Teh Thread Everlasting at One Year: A Graphical Retrospective

At 10:28 PM Pharyngula timestamp time (=EST) on February 24, 2010, teh Eternal Thread reached exactly one year in age. From shortly after its humble beginning as an argument with delugionists in a thread ostensibly about some comicbook movie to its current status as damn-near permanent Most Active comment thread of all of ScienceBorg, I have assiduously copied and pasted the date and time of every hundredth comment. This ridiculous time-wasting hobby has now yielded a number of sniny graphs and a few hard-won Truths; because I'm not really sure what the latter are, exactly, here I share the former.

First, the raw data, exactly one year of teh Thread (all figures are clickable and thereby enlargable):

 

Fig. 1: One year's worth of teh Thread Everlasting. See current update for details.

So, there it is, in all its glory, such as it is. Just the facts, ma'am. 365 days; 28049 comments.

Heroes #10

 

  

Thelonious Sphere Monk?

Yes, please.

Now listening...hoo!

Greatest Catfood Commercial of All Time

...if only I had the skillz to replace the soundtrack with...mmm...'The Porpoise Song'?
'Blue Jay Way'?

'White Rabbit'?

but anyway:

Mojave Action

Imagine that Martin Scorsese directed a CGI short about a coal train rolling down the hill from Cima to Kelso with NOBODY DRIVING THE TRAIN!

Peter Gabriel soundtrack.

Here it is:



awesome hi-res version here.

[Except there's a road missing. I used to see sidewinders on that missing road all the time.]

Ceci n'est pas une médecin

Future of The Thread: More Comments

Following the recent embarrassing trouncing of my once-bold-seeming prediction by that darn reality, I hesitate to prognosticate again.

And yet.

New Omnibus Thread Everlasting Update

These archives are no longer updated. New new updates are here. 

This title expresses approval of the post linked

This sentence links to a typically incendiary blog post by Chris Clarke.

word o' the day

starfart

Metathreadual analysis

With the 20K and 1 y stumbling blocks milestones approaching, a first stab at some comparative subThread-level trends.

First, subThread duration:

Clearly, despite some wide variation in the early going, subThreads are getting shorter in duration; of the last 6 subThreads, none has lasted even 10 d, and the last 9 were terminated ere e'en a fortnight was pass'd. It will be interesting to see if this infernal stimulus for increasingly frequent updates will persist.

Now on to subThreadwise commenting rates:

Very interesting. The illustrated upward trend (dashed line; simple linear regression) is due almost entirely to the high rates of commenting in the last four subThreads, i.e. post-anastomosation (red slash). Before Teh CO's eldritch experiment, a remarkably consistent rate of about 80 comments/day had obtained for five sequential subThreads. Can the ridiculous current rates, approaching 200/d, be sustained?

stay tuned

Animal taxonomy

A reasonably current synopsis:

Baseball history / psychedelic history

evolution

newstyle

oldstyle

is better, yes?

On the Anastomosation of Comment Threads

Presumably you know what I'm talking about already; if not this is unlikely to be of interest.

Teh Cephalopodian Overlord of Pharyngula conducted a fiendish and cruel experiment on January 8, 2010: two active comment threads were brute-force/microsurgically combined, an unnatural procedure jargonously known as anastomosis.

Quoth Teh CO at the time:

So there I am, holding two tubes on the internet that are pulsing and spewing, ready to cut both off…and what is any scientist's natural inclination in such circumstances? Why, to take the severed ends and suture them together and see what happens! That is this new thread, an anastomosis between two, count 'em, two old threads. I wonder…will it explode?

and, in alt-text:

Multiple threads fused into one gigantic monstrosity! Chaos reigns!

We now have sufficient data for a preliminary investigation of the early results from Dr. Myers' (if that is his real name) malicious "experiment".

Heroes # 9, is it?

for Cat's Cradle alone, but so much more too.


for Sometimes a Great Notion alone, but so much more too.

one more Kesey shot:

20K in 1 y

Having deployed sophisticated computer modelling techniques, I am now prepared to formally predict that Teh Thread Everlasting will exceed 20,000 comments before its first anniversary on Feb. 24 2010.**
This prediction is based on conservative projections from current temporal commenting trends, as illustrated here:

(click to enlarge)
The pink dashed line is a best-fit 3rd-order polynomial calculated from the comment/time data shown in black, and forecast into the future. Note that this underestimates the effect (if any, Professor) of the recent anastomosation.*
The red line is the minimum rate needed to satisfy the prediction.

As far as I am aware, this is only the second example of a quantitative prediction in the history of the discipline of Blogospherical Science.

*UPDATE 1/17: it seems that anastomisation did have a positive effect on commenting rate, and that the Day of 20K is therefore likely to arrive even sooner than predicted above.

**UPDATE 1/27: This prediction turned out to be laughably conservative. People started commenting at ridiculous rates.
*shrug*
Data here.

My favorite zoology vids

Sir David Attenborough’s Tree of Life (please start here!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6IrUUDboZo

(a little animal/vertebrate-centric but otherwise beautiful)

many more follow

This is where one quotes Mark Twain

A comment from Dania on The Thread Everlasting tapped into an interesting period in the history of The Thread when its death was prematurely predicted, and even requested, by a number of otherwise enthusiastic Threadizens. Here follow some laughably FAIL quotes, nostalgically evoking a simpler, less complicated, somehow more innocent time of days long gone by. Little could we have known at the time (March-April 2009) what glorious heights The Thread would soon reach. Is this Irony? I forget.

Breast cancer trends

(click to enlarge)
Annual breast-cancer death rates
squares: "black" women
triangles: "white" women
curves are quadratic

Data source: National Cancer Center SEER database
"US Mortality Files, National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates are per 100,000 and are age-adjusted to the 2000 US Std Population (19 age groups - Census P25-1130)."

Heroes, # whatever

HST: OK.

Heroes #7

For lyrical and musical honesty.

Geckos of Ecuador

actually a small subset thereof

Old Omnibus Thread-Everlasting update.

Last updated 1/24/10 @ 19452 comments.

please to go here
thank you

Heroes #6

posted without comment

Dead Kick Ass

Nassau was pretty good musically and fun personally; MSG was awesome in both departments. Hoo!

Approach of The Dead

So it looks like I'm going to both the Nausea Mausoleum Nassau Coliseum and Madison Square Garden shows this weekend, Friday and Saturday. Never seen a show at either venue, so I pick up a little East Coast deadheadcred.

I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends (people with whom I saw Grateful Dead shows as far back as 1980) and enjoying some improvised music and well-crafted songs. The setlists have been interesting and wholly unpredictable so far, eight shows and only I think 3 repeated songs, so that's fun. I'd love to hear certain tunes, of course (Here Comes Sunshine, Morning Dew, Crazy Fingers, etc.) but whatever.

It's a different band, and there's nothing wrong w/ that. *shrug* Nothin left to do but smile, smile, smile...

Heroes #5

I quote from Blair Jackson's excellent liner notes to the recent archival Grateful Dead release, recorded in Feb. 1968:

...hipster hero and Merry Prankster Neal Cassady, of On the Road and Acid Test fame, driver of Kesey's psychedelic bus and one-man living conceptual art piece....[Bob Weir:]"He was the guy who was the most completely in-the-moment of anyone I've ever met."

S,AICWCSoA

Soon, all internet communication will consist solely of acronyms.


You read it here first. (Or not.)

Heroes #4

Miles Davis, finest musician of my lifetime IMO.

Love in vain

I was inspired by this post over at Darren Naish's always-fascinating Tet Zoo blog to post one of my favorite photos (h/t Joe Bidwell)

My car is famous!

Yes, my 1996 Jeep Cherokee is featured on Google Maps' Street View! See here.

Heroes #3

That's George A. Bartholomew, my intellectual role model. Elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and inspiring, if low-key, teacher of ecologically relevant physiology (his favored term). I was privileged to know him during my years at UCLA (his last few there), and I believe I was the last PhD student to have Bart on my committee. You can read about his many scientific accomplishments here, marvel at his academic genealogy (I'm on there!!!) here, and read his UC obituary here.

Missed it by that much...

Where "it" was comment #1000
and "that much" was an hour and 41 minutes.
*shrug*

Countdown to crankiness

PZ Myers sez: "if this turns into another thousand comment thread, I shall be very, very cranky." Current projections, based on data shown above (click for sharper view), are for crankiness to hit at or shortly after midnight tonight (dashed line is an eyeballed extrapolation). Quake and tremble, ye believers, for we should soon witness some serious crankiness.

Aaaaaa what's the point?

You know? I mean, who cares?

Heroes #2

In the land of the dark, the ship of the sun is drawn by the Grateful Dead

Heroes #1

Darwin's Reach, an interdisciplinary conference, March 2009

ceremonial inaugural post

"I blog, therefore I yam what I yam"
-Popeye Descartes