RatBaby

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@RatBaby

Im The Funny Little Dyke Rat

  • She/They

Wow it's everyones 7th favourite Trans Dyke, PIPER! but you can call me Rat.

RatBaby
@RatBaby
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In this paper we present irrefutable proof of the presence of Americans on the Cohost1 website.

By analyzing the activity levels of website users and correlating them with statistical data about people’s sleep patterns, we can, with high statistical likelihood, estimate the locations of these people on the Earth2.

Our methodology consists of measuring the hourly notification frequency on a sample Cohost user account, with the assumption that this data will represent a reasonable estimate of the activity on the entire website. By repeatedly querying the /api/v1/notifications/list API endpoint on cohost.org, we were able to obtain over one month of Cohost notification data (N = 2058).

In this data, we could not see anything.

However, using computer technology3, we were able to sort the data into 24 buckets representing the hour of the day in the UTC time zone. From this, it was possible to create a histogram of the data (Fig. 1).

a histogram showing notification frequency by UTC hour, from 0 to 23.
Fig. 1: Notification frequency by UTC hour.

The data has a single maximum value at 21:00 UTC, and a single minimum value at 10:00 UTC. We can thus estimate that the Cohost website is most active and least active at around those hours.

A 2016 study4 revealed that people go to sleep at around 23:00 and wake at around 7:00 in their local time zone. Using the arithmetic mean5 between the two values in the finite additive group ℤ/24ℤ, we were able to calculate that it is very likely for people to be asleep at 3:00, and very likely for people to be awake at 15:00.

Hence,

  • let amax,utc = 21 be the max. activity hour in UTC
  • let amin,utc = 10 be the min. activity hour in UTC
  • let hawake = 15 be the mean awake hour in any local time zone
  • let hasleep = 3 be the mean asleep hour in any local time zone

We can now formulate an optimization problem to find a UTC offset k to minimize the metric |amax,k − hawake| + |amin,k − hasleep|, where ∀ i ∈ {min, max} ai,k = ai,utc + k.

This problem is trivially solvable:

k equals the integral from negative to positive infinity of e to the power of minus 4 pi t squared over h awake plus h asleep squared d t minus one half the L1 norm of the two-dimensional vector a max utc, a min utc. this is equivalent to: k = -6.5

The average UTC offset of a Cohost user is hence −6.5. Consulting a map reveals that this UTC offset coincides with the location of North America (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: The average location of a Cohost user.

Hence, the average Cohost user resides with high likelihood in North America, providing irrefutable proof that there are Americans on Cohost (p ≪ 0.001).

Discussion

It is unclear what this means.

  1. C. Bayer, J. Kaplan, A. Grealish, Cohost dot org, in: the interweb(s) (2022).

  2. Disputed author, Earth, in: Nature (−4.54×109)

  3. L. Menabrea, A. Lovelace, Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage (1842).

  4. O. Walch, A. Cochran, D. Forger, A global quantification of “normal” sleep schedules using smartphone data, in: Science Advances, Vol. 2, Issue 5 (2016). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1501705

  5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II.

RatBaby
@RatBaby

I object to the use of "Americans" here

The region depicted contains parts of both North and Central America but not South America and I require more specificity.