How Randomly Can We Be Connected?
The popular website XKCD, a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” posted a survey on Thursday September 3rd. It isn’t a survey about what people want to see their daily comics about or what their favorite of the four described topics is. It’s a completely anonymous survey about random information. The only stipulation is that answers will be published (but more on that later). The strip’s creator and author, Randall Munroe, calls the survey the “Search for Weird Correlations” and it shows from the questions. With questions ranging from “what is a really popular food that you don’t like” to “fill this text box with gibberish by mashing random keyboard keys”, it’s very clear that there isn’t a reason for the survey aside from generating random data. So, of course, I filled it out.
The reason the survey caught my attention was because one could analyze the data and create an information linkage graph like some of the ones we use and discuss in class. Nodes would represent individuals filling out the survey and edges connect people who answered a given question the same way, maybe even those who answered around the same time. The graph would most likely not be complete, but it would still be interesting to look at, especially if, for a given topic, the edges were different colors. If the individuals making the graph could reverse DNS and find the IP addresses belonging to individuals who filled out the survey, nodes could be laid out on a map so that people could see where in the world these like minded individuals approximately are, how concentrated certain habits and thought processes are, and how one fits into our global network.
Munroe is posting a database of all the answers for public use so perhaps someone could take on the task of making such a graph and using it to infer how our preferences and experiences are linked to each other. There are so many possibilities. The most exciting is knowing that this seemingly trivial information could show just how much we all have in common, no matter how far apart we are.
Link to the survey:
http://xkcd.com/1572/