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

“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. 
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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.

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.
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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
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