Tag Archives: numbers

Fun with birthdays

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Sometimes I get distracted by shiny trivia. Shortly before St. Patrick’s Day, I noticed that seven of my Facebook friends happened to celebrate their birth on that holiday. That seemed surprisingly high, so I went through and counted up the birthdays for all 459 of my Facebook friends who have their birthday listed. The results are interesting. I don’t know if they’re meaningful or not.

As you can see from the I-should-have-made-it-larger chart above, any given day is most likely to be the birthday of one of my Facebook friends. It is slightly less likely to be the birthday of none of my friends. That was the most surprising result: I would never have expected that 108 days a year are empty when there are 459 birthdays to go around.

St. Patrick’s Day is the most frequently-birthed day with seven, although June 4 has six. According to the New York Times, those are the 134th and 146th most common birthdays. The most common birthday for those born between 1973 and 1999 is September 16, yet none of my Facebook friends claim that day.

May and December are the most common months for my friends, both with 52 birthdays. January is the least common with 25, though February and November each have 26. February gets some credit for being the shortest month, but it is still among the three months with less than one birthday per day. January does claim the longest stretch of birthday-less days, with eight.

How about days of the month? The 31st has the highest average, due to the 5s contributed by March and May (interestingly, these are the only two days with 5 birthdays). In second place, is the 22nd, which has the highest total count at 24. The lowest is on the 20th, which only has 6 birthdays. Two days before and after are in the 20s, so it’s a notable dip.

The full spreadsheet is available in Google Drive if you want to make your own observations.

What do I actually read?

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My long-time readers (I’ll call them “Matt” and “Shelley”) might recall that I wrote a post a long time ago about the importance of reading.  I’m too lazy to go find it and put a link here, but that doesn’t really matter anyway.  I know that it’s important to read, but I thought it might be interesting to see what I actually do read.  Like much of the rest of my life, I let Google handle this for me.  Google Reader has a nifty trends feature which allows you to see some information about what feeds you actually read. So what do we know?

My most popular friend is Matt Simmons, with 87 other Google Reader users subscribing to his feeds.  By comparison, I have nine.  On the other hand, there are 52 Google Reader users subscribed to this blog. Hi, everyone! I’m guessing a lot of you started reading this because of the many re-tweets I got from Friday’s post. I hope I don’t let you down.  While you’re here, you might try reading Journal & Courier reporter Amanda Hamon’s blog — I’m the only person using Google Reader to follow it.  Of course, she doesn’t update too often. Unlike Slashdot, which is the most active of my feeds with over 23 items per day.

None of that answers the question of what I read myself.  Well, in terms of absolute numbers, I’ve read more of Boiled Sports than anything else, with 47 read items in the past 30 days.  Hammer and Rails, Hitchin’ On, Slashdot, and Maemo News round out the top five.  On a percentage basis, there are several items where I’ve read every post in the past month.  Only counting feeds with 4 or more posts, I’ve read all of Hitchin’ On and Hippie In Training (the finest environmental blog I’ve read, and I’m not just saying that because my wife writes it).  I’ve also read 94% of Boiled Sports, 86% of Sara Spelled Without An ‘H’, 82% of Kassy_ and 52% of Chris Siebenmann’s blog.

From this, it seems clear that I mostly use my RSS feeds to follow sports and keep in touch with friends.  I’d like to start adding some more, especially feeds pertaining to high-performance and high-throughput computing.  I’m open to anything worthwhile and/or entertaining though (which reminds me, I need to add The Bloggess to my list) so if you have any must-reads, please let me know in the comments.

And speaking of comments, I remarked to my wife last night that I had over 50 Google Readers users subscribed and she was amazed since I never seem to have any comments.  I told her that either no one actually read my blog after subscribing or that they all felt that I say everything that needs to be said.  I like to think it is the latter.