The Fish Eater Plot

David A. Harding
Tuesday, 04 Dec 2007

A revelation came upon me last night as I analyzed my IRC logs for the NSA. You may not believe my discovery immediately—so I'm appending my results and the code you need to duplicate them—but I'll start making my case with the plot.

Plot described below

Observe that the number of lines Christina Eater and Jim Fisher type in the #ubuntu-us-nj IRC chat room mirrors each other. As Jim begins chatting on 09 November 2007, Christina's line count rapidly decreases. There's only one possible explanation: they're the same person.

Look closely at all the pictures on Joe Terranova's blog. There are pictures with Jim and there are pictures with Christina, but there are never pictures with both Jim and Christina.

I don't know if this is a case of sapient supersedure, multiple personality disorder, or a simple superhero disguise, but I'm worried because I don't know how to tell Christina's boyfriend, Joe Terranova, that his girlfriend is a married man.

Note: the funny part is over and the graph above is accurate. The rest of this article proves it.

Below is a sample of my IRC log format.

--- Day changed Mon Dec 03 2007
19:56 < jedijf> stop reading your logs
19:56 < jedijf> :P
19:57 < harda> I should now that I've scared off most of my readership.
--- Day changed Tue Dec 04 2007

I use the following command line to see how many lines Christina typed each day. Her IRC nickname is christinaeater. The results for the 39-day reporting period follow.

for i in `seq 1 39 | tac`
do
        prev=$(date '+%b %d %Y' -d "$i days ago yesterday")
        cur=$( date '+%b %d %Y' -d "$i days ago")
        echo -n "$cur: "
        sed -n "/Day changed.*$prev/,/Day changed.*$cur/p" ubuntu-us-nj.log |
                grep -c christinaeater\>
done > christinaeater.stats

cat christinaeater.stats
Oct 25 2007: 144
Oct 26 2007: 178
Oct 27 2007: 0
Oct 28 2007: 0
Oct 29 2007: 0
Oct 30 2007: 55
Oct 31 2007: 93
Nov 01 2007: 15
Nov 02 2007: 112
Nov 03 2007: 0
Nov 04 2007: 2
Nov 05 2007: 0
Nov 06 2007: 8
Nov 07 2007: 26
Nov 08 2007: 78
Nov 09 2007: 0
Nov 10 2007: 0
Nov 11 2007: 0
Nov 12 2007: 0
Nov 13 2007: 26
Nov 14 2007: 0
Nov 15 2007: 0
Nov 16 2007: 12
Nov 17 2007: 0
Nov 18 2007: 0
Nov 19 2007: 0
Nov 20 2007: 2
Nov 21 2007: 0
Nov 22 2007: 1
Nov 23 2007: 0
Nov 24 2007: 0
Nov 25 2007: 0
Nov 26 2007: 0
Nov 27 2007: 0
Nov 28 2007: 0
Nov 29 2007: 0
Nov 30 2007: 3
Dec 01 2007: 0
Dec 02 2007: 0

I replace the two instances of christinaeater in the code above with Jim Fisher's nickname, jedijf, to get his results:

cat jedijf.stats
Oct 25 2007: 0
Oct 26 2007: 0
Oct 27 2007: 0
Oct 28 2007: 0
Oct 29 2007: 0
Oct 30 2007: 0
Oct 31 2007: 0
Nov 01 2007: 0
Nov 02 2007: 0
Nov 03 2007: 0
Nov 04 2007: 0
Nov 05 2007: 0
Nov 06 2007: 0
Nov 07 2007: 0
Nov 08 2007: 0
Nov 09 2007: 23
Nov 10 2007: 34
Nov 11 2007: 28
Nov 12 2007: 32
Nov 13 2007: 13
Nov 14 2007: 18
Nov 15 2007: 107
Nov 16 2007: 41
Nov 17 2007: 35
Nov 18 2007: 17
Nov 19 2007: 62
Nov 20 2007: 43
Nov 21 2007: 23
Nov 22 2007: 56
Nov 23 2007: 20
Nov 24 2007: 5
Nov 25 2007: 15
Nov 26 2007: 0
Nov 27 2007: 36
Nov 28 2007: 27
Nov 29 2007: 82
Nov 30 2007: 41
Dec 01 2007: 15
Dec 02 2007: 14

Finally, I create the graph using gnuplot.

gnuplot> set xlabel 'Days after 25 October 2007'
gnuplot> set ylabel 'Number of lines typed in #ubuntu-us-nj'
gnuplot> plot 'jedijf.stats' u 4 smooth csplines, 'christinaeater.stats' u 4 smooth csplines

gnuplot> set term png size 700
Terminal type set to 'png'
Options are 'nocrop medium size 700,480 '
gnuplot> set output 'foo.png'
gnuplot> replot