Slashdot Mirror
The Numbers of a Life
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."
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.
At first glance, the whole idea of personal analytics seems kind of worthless. But imagine comparing analytics among populations and drawing correlations between habits, lifestyle choices, and diseases. That could be a helpful step toward the kind of preventative health care we need as a people. Lifestyle choices matter a lot more than the strictly-retroactive fix-me-up-after-my-heart-clogs-up-with-french-fry-grease healthcare that much of the US and I'm sure other countries seem to encourage.
Nothing is more dangerous than a programmer with a screwdriver.
Horse shit.
What if your happiness *is* statistics and analytics? As long as you're happy doing it and its pursuit makes you a living and gives the rest of us insight that lets us all benefit from a higher quality of life, I'd say that's a pretty damn good chunk of life. Of course it has to be balanced in a healthy way with interpersonal relationships but this same logic applies to biosciences and chemistry.
Your "insightful advice" sounds more like condescension. It's dismissive of an entire class of meaningful occupations without considering their individual habits. Simply dismissing anyone who invests any time in personal analytics as "sitting on the sidelines" and wasting their lives is intellectually dishonest, even when hedged with, "Observation and introspection is healthy. Too much of it is a waste of time."
Looking at this data we can conclude that Wolfram's success has a lot to do with his wife being awesome and helping him with the family. I'm sure this is not an isolated result.