Scientific Method

Taking these science classes, both books open with a bit on the scientific method. Being a complete moron, i'd never heard of this "Method" previously and decided to attempt to apply it. Sitting at a bar (and not even drinking), i came up with a theory: i communicate using fewer words than others. A bit later i get some work via IM and see potential for a hypotheses: my IM logs will show i've written less words to others than others have written to me. That's easy enough to research, i've just over 1.5 year's worth of IM logs to parse. A few lines of perl later and here is my word count, their word count, and the former divided by the latter:

           Me    Them  Diff
           44      37  1.19
           53     181  0.30
           53     289  0.18
           94     146  0.64
          200     453  0.44
          231     401  0.58
          279     238  1.17
          323     146  2.21
          339     428  0.79
          347     392  0.89
          398     374  1.06
          399     855  0.47
          511     627  0.81
          682     773  0.88
         1251    1137  1.10
         1341    1021  1.31
         1375    1831  0.75
         1469    2596  0.57
         2519    3084  0.82
         2849    3565  0.80
         3221    2194  1.47
         3947    3707  1.06
         4908    8957  0.55
         5323    7113  0.75
         6071    3920  1.55
         6128    4624  1.33
         8124    8035  1.01
        11096   17018  0.65
        34601   53853  0.64
        64800   84477  0.77
Total: 162976  212472  0.77

Out of 30 people, 11 use fewer words than me and 19 use more words. Overall (and rounded a little), i'll use 4 words for every 5 someone else does.

Next i should look through my collected e-mail from the past few years and see if the trend continues through that medium, but instead i'm going to be distracted by my IM logs for a few more days, and past that i've still some visuals to work on.