I wanted to get caught up on "The Traveller Adventure" that Timothy has been posting but the TML archive index is kind of clunky, and I couldn't tell where the whole thing started (I couldn't find The Traveller Adventure part I). So, I grabbed all of the post data from TML and took a look, then got distracted thinking about human behavior a little. 

Anyway, searching for "The Traveller Adventure" didn't seem to come up with the starting thread: 

The first thread in the series seems to be TTA: VIII. So, as a request to Timothy, do you happen to have the prior episodes? 

I started to notice a regular pattern in some of the posting dates though and that got me wondering if there was any evidence of interest in Traveller dropping off as the years progressed: 

Post activity is fairly light but there are periods of relatively intense activity. Much of the activity at the end of that histogram is actually all of the technical threads, and in fact the "Celestial Configuration" thread was the 17th most popular thread on TML: 

https://i.imgur.com/V6qXwNf.png  (admittedly, the majority of those posts were probably mine). It does seem like interest is dropping off somewhat, but it does still spike now and then. 

Thread lifespan is generally very short: 

(I had to do some work to identify threads, all of the Re: Re:Re:  thread [was: thread] probably confused that plot a bit. 

The longest running thread except for the automated ones, "Ping", and "No Subject" was Loran's Appeal: 

For some reason, February is the most popular month to post and March is the least popular: 

I presume there's a winter vs spring thing in there somewhere. 

Now it gets kind of interesting, it's pretty easy to discern someone's day/night cycle and some other behavior just from their posting frequency. Here's mine: 

That's a plot of each individual post and the sun azimuth (x axis) and elevation (y axis) at the time of the post. From that data, I prefer to post in mid-afternoon and do stay up a bit after midnight, but never post in the early to mid morning. There are also suspicious slots when the sun is highest in the sky where I don't post - meaning that I seem not mind posting from work, but do not post during lunch. 

I won't post other people (though obviously the data is public), but looking at them it usually is very easy to determine someone's sleep/wake cycle and if I can infer their geographic location, if they're day people or night people. Also, several have no discernable sleep/wake pattern at all, which is interesting.  

Where this is going is that it was remarkably easy to pull that data and put together a simple analysis - not only are computers much more powerful than they were but programming languages are much easier to deal with. I do sometimes have perhaps unkind thoughts as to the lack of solid astronomy in the Traveller and the world that grew up around it, but I'm starting to think that even simple catalogue searches and sorting of stars in the timeframe of the original traveler universe's creation was probably quite difficult. 

It's also something of a lesson in how dramatic the tech difference is between what is effectively TL8 and TL8.1, based on this real world example. 

Anyway, forgive this Meta interruption of the regularly scheduled TML programming. Sunday evening thoughts -