P3D numerical frippery

[Tom Deering <tmd@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The neighbors kept me up all night again, so I found myself with a 
few hours to kill.  As a pleasant diversion, I performed the 
following statistical analysis on P3D postings.  Some of you may 
enjoy reading the results.

In the past three months, 259 people posted messages on Photo-3D.  (I 
did my best to account for multiple email addresses.)  On average 
contributors posted seven messages in that time.  The certified champ 
is George Themelis, who posted 134 messages in that period, or 19 
times the average.  He won hands down, posting as many messages as 
the next two voluminous posters combined, Mark Shields and Mark 
Doddle.

For the single longest message, the prize goes to Gabriel Jacob, who 
wrote a nice piece on the Montreal 3D Festival.  Oddly, many of the 
longest messages were posted by people who wrote just that one 
message, as if they wanted to lob a big one over the wall and run. 
As a group, the longest average messages were written by Al Razutis, 
whose five messages were all four times the average, and he didn't 
quote the entire digest, either.

Two guys who can get right to the point are Jim Norman and Felix 
Klee, who both wrote a message consisting of only 47 characters.  If 
you pull out the extra spaces, Jim's is easily the shortest regular 
message posted in the past three months.

If you add up all the characters posted in the past 3 months, it 
averages 7,285 characters (7.1K) for each participant.  The title of 
bandwidth king goes to George Themelis, who managed to post messages 
totalling 243,000 characters during the period.  Where does he find 
the time?

The following people distinguish themselves as the core of P3D.  Word 
for word, they posted as much material as the other 242 combined:

238 k  George Themelis <gthemelis@xxxxxxxxx>
113 k  Shields@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  89 k  wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  66 k  markaren@xxxxxxxxx (Mark Dottle)
  64 k  Greg Wageman <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>
  64 k  Gabriel Jacob <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  54 k  Jon Golden <3dman@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  53 k  Lawrence W Kaufman <kaufman3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  49 k  Oliver Dean <3d-image@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  45 k  Paul Talbot <ptww@xxxxxxxxx>
  44 k  Dan Shelley <dshelley@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  41 k  Tom Hubin <thubin@xxxxxxxxx>
  37 k  Brian Reynolds <reynolds@xxxxxxxxx>
  36 k  Bob_Maxey@xxxxxxxxxxxx
  34 k  Linda Nygren <lnygren@xxxxxxx>
  33 k  aifxtony@xxxxxxx (Tony Alderson)
  32 k  drdave@xxxxxxxxxx

If you wanted to print everything posted to the newsgroup over three 
months, and you pulled out headers and blank lines, you could jam it 
all on a single sheet of paper 664 feet long ( at 6 lines to the 
inch.)  At that rate, a year's worth would require a strip of paper a 
half a mile long.

I didn't do an extended analysis of signatures, but if you counted 
only Mark Shield's 11 line kitty signatures and threw away the body 
of his messages, he would still rank in the top 25 overall 
contributors.  :^)

It's nice that stereo photography has such a nice big discussion 
forum.  Thanks, Bob Wier for keeping it on the air.  And my hat is 
off to all of those good folks that make Photo-3D the excellent 
resource that it is.

Cheers,

Tom Deering