3:30 am ScienceBlogs time.
499,993
499,995
499,999
500,001

I hadn't bothered to see what costs will and won't be covered when you win the trip.

It might have been almost nothing if they'd chosen someone already living there! The odds were against it though, especially given the winning location.

Oh, a lottery doesn't seem as fun as being the 500,000 poster exactly. 'course I can see why they might be reluctant to do an exact 500,000th poster.

Interesting, the rule contest page* doesn't actually say what the rules were or how many winners or the conditions of the drawing. (Every commentor in the last five weeks get equal chance? Get weighted chance base on number of comments? Get weighted on closeness to the 500,000?) I suppose not disclosing the rules the are safe to use whatever method they like and to modify it if it didn't work they way they expected.

Hurray, San Francisco isn't the most scientific city. If it were and I won all I'd recieve would be a $7.50 BART ticket. (And if I didn't win I'd have to put up with you hordes invading....)

Well, good luck to everyone!

*Of course, this isn't the pre-contest page which may have had rules. Does anyone know how many winners there will be? Well, good luck to all.

I better have won, 'cause the only other way I'll ever get there is if I get terminal untreatable cancer so I can just go anyway and not have to worry about paying off the Mastercard bill.

I'm sure it's like framing of science. Sure, it's the same thing as it was ten minutes ago but if you say Breaking News all the time you get more stories picked up. So I'll install this frame:

I won.

And anybody who says otherwise is robbing me. Those evil thieves.

#17 SEF:

The contest page states that the permalinks are about 80k ahead of the comments since they were filtering spam or something out of the contest. So it appears the contest itself was open past the 500k mark.

If the 500,000th comment is the winner, are the 50 runner-ups #500,001-500,050? 499,950-499,999? 499,975-500,025?

Or is anyone who posts during the time the contest is open given an equal chance of winning/running up?

Ooh! Look at all those gaps in the comment record. That means each comment number must have been an intelligently designed special creation. They can't possibly have been derived from previous numbers via small increments, with some examples being elsewhere or deleted.

:-D

PZ's blog does appear to be responsible for about 1/3 (or more?) of all fossilised comments on ScienceBlogs though.

And the winner is...SAL CORDOVA!!

heheheh...wouldn't that be funny?

No?

I won! I won! I just got the e-mail! But instead of sending me to Cambridge, they're giving me a lot of money. And why do they need my bank account number?

Does the blogger get a cut of any cool prizes? It seems like the person responsible for attracting the traffic and comments should get some kind of payoff, too.

So, the winner is (most likely) going to be sent from the US to the UK. But any runners-up outside the US don't get the mug, presumably because Seed think it's too expensive to post mugs from the US to anywhere else.

This is kinda US-centric competition.

There must be something wrong with the contest, because I haven't gotten my "you won" email yet.

This is kinda US-centric competition.

That made it relatively safe for me to "enter" (ie carry on posting) though. Normally I have to avoid doing whatever might be construed as entering a competition, for fear of inadvertently winning whatever the revolting prize might be. This time the likely consequences were of negligible impact. :-D

good

good