Tuesday, 27 July 2010

Life begins at <x>

Cycling home yesterday I had the song Waiting for my Real Life to Begin by the amazing Colin Hay stuck in my head, and this got me wondering - when does life really begin?

So when I got home I knocked up a simple Greasemonkey script to find out. It simply performed a Google search for the text “life begins at <x>”, starting with x = 1 and incrementing x until it reached 100, logging the number of results returned for each search. I then pasted these values to a speadsheet and it spat out the graph below (modified slightly because of 40);

So it turns out that the modal age is 40. Every 5 years past then are all quite popular too. 8 was an interesting one until I performed the search manually and found that it was finding a lot of results for some Broadway musical.

Anyway, popular opinion says that I have not yet reached the best years of my life. That said, had I included, conception would come in second place, so I don’t know what that means.

Two interesting asides I noticed when doing this were that google.co.uk yields way more results in a search than google.com - I used google.com for the purposes of this; and also it took 74 requests in a few seconds before Google decided that I was automating my searches and made me take a 5 minute break.

EDIT: On reflection about it, a logarithmic scale would have been much better for the graph. Hit the jump to see this graph with a logarithmic scale ..

Posted at 7:12pm