Friday, August 25, 2006

i am hungry right now

My car has only traveled like 60 miles in the last few weeks, so we're still ~300 short of 200,000. Here, briefly, I will note those who have driven my car some significant amount of time.

Me: drove this car a lot
Jingping X.: is learning to drive with it recently
Samantha A.: drove it quite a bit in previous years
Lindsay H.: drove it a bit my first 2 years in knoxville

Me and 3 girls, wow!

hey, whatever, i was just writing an e-mail to somebody, and i used the phrase "one of them's" as a possessive. i thought it was funny because it sounds pretty wrong, but i think it's right. it was like, "two of my friends have a birthday today, and i know one of them's e-mail address". it would be kind of like if i wrote, "i know one of you's mama" (in this case it would obviously be easier to say "i know one of y'all's mama). i thought it was funny because it sounds pretty wrong, but i think it's right.

obviously it shouldn't be "one of their address", though i could have said "one of their addresses", with "one" referring to a member of the address group and not the friend group.

now, if we were speaking victorian pseudo-latin new-french english, maybe i could say, "i know one's of them address", but that sounds pretty weird.

In other news, I have been keeping track of all the loads of spam i get in my UofL account every day. Every hour actually. Every 36 minutes and 20 seconds actually. Here are some charts!

Here is the local period of junkmail message arrival. The vertical axis is in time-between-messages, and the x axis is date; the horizontal divisions are at noon every day.

{please click it so you can see the detail!!!}




So, a high dot means that several hours passed before that particular message arrived; all those dots on the 0 are from the messages that appeared simultaneously with other messages. There are a lot of those: almost 350 as of 5:05 pm on 8-25-06. We will probably break 400 sometime tomorrow morning. Now, I've just been keeping track for 17 days now, but 331 simultaneous spams is a big chunk of the 678 total since 8-8-06 (almost half, at 48.9%). Something may be going on here.. Here's a clue: the simultaneous messages are always identical to eachother.. Hmm..

Okay, next:

I'll just cite some statistics. For one, how many of these e-mails do I get every day? I will tell you. 678 e-mails divided by 16.9 days is almost exactly 40! Weird! I get almost exactly 40 crap e-mails a day!

Next, you wonder, how frequent are they? Are they getting faster? Very frequent! Yes, they are! On average, I get one every 36.33 minutes; however, the median interval is only 9 minutes, thanks to all those simultaneous duplicates screwing up the distribution. And they are getting faster!

I can average together the current intervals with each prior intervals to get an idea of the overall change in interval over time: if this number is 0, that means they're coming in no faster today than 16.9 days ago. If it's positive they're slowing down. But no, it's actually -23.85 seconds! The interval between junk e-mails is now 23.85 seconds shorter than when i started keeping track! (actually this isn't really accurate, since there's so much variance [just look at the plot above] i can't tell what the current average interval is or what the original average interval was.)

What next!

{please click it so you can see the detail!!!}




Here you can see the arrival of my junk e-mail collapsed across date, to see if time of day has an effect! Look! Obviously, the pink line describes the (normalized) number of e-mails that have arrived at that time of day- you can see that they like to arrive at lunchtime the very most, 12-13 o'clock.

The blue spots are just the inverse of the data shown in the first plot (actually the inverse of that data plus 1; otherwise all the simultaneous e-mails would get undefined values here). This means that it is a plot of frequency across time, get it? It obviously tracks with total arrival density (look at the blue line, which is just the average of all the blue dots, and compare it with the pink line).

Oh well, there you go!

Friday, August 11, 2006

my car

in the coming weeks, my car will likely be crossing the 200,000 mile odometer point. so, in the coming weeks, this site will be devoted entirely to information relating to the known history of my car.

my parents bought me a 1991 toyota camry the summer before i went off to knoxville. this was the summer of 1998. at that time the car had 85,000 miles.

so, in the past 8 years, this car has gone 115,000 miles, which is about 14,000 miles a year; the vast majority of this was acquired through back-and-forth trips between knoxville and nashville. since i've come to louisville, the car has gone into semi-retirement: two years ago, we crossed the 186,000 mile point, meaning the car had finally travelled 1 light-second. this means the earlier per-year mileage has gone from a likely high of 20,000 a year during my knoxville days, to about 7000 a year during my louisville days...

200,000 miles is almost 8 complete circuits around the planet Earth! this is a good long distance.

Sunday, August 06, 2006

WENT TO CHICAGO THIS WEEKEND.
-saw dinosaur skeletons. saw lots of birdies.
SAW FAMOUS PAINTINGS
-making many hours go fast. this is hard to beat.
STOOD UNDERNEATH THE SEARS TOWER.
-a very tall building. not as tall as expected. still, tall.
THEN WALKED AROUND
-saw lots of rectangular things, and triangular.
INCLUDING BUILDINGS
-with rectangular windows and big rectangularness in general.
ALSO INCLUDING STAIRS, LEADING UNDERGROUND OR UP
-into train stations. speaking of which
RODE THE TRAIN
-went to china town lots of times to eat.
ATE LOTS OF FOOD
-walked around, saw lots of things, people, buildings, vehicles, birds.
ET CETERA