An Experiment in Scotch

Because I am weird (and because I only have 35 Face­book friends, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to turn my weird­ness into some data obser­va­tions), I have spent the last 10 min­utes ana­lyz­ing how many friends my friends have. On aver­age, they have 162.8857 friends (the per­son who is .8857th of a friend keeps show­ing up as a sug­ges­tion but I keep ignor­ing him, pre­fer­ring whole friends to per­cent­ages). The stan­dard devi­a­tion is 93.06284 which is remark­able (only in the sense that I am remark­ing on it) because even at only 35 friends, I am with 2 stan­dard devi­a­tions of the mean.

My friend with the fewest friends is Jane at 50. The friend with the most is Madi­son with 409. Madi­son is almost 3 stan­dard devi­a­tions above the mean of my friends which is prob­a­bly com­pletely mean­ing­less. There seems to be some inverse cor­re­la­tion with num­ber of friends and age though I have not run the num­bers to tell you what the Pearson’s is.

In fig­ur­ing out the num­bers, I only ran into 4 friends with whom I had no friends in com­mon (one old high school buddy, one Cross­Fit friend, one old AOL/chat/email buddy and one friend from our dog boarder) and in the remain­ing graph of friends, I only ran into a dead end three times (a dead end being defined as reach­ing a point where I could not find a friend’s friend num­bers with­out hav­ing to return to my home page, once with my fam­ily, once with pre­vi­ous work related friends, and once with mutual friends of Kathryn’s. My friends seem to be tightly inte­grated through a hand­ful of limbs on the tree.

What all this means is that I slept 12 hours last night, haven’t had a drink tonight and thus am not the slight­est bit tired at 11 PM. I have fin­ished the book that I said I would (Wis­dom of Crowds, highly rec­om­mended but you can’t have my copy because I bor­rowed it from Matt F , another friend, also the friend who shares names with the largest num­ber of my friends at 3), I have roasted and deboned a chicken, I have bought gro­ceries, I have watched Bode Miller win Bronze in the down­hill and so I am allowed to waste time on Face­book though I will have to admit, this is the most fun I’ve had on Face­book since start­ing here. See, I told you I was weird.