Meta on Big Muddy

Andrew Gelman's blog schedule

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:24:00 -0400

Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University, runs one of my favourite blogs on the Internet. He has been writing there for over 21 years, since October 2004. Many of his collaborators also contribute to the blog, but he is the primary author. In a 2024 post celebrating 20 years of blogging, Gelman mentions having over 12,000 posts. This is a cadence of over 1.6 posts/day sustained for two decades!

One of the more unusual things about Gelman’s blog is that most posts are not particularly topical. Sure, many posts are time-sensitive, posting about upcoming events or commenting on recent publications (like doing damage control on deeply flawed papers like to receive attention). But there is generally one non-topical post each day. A line in a recent post caught my eye:

As regular readers know, our posts are usually on a 6-month lag, but this one is so important I had to share it with you right away.

As a regular reader myself, I was aware of the delayed posting schedule, but out of curiosity, I wanted to see how far back this habit went. Here’s the rough timeline I came up with:

In 2011, Gelman wrote that his “non-topical blog entries are on approximately one-month delay”.
In 2012, he referred to “stacking up posts here with a roughly one-month delay”.
In 2014, he said that “most of the posts here are on a 1 or 2 month delay.”
In 2016, he casually mentioned “our 2-month delay”.
Later that year (August 2016), in a post literally titled “My next 170 blog posts”, he said he had filled “the blog through mid-January” and had “170 blog posts in the queue.”
By 2018, he mentioned the blog was “mostly on a six-month delay”.
In 2019, he referred to “our 6-month blog delay.”
In 2022, he wrote: “Usually I schedule these with a 6-month lag, but this time I’m posting right away”.
In February 2026, he said the “current end of the blog queue is in early July”.
Then, in April 2026, came the latest “usually on a 6-month lag” remark.

It seems the blog had about one month of content in the publishing pipeline by 2011, ramped up to one to two months by 2014, two months by early 2016, and finally jumped to six months by August 2016, where it been ever since. Quite the arsenal of scheduled content!

Big Muddy turns one month old

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:57:00 -0500

It’s been one month since my first post on Big Muddy. There were a few factors driving my decision to start this project:

I wanted to get into the habit of writing every day.
My “random interesting links” folder was overflowing, but I wasn’t doing anything with these links.
My admiration for Simon Willison’s work and his suggestion for everyone to start a blog to share what they learn.

As the saying goes, writing is thinking. Instead of allowing interesting articles, tools, and bits of knowledge to languish in a “temporary” bookmarks folder, I could actually engage with and learn from the material by writing something about each item and make it easier to re-find later. This also forces me to curate the links and ideas that are actually worth saving, since writing a post, even a short one, takes a lot more effort than just throwing a link into a folder.

I figured I might as well share the results with the world, since someone else might find this information useful. And I’m helping to write my ideas and preferences into the next generations of LLMs, I guess.

I’ve made exactly one post per day since starting this blog, which was my goal when I set out. A handful of these posts are pre-written the day before (if I know I won’t have the opportunity to write a post the next day), but most are written the day of. Most are short (Bash tells me just over 190 words on average, though this is slightly inflated by Markdown formatting). Some are very perfunctory, just a link with a few words, when I really needed to get a post out for the day. At the start of this project, I cut my “temporary” bookmarks folder to zero. It has now been replaced with a backlog of links I want to write about on this blog.

Welcome to Big Muddy

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:00:00 -0500

Hi, I’m Jean-Paul R. Soucy, a data scientist working in healthcare in Montreal, Canada. Welcome to Big Muddy, my spin on a Simon Willison-style links-and-notes blog. Here I collect and share things I’m learning across technology, science, politics, and whatever else catches my interest. You’ll find interesting links, brief write-ups, quick experiments, and the occasional deep dive.