Figure 4: Number of first visits to confluence points
each month in the world, Usa and russia.
Even though the total number of visits
hasn’t changed, progress towards the
project goal has in fact slowed down.
After taking revisits out of the statistic in
Figure 1, we find
that the actual rate of first conquers has halved within the
last 5 years. Figure 3 shows that more
and more postings tend to be revisits
– bringing the fraction of first visits
down to 30% from initially 100%.
Figure 5: Fraction of visited confluences in some selected countries.
The project progress differs largely in from
country to country. As can be seen from
Figure 4 and 5, initially all of the world’s
first visits had been occurred in the USA.
The passion for confluencing reached
Europe in 2001 and Russia in summer
2004. From Figure 5 it is witnessed how
quickly Germany (as a comparatively
small country) was captured almost totally
within one single year. The USA still
remains 25% incomplete due to remote
Alaska. Densely populated countries such
as China and India find more and more
enthusiasts –now being finalised by 40%
they have overtaken the world average in
terms of reaching completeness. However,
huge remote unpopulated areas such as
the Himalaya region in China and the
Siberian tundra in Russia will prevent
Figure 6: total number of visits each day of the week.
those countries completion for quite a
while. Confluencing tends to be a hobby
for the weekend when twice as many visits
occur compared to weekdays, see Figure 6. |