Holy Statistics, Batman! When regular blogging topics collide!
December 8th, 2007 at 16:59

I noticed something peculiar earlier – Facebook network pages have lots of statistics about the people in the network – percentage male and female, a breakdown of political leanings, that sort of the thing, but there is one obvious statistical breakdown they’ve missed though, which strikes me as odd considering they collect the data in a regimented, easily counted way: religion.

I find it slightly perplexing that at a glance I can discover that 8% of my university colleagues define themselves as liberal, and 3% of them are married, but not find out which strand of bullshit most of them believe. I’m actually tempted to play the “political correctness gone mad” card.

So given that I love facebook, pie charts and slagging off religion, I took it upon myself to generate the statistics myself. As I am a man of science, I don’t want to create the impression that this pie-chart is at all accurate, fair, or representative. There’s the usual caveats of this is only made up of the 1126 people who are less feckless than the 5359 other people at my university who have neglected to enter a religion in the religion box on their profile.

This basically means that the people (women) who have it listed that they’re “spiritual” because they occasionally buy scented candles don’t count. Likewise entries like “none” and misspellings haven’t been counted because I’m not willing to count this manually. The benefit of this though is that the people who do count have clearly at least thought about their religious position enough to fill it in with something coherent, so they can probably explain their beliefs (but probably not justify them in the case of the theists… zing).

As you’d expect, the big religions – Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have the largest market share of the theists, with 38%, 14%, and 18% respectively. Excellently though, it appears that there are lots of Atheists and Agnostics (and Pastafarians) – about 29% of people are going to be predisposed towards acting rationally in all situations. This probably isn’t surprising unless like me, you spend your free time on YouTube getting annoyed at creationist videos, though.

What I find slightly surprising is that considering there’s five Jews, which is a sort of proper religion, there’s 5 “Wiccan” people. Or to give them their proper name “attention seekers who used to be goths when they were teenagers”. Similarly, there’s four “pagan” people, which is slightly bewildering, as they can’t even use the theist, cough, “reasoning”, cough, that loads of people believe what they believe, “so it must be true”.

So there you have it – a breakdown of the religions at my university, as derived from some unreliable statistics.

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Picking on people who share names with bastards
November 19th, 2007 at 16:56

I’ve invented a new game. Its called “How many people on Facebook share a name with someone I don’t like?”. I’ve been trying to think of a snappier title, but the best I can come up with has to be read in a Scottish accent: “Guess who many?“.

It turns out that there’s loads of unfortunate people in the world. Here’s a top-13 list of some unlucky people cursed with sharing a name with some truly dreadful people:

1. Nick Griffin – 274
2. David Cameron – 252
3. James Blunt – 171
4. David Mellor – 47
5. Jeffrey Archer – 37
6. Maxine Carr – 12
7. Richard Blackwood – 12
8. Richard Littlejohn – 8
9. Ian Huntley – 5
10. Vernon Kay – 3
11. Lowri Turner – 2
12. Madeleine McCann – 1
13. Adolf Hitler – 0

There are 171 James Blunts in the world. I especially feel sorry for the ugly ones, who have the joke set up for them by their namesake. At least no one named their kids Adolf Hitler, I guess.

I feel sorry for the Madeleine McCann on there – every day she must glance at the Daily Express front page on the way to work, only to learn that she’s either alive, dead, or whether or not her parents killed her, depending on the editorial slant the paper are taking that day. And every time her location is questioned, it must sound like some sort of sick joke, rather than a genuine enquiry. I hope she’s not planning any trips to Portugal otherwise we could be in for a year of the press saying “Maddy has been found” and then speculation on how she’s managed to age by 20 years.

And the poor other Richard Littlejohns – if they Google for their own name, as people (er, I) sometimes do, they might inadvertently think that I hate them.

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The Summer in Numbers
September 30th, 2007 at 21:23

Today is the 30th September. The last day of summer, more or less. Tomorrow is the start of my first week back at university (er, not that I have any lectures until Wednesday). I had an incredible summer and managed to do an awful lot, so here is my summer in numbers (aka: some statistics generated between two moderately arbitrary dates: June 1st and September 30th):

Capital cities visited: 2

I took a trip to Paris with my friends JD and Fundar in August. We saw tonnes of sights, art galleries, museums, and, er, dodgy parking techniques.

Trips to London: 8

I also went to London many, many times. With Katy, I saw everything from BBC Television Centre and the Foreign Office, to the Houses of Parliament and National Gallery, to London Zoo, to the Natural History Museum (and Science Museum, but I didn’t blog that), to the Tower of London and the London Eye. I bloody love London.

Prime Ministers seen: 2

I was also down in London for the big Prime Ministerial changeover day. I saw Tony Blair leave Downing Street for the last time, and Gordon Brown leave the Treasury on the way to Buckingham Palace.

Internet friends met: 20 or so

My other website had a big meet-up, and it was one of the most amazing days ever. I met around twenty people I’d only ever known via the internet before and they were all wonderful, excellent people.

Money spent on non-Paris holiday rail travel: £226.35

I knew, er, logging my train tickets would come in useful someday. I’ve used the trains quite a bit this summer. This explains where all of those savings I used to have have gone. This massive amount of money is why I feel comfortable getting all self-righteous about rail travel.

Bands seen live: 35

According to another spreadsheet, I’ve seen 35 bands live since June 1st, at 11 different gigs. It’d be 38 bands if I counted the night of May 31st. I saw quite a wide variety of people: Tom Morello, Me First & the Gimme Gimmies, Citizen Fish, Leftover Crack, Send More Paramedics, Frank Turner, Lethal Bizzle and Gallows, RX Bandits, and Hadouken, to name a few. All of this live music has empowered me to try and tell bands how it should be done.

Musical instruments I’ve failed to master: 1

Earlier this summer I thought it’d be wise to try and learn the trumpet to take on a friend in a stupid bet. Unfortunately, I’ve since lost my enthusiasm for the instrument, after it turned out that its really hard.

Films seen at the cinema: 5

Fantastic 4 2, Ocean’s 13, Die Hard 4, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers.

Miscellaneous events I’d like to link to but can’t think of context: 2

I met Ming Campbell, and went to Woburn Safari Park.

Number of Cokes consumed: 498

I haven’t written about this for a while, but I’m still tracking my Coke intake. Over the summer I had 498 Cokes – or on average, 4.08 a day. Which is, er, rather a lot. The average (calculated by records beginning in early 2005) has gone from 3.131 to 3.252 – and this summer’s coke intake accounts for about 15.8% of Coke consumed since records began.

271 one of them were Coca Cola, 3 Diet Cokes, 52 Coke Zeroes, 119 Pepsi, and 45 Pepsi Max.

There is still officially “little to no purpose” for this data existing.

Blog Entries: 121

That averages one post every 1.008 days. And every single one is pure gold. Cough.

If you include this one then its averaging exactly one a day.

Change in amount of currency in ISA: Down 29%

Bugger.

Not doing a Master Card parody gag: Priceless

Summer was excellent. Hooray!

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Political Metrics
July 22nd, 2007 at 01:20

Politicians have always had a problem attracting young people. If you’re a boring old fart who’s idea of an exciting evening is discussing the finer points of the Private Finance Initiative or the latest movements in the Hungarian interest rate, then young people are going to think that you’re the most irritatingly tedious person alive. Its why politicians go out of their way to explain why they love the Arctic Monkeys.

But how can we judge a politician’s popularity with the ‘yoof’ of today? I think my friend Michael and I have stumbled upon an exciting new way to take metrics on just how popular politicians are: Facebook groups.

(Readers! If you have a Facebook account, it will massively enhance the rest of this post – it’s like having digital telly and press red. You’re able to pointlessly switch over from Tim Henman losing at Wimbledon to a couple of nobodies on Court 4 battling it out.)

On Facebook, you have the ability to create and join groups where you can discuss common interests or state your allegiance with a cause. Whilst this is invariably sickeningly studenty topics like “Fun House Appreciation Society” or “Bring back the Crystal Maze” (if that were a manifesto commitment the party would be practically guaranteed victory), there are some political groups too. And I think the groups say a lot about politicians. Here are some examples:

Lets start with someone obvious: the Boris Johnson appreciation society has over 12,000 members.

‘Stop David Cameron… his lies make baby Jesus cry‘ has 1200 members. Meanwhile, he has 62 members in his ‘appreciation society‘, although to be fair, there are a number of pro-Cameron groups so the membership is probably fairly fragmented.

One of the more bewildering groups is the (brace yourself for this) David Davis Appreciation Society. W..W…What? David Davis. Really. It has 40 members.

Tessa Jowell has exactly seven fans. Charles Clarke has an incredible ten.

The group “Iain Duncan Smith, I love you“, generously calls IDS “only slightly inept”. The man who thinks that tax cuts will heal deep personal problems and cause less marriages to fall apart has only three fans. This is pretty pathetic when you consider that Alistair Darling’s eyebrows alone have exactly 24 times as many supporters.

‘Michael Meacher‘ for PM. Two members. One of them is… Michael Meacher.

‘Hazel Blears depreciation society‘… 151 members. ‘Hazel Blears – what a fox‘… 20 members. Telling.

There are 3,500 nutcases who ‘appreciate’ Margaret Thatcher. The Anti-Thatcher league only has 640 members. Damn.
‘Ruth Kelly is shit and should resign‘ – 16 members. ‘Sack Ruth Kelly‘ – 21 members. ‘I support Ruth Kelly‘ – er, 2 members.

George Osbourne has 102 fans and 94 anti-fans. Which shows that there is something slightly wrong with the world.

So what does this prove? Some people like politicians and other people don’t. What a revelation.

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Top Books
July 2nd, 2007 at 17:49

Warning: If you thought James O’Malley wasn’t an elitist twat, and want to retain this delusion, you might want to skip this one. May I recommend watching this video (again?) instead?

I’ve been having a look around Facebook again. One of the best features is that it splits users into different university networks, so you can see other people at your university and so on. What makes this interesting is that it makes it possible to generate statistics about the most popular TV shows/activities/etc at each university based on what people have put into their profiles. What makes this interesting is that I’ve figured out that it is possible to compare these statistics with those from other universities.

So I’ve decided to compare the Top 10 books from my university, a former polytechnic, with those from the university where I’m going to apply to do an MA next year, a “proper university” in London (whether I’ll get in there is a question for another blog entry). See if you can guess which list goes with which university.

List #1

1. 1984
2. Lord Of The Rings
3. Pride And Prejudice
4. Memoirs Of A Geisha
5. Wuthering Heights
6. Lolita
7. Harry Potter
8. To Kill A Mockingbird
9. The Picture Of Dorian Gray
10. Rebecca

There’s loads of “classics” listed there. Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and so on- the sort of thing I wouldn’t read but would like to create the impression that I would tolerate, as it’s a high culture thing. It has 1984 at number one. People at this university must be excellent.

List #2

1. Harry Potter
2. Da Vinci Code
3. Angels And Demons
4. The Bible
5. Lord Of The Rings
6. 1984
7. Pride And Prejudice
8. Dan Brown Books
9. Cosmopolitan

A children’s book, three trashy Dan Brown novels, the most evil book ever written, and a magazine.

Have you guessed yet? The first list in the uni in London, and the second is my university. The disparity in… high culture… really is that clear.

What makes this more depressing is that I have not made a mistake on the second list above – there really is only nine entries in my university’s top ten books.

I’m not trying to slag off my university here, as it’s alright really. I just think its an interesting comparison – almost as if there is still a class divide between universities and polytechnics. If I were a better elite hacker, I’d write something that compares every university. But alas, I’m not.

In summary: Statistics are fun!

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