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Woman to grump man: “I’d forgotten how pissy you get when one of your tweets gets ratioed.”

Twitter math

Twitter math published on

Ratioed (see also “the ratio”): When a tweet garners more comments than likes, suggesting it is unpopular.

Square rooted: When the number of comments on a tweet is the square of the number of retweets, suggesting your followers aren’t into sharing and probably didn’t watch Sesame Street.

Quadraticked: When the pace of likes on a tweet over time (t) = at^2 + bt + c. If a is a positive value, it suggests the tweet was popular, then overexposed, then became kind of retro-hip. If a is a negative value, it suggests people are messing with you. (Note that most of the time you will also have a negative number of likes. So, high school all over again.)

Logarithmicked: When the number of likes is the exponent to which a tweet’s character count must be raised to equal the total number of Twitter users, suggesting the advent of Gnarr the Destroyer is at hand.

Sudokued: When the digits in a tweet’s number of likes, retweets and comments, along with its character count, can be arranged in a grid to form a simple, diverting puzzle, suggesting the singularity has occurred and we all missed it.

Fibonaccied: When the number of likes on a tweet equals the character count, the number of retweets equals the character count plus the number of likes, the number of comments equals the character account plus the number of retweets, and the number of followers on the tweet’s account equals the number of comments plus the number of retweets, suggesting you’re reading too much into your metrics.

A developer has created a fitness app that expresses your running speed as a proportion of the speed of light to seven significant digits. It turns out to just be an image of the digits 0.000000.

Maybe you aren’t as powerful as a locomotive, but you’re as fast as a speeding bullet

Maybe you aren’t as powerful as a locomotive, but you’re as fast as a speeding bullet published on

The idea for this came to me on the weekend when I was running past TRIUMF. One of the perks of living in Vancouver is you can run through a beautiful, moss-soaked coastal temperate rainforest—the kind of place that makes you think Yoga should be lurking nearby—and then emerge next to a particle accelerator.

Spock does a victory dance when his algorithm beats Kirk's gut feeling to win an election pool

Depressing thought: in the 23rd century, they still have the electoral college

Depressing thought: in the 23rd century, they still have the electoral college published on No Comments on Depressing thought: in the 23rd century, they still have the electoral college

Captain’s log, sup-… sup-… -lemental. OK, had a drink or two with Scotty and Bones while we watched the returns. Played a drinking game: every time you saw Wolf “359” Blitzer get excited about a result with fewer than 1% of the votes counted, you took a shot. We were hammered before the polls closed on Altair VI.

My gut told me it was going to be a huge sweep for Jonathan Archer Jr. (and forget that third party guy – it’ll be a cold day in hell before an Efrosian becomes president!) But in waltzes Spock with his, his, all his charts and graphs saying “Logic dictates a decisive defeat for Archer” and we just laughed.

So now it’s six hours later and my gut’s telling me something different, mainly that the Denebian burrito I had was a bad idea, and Scotty and Bones and I just lost three standard months’ salary in the election pool. And Spock’s just insufferable about it, saying he’d be happy to walk me through the algorithm in a simplified way that humans can understand.

But what he doesn’t (burp) – ‘scuse me – what he doesn’t get is that my gut was right. If it wasn’t for that ion storm that hit sector V-5, which totally killed Archer’s momentum, it’d be Spock pawning his communicator to Harry Mudd, and me booking two weeks in a beachside cabana on Risa. Also, Andorians and Vulcans reeeeaallly love to vote against the human, y’ever notice that?

‘kay. Little tired now. Jus’ gonna lie down for a…

(thud)

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