Ayurvedic Astrology
  • Home
  • Astrology Readings
    • Bookings
    • Vintage Reviews
    • World Renown
  • Resources
    • Media >
      • Articles
    • Calculators >
      • Astrology Centric >
        • Any Asteroid
        • Calendar Convert
        • Find Location DMS
        • Katapayadi Calculator
        • Real-time Gold & Silver Prices
        • Simple Star Calculator
        • Varsha Phala and Tithi Pravesh Location Finder
        • Earthquake Predictor
      • AI Centric >
        • Ask Charak
        • Handwriting Analysis
        • History Predictor
        • Personality Trait Predictor
        • TruthBot
    • Research >
      • Bibliography
      • Coding
      • NASA Research Tool
      • Degrees Spreadsheet
    • Privacy Policy
  • Store
    • Astrology
    • Jewelry
    • Lifestyle
  • About
    • Location
    • Contact
    • Newsletter

Prima Facie, the Timing of Mercury Retrograde Slightly but Significantly Affected Reddit Submission Misspellings and Other Unusual Word Choices in May 2015

10/3/2015

0 Comments

 
“Mercury retrograde” is, in my culture, a time of great concern.

It is believed by many that the apparent astronomical retrogression affects human communication, use of electronics, and thinking, among other things.

Before May 19, 2015, 2:46 am GMT, the people of Earth were not experiencing apparent Mercury retrograde that month, (I call this time NMR), and after that, they were (MR).

To test the general thesis of an effect on communications during Mercury retrograde, I looked at a randomized 3.13836% of the Reddit comments in May 2015, wherein 31,863,786 submissions (approx. 1.8 million per day) occurred during NMR and 22,640,624 (approx. 2.1 million per day) occurred during MR.

I used the software Mathematica to scan for spelling mistakes, finally comparing the distributions, averages, variances, and their ratios of spelling mistake rates (number of naïve word spelling mistakes in an entry divided by number of words in that entry) during NMR and MR.

I did not edit out common words that are not in the dictionary (e.g., many last names, slang, and swear words) or emojis such as :), and so they artificially increased the spelling error rate. The hope here is that this increase is minimal and approximately uniform across the millions of entries in NMR and MR, but such uniformity is, I believe, a little unlikely and not known by me, regardless. The uniformity level could be easily tested, however.

What were not included for consideration:
  • Context mistakes (such as there/their/they’re),
  • Digital numbers (0 through 9),
  • Internet links,
  • Grammar,
  • Punctuation,
  • Capitalization errors,
  • Non-English entries,
  • If the entire post was misspelled, it was disregarded to reduce absolutely nonsense entries or entries whose language is not one of the major ones that could be identified by Mathematica.

The numbers of entries thus finally considered were 951,084 during NMR and 674,001 during MR. 
​
Note that the distributions by histogram are very similar, and the probability plot is visually close to 1:1 (yellow overlapping blue) relative to a normal distribution (the dotted line). Since the distributions are so similar, we can compare the means and variances directly.

Picture
Picture
Picture
The NMR mean is 0.0869656, the MR mean is 0.0881096. The ratio of MR mean to NMR mean is 1.01316. The ratio of MR variance to NMR variance is 1.01399.

​Thus, prima facie, average word spelling mistake rates in Reddit submissions in May of 2015 slightly increased by about 1.3 percent during Mercury retrograde and variance of these increased by about 1.4 percent.
​

MR Mean & Variance 95% Confidence Intervals: {0.0878318, 0.0883875} & {0.0135012, 0.0135927}

NMR Mean & Variance 95% Confidence Intervals: {0.0867333, 0.0871978} & {0.0133221, 0.0133981}

Significantly, the confidence intervals do not overlap. In fact, the Kruskal-Wallis p-value for equivalence of medians, where there was a 2.9% increase, is about 2x10^-11 and the Conover p-value for equivalence of variances is about 1x10^-3946 (ha).

Therefore, I believe these slight but significant results do warrant further investigation into Mercury retrograde timed effects on word choices in this May 2015 database in particular, and that the data does somewhat support the thesis of a pervasive effect on communication in humans, at least during this particular Mercury retrograde.

A more far ranging horizontal study across more Mercury retrogrades would be welcome though, especially since some are described as worse than others, and so the effects based on entry topics specific to the windows can be smoothed out.

I would submit to telecommunications companies an easy and perhaps more fruitful challenge: during MR periods, do they experience an increase in technical support call volume, length, and difficulty?

Here, also, is the Mathematica notebook for your review.

reddit_may_2015_mercury_retrograde_study.nb
File Size: 773 kb
File Type: nb
Download File

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    ARTICLES

    Author

    Renay Oshop - teacher, searcher, researcher, immerser, rejoicer, enjoying the interstices between Twitter, Facebook, and journals.

    Categories

    All
    Astrology
    Ayurveda
    Cooking
    Math
    Miscellaneous
    Research
    Sanskrit
    Yoga

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    October 2021
    September 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    June 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    March 2015
    April 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    January 2013
    December 2012
    October 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    November 2011
    July 2011
    April 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    June 2010
    January 2010
    October 2009
    July 2009
    May 2009
    February 2009
    January 2009
    November 2008
    October 2008
    September 2008
    August 2008
    July 2008
    June 2008
    May 2008
    April 2008
    June 2002

© 2008–2022  Renay Oshop  AyurAstro®
  • Home
  • Astrology Readings
    • Bookings
    • Vintage Reviews
    • World Renown
  • Resources
    • Media >
      • Articles
    • Calculators >
      • Astrology Centric >
        • Any Asteroid
        • Calendar Convert
        • Find Location DMS
        • Katapayadi Calculator
        • Real-time Gold & Silver Prices
        • Simple Star Calculator
        • Varsha Phala and Tithi Pravesh Location Finder
        • Earthquake Predictor
      • AI Centric >
        • Ask Charak
        • Handwriting Analysis
        • History Predictor
        • Personality Trait Predictor
        • TruthBot
    • Research >
      • Bibliography
      • Coding
      • NASA Research Tool
      • Degrees Spreadsheet
    • Privacy Policy
  • Store
    • Astrology
    • Jewelry
    • Lifestyle
  • About
    • Location
    • Contact
    • Newsletter