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The Numbers of a Life

Posted by Soulskill on from the plotting-out-a-person dept.

porsche911 points out a recent post by Stephen Wolfram in which he plots out data on his communication habits collected over a period of years — or in some cases, decades. He presents visualizations of the times and frequency of a third of a million emails since 1989, 100 million keystrokes since 2002, phone calls, meetings, modification times on his personal files, and even the number of footsteps he takes in a day. It provides some interesting correlations and insights into the structure of a person's life, and how that structure shifts over the years. He says, "What is the future for personal analytics? There is so much that can be done. Some of it will focus on large-scale trends, some of it on identifying specific events or anomalies, and some of it on extracting 'stories' from personal data. And in time I'm looking forward to being able to ask Wolfram|Alpha all sorts of things about my life and times—and have it immediately generate reports about them. Not only being able to act as an adjunct to my personal memory, but also to be able to do automatic computational history—explaining how and why things happened—and then making projections and predictions. As personal analytics develops, it’s going to give us a whole new dimension to experiencing our lives."

4 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Someone should apply this to his data by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    If ((age IS GREATER THAN 25) & (number-of-times-laid IS LESS THAN (age-16)) || number-of-times-laid IS LESS THAN number-of-times-starwars-seen)
          {
          Loser = true;
          }

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:Someone should apply this to his data by trongey · · Score: 3, Funny

      If ((age IS GREATER THAN 25) & (number-of-times-laid IS LESS THAN (age-16)) || number-of-times-laid IS LESS THAN number-of-times-starwars-seen)

            {

            Loser = true;

            }

      Actually that function has a non-unique solution.
      Married=true and Married&Loser=true both satisfy the conditions.

      --
      You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
    2. Re:Someone should apply this to his data by Sarten-X · · Score: 3, Funny

      His name is known to millions of struggling female math students around the world. That he's apparently married might be the only thing holding him back in that field.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  2. Re:100 million key strokes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    lol. Think about what you said, and then how many keys are on a keyboard.