"Counting is difficult" is becoming highly irritating

Pleasing everyone is very difficult. :wink:

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I should add that my teacher used to say Counting is Difficult all the time, at least once a day. If he wasn’t so adamant about drilling that into our heads I probably wouldn’t have put it somewhere you’ll see it once a day. I’ve lived with that phrase in my head for so long that I knew it was a keeper.

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Hey Andrew, thanks for writing in with your concern. The phrase comes from a math teacher I had. He was also one of the greatest teachers I’ve had. His subject was AP Statistics and his phrase was Counting is difficult. It refers to how such a simple thing like counting is actually quite difficult to do successfully. And in statistics you perform a lot of counting.

And if you pay any attention to competitior news readers, you’ll notice that all of us share a common fault, and that is that sometimes our counts are wrong. But it’s such a basic thing! There are 3 unread stories but the count shows a 2! This is why counting is difficult. It’s ironic, the very first math skill we’re taught as three and four year olds is counting and it hardly gets easier. 

Anyway, it’s my personal touch and it’s been NewsBlur’s mainstay phrase since forever. It also serves as a good reminder that NewsBlur is crunching the numbers during that phase. The “On its way” phase shows that the feeds you see are the cached feeds. Once those comes in, the counts on some feeds may be stale, and then you get to the counting phase. 

I’d hate to lose you, esp. for something like a personal touch, but NewsBlur is 90% opinionated (and 10% standardized). 

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