930: Days of the Week

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Jump to: navigation, search
Days of the Week
Not pictured: the elongated Halley's-Comet-like orbit of every Rebecca Black lyric.
Title text: Not pictured: the elongated Halley's-Comet-like orbit of every Rebecca Black lyric.

The xkcd page links to a much larger version.

Explanation

As explained in the image, the graph is a polar graph, charting the relative strengths by which certain phrases are associated with certain days of the week. The closer a phrase comes to the center of the graph, the less the phrase is associated with whatever day of the week that is. Conversely, the further out a phrase is, the more associated with that day of the week it is.

Perhaps the clearest example of this in the above graph is the ladies night line, which has such a strong peak on Wednesday that it goes clear out of the bounds of the picture. Likewise, church is so strongly associated with Sunday that it goes off the chart there.

Also of interest are the less eccentric orbits, for instance "big day" and "so drunk." The fact that these don't clearly peak on any one day indicates that (according to Google, at least) big days are spread out fairly evenly throughout the week (with a minimum on Mondays), and so drunk tends to peak on weekends, though it seems fairly evenly split between Fridays and Saturdays.

Mentioned in the title text is Rebecca Black's viral pop hit, Friday, which received considerable negative attention and ridicule for its terrible songwriting and performance. It peaks so far out that no perspective which would show it would be of any use, since many parodies have been made of the song since.

Transcript

[The whole comic is a single panel, with a circular diagram of the days of the week.]
Polar graph of what stuff happens on which days, based on number of Google results for phrases like "company meeting on <day>."
The relative frequency of <day> in <phrase> is shown by the distance from the center at which <phrase>'s line crosses <day>.
Each curve is normalized to have the same number of total hits - they're not on the same scale.
It follows the plot as a sortable table:
Ring position in pixels from center on ... Ring Color Topic Ring Text Pattern
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
16 97 594 181 78 45 9 dark green Ladies night <day> is ladies night
194 176 159 216 137 65 64 purple Announcement announced <day>
151 243 146 168 165 66 60 light blue Company company meeting on <day> / company meeting <day>
264 138 143 134 257 29 32 yellow Due day due on <day>
141 102 112 103 206 183 146 green Sex got laid <day>
59 22 105 65 258 350 138 red Alcohol drunk on <day> / so drunk <day>
32 92 91 88 218 194 169 dark blue Big day <day> is the big day
30 29 72 28 77 115 778 blue Church Church <day>
189 89 67 137 183 137 198 dark red Menstruation got my period <day>
113 62 49 64 391 134 158 bonze Breakup we broke up on <day>
155 46 38 266 176 151 164 pink Terrible day <day> sucked
(Not easy to reproduce the actual plot, these are the phrases, in order of popularity on Wednesday.)
1. <day> is ladies night
2. announced <day>
3. company meeting on <day> / company meeting <day>
4. due on <day>
5. got laid <day>
6. drunk on <day> / so drunk <day>
7. <day> is the big day
8. Church <day>
9. got my period <day>
10. we broke up on <day>
11. <day> sucked
[Thursday, from most common to least common: 11, 2, 1, 3, 9, 4, 5, 7, 10, 6, 8]
[Friday, from most common to least common: 10, 4, 6, 7, 5, 9, 11, 3, 2, 1, 8]
[Saturday, ditto: 6, 7, 5, 11, 9, 10, 8, 3, 2, 1, 4]
[Sunday, ditto: 8, 9, 7, 11, 10, 5, 6, 2, 3, 4, 1]
[Monday, ditto: 4, 2, 9, 11, 3, 5, 10, 6, 7, 8, 1]
[Tuesday, ditto: 3, 2, 4, 5, 1, 7, 9, 10, 11, 8, 6]


comment.png add a comment! ⋅ comment.png add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif refresh comments!

Discussion

I *might* buy the print of this, but it looks like the kind of thing that varies quickly, and I want a poster that I can refer to easily and won't become outdated after a year. Davidy²²[talk] 09:17, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Just think, If I hadn't got this far in my pilgrimage, I would never have heard of Rebecca Black. So duhh! how did a computer hack?

I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 16:43, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Randall missed a real opportunity to go full meta and put a ring that said "Gotta go read the new xkcd" -Yh 1:09, 24 January 2016 (US Central) -- Yhsanave (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Anyone notice the Transcript misses Wednesday? --141.101.98.229 03:57, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

No it doesn't (at least not by July 2017): the "source" list is defined for Wednesday.172.68.47.126 01:46, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

"So drunk" has a mid-week peak on Wednesday. This could be a consequence of Ladies Night. Redbelly98 (talk) 19:39, 21 July 2018 (UTC)