Sleep while you can, because it won’t last long
I read a recent blog post about the coming extinction of MySQL bloggers with concern. The post plotted the blogging activity of Planet MySQL bloggers and fit a polynomial curve to it:
The curve isn’t extended out, but it’s a polynomial, and we know what happens: it’s going to intersect the X-axis. I didn’t do the math, but if you want to, you can predict, to the day, when blogging as we know it will cease.
I couldn’t help thinking: what else can we fit a curve to? The stock market? — no, that’s heavy stuff. How about the hours of daylight this year? There can’t be any harm in that, can there? So I went to an online hours-of-daylight calculator and got the sunrise and sunset times for the first 60 days of the year. I plotted the result in gnuplot and fit a polynomial to it. The X-axis is the day of year, and the Y-axis is minutes of daylight.
The conclusion is clear: by year’s end, the days will be 2909 minutes long. That’s more than 48 hours. The way things are going, we’re headed for negative sleep a little over halfway through the year.
In case you’re worried about the quality of my analysis, stop. The curve is an excellent fit for the points, so you can’t argue with it; and I got my data from the US Navy, so there can’t be problems with that either. What are we going to do now?
Blogging Activity
Minutes of Daylight in 2011
Baron,
The graph with blogging activity is very similar
to EUR / USD exchange rate on the period from Oct-7 to Nov-1 2010.
http://www.exchange-rates.org/history/EUR/USD/G/180
So you can see that very soon it will reach historical minimum and polynomial prediction is working.
The only hope I have, it will skyrocket again, if we will follow EUR/USD rate history.
VadimTk
15 Jan 11 at 1:18 am
Lol. :)
Great post. Extrapolations are indeed the toast of the day!
:)
Cyril Gupta
15 Jan 11 at 1:50 am
OMG, we are so doomed!!!
George Guimarães
15 Jan 11 at 8:07 pm
I knew there must have been a reason why I am not sleeping late any more …
Giuseppe Maxia
16 Jan 11 at 5:08 am
Further worrying conclusions: http://xkcd.com/605/
Dave Cahill
16 Jan 11 at 7:19 am
That is to imply that most people sleep at night. I’m a night owl (cat) or vampire however you see it. I guess that explains why I’m sleeping so much more now :).
Regina
16 Jan 11 at 8:52 am
Baron, sometimes you’re a really strange guy.
Not that its a bad thing.
Daniel Gary
16 Jan 11 at 12:35 pm
Data comes from the devil, only models come from God?
:)
John Allspaw
16 Jan 11 at 9:50 pm
John: I know someone who would say that. I was thinking more along the lines of “just because you can fit a curve to it, doesn’t mean you should” and “I don’t give a hoot what the curve looks like, you need to understand the underlying mechanics before you start fitting stuff.”
Daniel, I’ll take that as a compliment!
Everyone/nobody-in-particular: Obviously the blogging curve isn’t a polynomial, because we aren’t going to start negative-blogging no matter what. And there is actually a really good reason why a parabola is an extremely good fit for the minutes-of-daylight curve. (A 3rd-order polynomial would fit even better, and there’s also a good reason for that; does anyone know why?)
Xaprb
16 Jan 11 at 10:51 pm
Baron, my intention was not to trend the number of posts to a halt but rather to nudge the community and prompt people to blog again! … But, it seems I was misunderstood! Oh well, no harm in trying to do a good deed.
Darren Cassar
18 Jan 11 at 12:21 pm
I understand the original post, it was about MySQL and the MySQL Community and the math show a decline. How we interpret this and what to do about it I feel defines our contributions to the MySQL community. This post is really nothing about MySQL and is not contributing to the quality of improving the curve.
Ronald Bradford
18 Jan 11 at 6:58 pm