All of the As!

I'm sure at least some of my readers have gone through my list of received postcards and wondered... "why do most of these start with the letter a?" The reason is simple: I've been sending out requests for postcards alphabetically, one by one. And today, I've finally completed sending requests to all 112 U.S. counties that start with the letter A: from Abbebille County, South Carolina to Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana.

Hopefully, a couple weeks after this last batch, I can use this as a representative sample to see what proportion of requests will be fulfilled. Counties that start with "A" make up 3.56% of total US counties. So once I get my total count, I should just be able to divide the total number of positive responses by 0.0356 and I should get, roughly, the total postcards I'll receive after all the requests are done. That's assuming that counties that start with "A" aren't inherently more/less generous than other counties, of course :) In fact, I may be tainting the data just by writing this! Oh well!