Questions Nobody Asked..

Every freaking time!

They look something like this There's 167 of them - a little over Dunbar's number, for what it's worth - shaded by number connections.

Or StationRank.

Long story short, I was playing with my dad's fancy camera and took this (amongst others) photo of some icicles Which I was pretty proud of.

In terms of getting some idea of a person's 'influence' on Twitter, working out (a variation on) PageRank is more effective that counting followers and followers of followers, but much less effective than using HP Labs' modified HITS algorithm.

The nice thing about Tumblr, is it's kinda like Twitter in that you can repost something someone else posts; but unlike Twitter, it's easy to keep track of what's going where.

Last time I tried to do this, I tried to use as large a range as possible for the data and found some people missing.

Or National Novel Writing Month, for those unaware and curious.

Mentions So if you wanted to make a very basic BFF app, you would probably take the means of the numbers of mentions between a user and each of their followers, then pick out, say, the 5 highest.

If I were any good at drawing, this would be illustrated.

As Aerliss quite rightly pointed out, taking an average over the last 2 weeks isn't that accurate for anyone who has been uncharacteristically quite or talkative over that period.

Introductions First of all, following a few recent new follows, here's the revised introductions graph.

Okay, so this started a few weeks back, when anti-piracy firm AiPlex Software were hire to have torrents of some Bollywood films taken down from indexing/tracking sites (including The Pirate Bay) - which don't host infringing files, but provide links to t…

Here's how how the game works: 1.

Background So here's what's happened - Twitter has been 'hacked'.

[Reblog: Originally titled 'Pimp My Change'] There's an old problem in discrete mathematics, known as the Subset Sum Problem which goes as follows: Given a set of integers, does the sum of some non-empty subset equal exactly zero?

This is just a collection, as the title suggests, of random 'infographics' that I'm made at some point or other, that don't warrant blogs on their own.

As a sort of quick follow-up to yesterday's post.

In online social networks, ideas can spread between users like viruses.

In his book, "The Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell outlines the three key factors that will create the tipping point for an epidemic - the mass spread of something; whether it be virulent, informational or whatever.

Case Study: #MyChemicalRomance Origin So I tried to work out why this was trending.

..Or why, when the zombie apocalypse comes, we're all screwed.

This is a bit of a lazy 'en.

More Sex and Lesbians Dimensional analysis is a hell of a thing.

Short answer - Of course not!

For those who don't know, Google Trends is a site that gives statistics about frequency of certain (Google) search terms, and can be used (tentatively) to compare the popularity of things or look for patterns, etc.

Shutter Island You know you've seen a good film when you're left with a lingering feeling of unease once the film's over.

It started with a simple question - will I get a seat on the train?

Thanks to LoveFilm, my recently seen movie quota is significantly up at the moment.

Back in 2009, Derren Brown once again shocked the world with his witch-craft, as he predicted the lottery, live on TV.

As a follow up to the previous procrastination post, it's worth noting that, in fact, the 'Principle of Procrastination' is a special case of a more general will power principle.

Don't get me wrong, The Matrix is a good film.

So here's the story - Me and my dad were at Costa, and dad noted that the table was slanting to one side, pointing to his coffee.

"The number of desirable activities at any given time is directly proportional to the importance and urgency of the task you should be doing at that time."

So say you were some sort of future-loving nut-case, or even a rampant scientist or mathematician who thinks all things 'imperial' are antiquated and need to be done away with.

As it turns out, the reason some links were missing is because the api only allows you to retrieve the 100 most recently follows for a user.

I'll get to the technical stuff shortly.

If you didn't know by now, Inception is the most epic film in existence that everyone is talking about, with the ending that people will furiously debate until the end of time.

Obviously there are several different approaches.