It's actually a lot dorkier than that. Get comfortable, because this is another one of my project posts.
I keep a list of all the movies I've seen more than once, and that list is currently 960 titles long. I've got something big planned for #1,000. It won't likely be this year, but it should be next year.
As I was adding Invasion of the Body Snatchers to that list (see Monday's post), I had an idea. It's an idea nobody but me would get. It's an idea definitely nobody but me would write about.
I wondered:
What's the highest percentage of titles that start with any one letter that I've rewatched?
You're like "Um, what?"
I'll explain.
In my big spreadsheet in which I keep track of all the movies I've ever seen, I have a running total at the bottom for how many movies I've seen whose titles start with each letter of the alphabet. For example, right now I've seen 736 movies that start with letter S, or 10.17% of my total movies watched. There is no reason to keep track of this. I do it anyway.
So I thought I would go through the smaller rewatch list, count up the titles rewatched that begin with each letter, and see what percentage of all the titles I've seen with that letter that I have also rewatched.
Still don't get it? I don't know if I can explain it in another way.
When I first started, this was just a bit of a curiosity. I was writing the information down, but I didn't expect to do anything with it.
Then after the letter B, I noticed something interesting: Both the A totals and the B totals were exactly, or could be rounded to, 15%.
I started to get more curious.
Like any statistical exercise, there should be a fair amount of random noise. There should be one letter where I happen to have rewatched a way higher amount of movies than another letter. But there really wasn't.
Oh they aren't all 15%. But they are all between 10 and 15%, which seemed strange enough to write about.
Here's the total list:
A - 56/381 (15%)
B - 85/564 (15%)
C - 64/454 (14%)
D - 48/375 (13%)
E - 28/206 (14%)
F - 51/355 (14%)
G - 38/302 (13%)
H - 51/381 (13%)
I - 33/246 (13%)
I'll stop here to note that to this point, it's even more consistent than that five percentage point range. It's a range of only three percentage points. Which is not a lot of random noise at all. But after that the range widens a bit:
J - 13/132 (10%)
K - 14/135 (10%)
L - 35/360 (10%)
M - 58/528 (11%)
N - 26/195 (13%)
O - 17/178 (10%)
P - 48/363 (13%)
Q - 2/21 (10%)
R - 43/285 (15%)
S - 108/736 (15%)
T - 59/458 (13%)
U - 12/82 (15%)
V - 11/72 (15%)
W - 52/339 (15%)
And here it falls down, only because the sample size is so small:
X - 0/11 (0%)
When you've only seen 11 movies that start with the letter X, there isn't actually any number of movies you can rewatch that fall into 10 to 15% of that number. If you rewatch only one of the 11, it rounds to 9%. If you rewatch two, it rounds to 18%. So I was not going to hit on this regardless. As it so happens, I rewatched none of the 11, which means I have never rewatched an X-Men movie. I didn't consciously realize that until right now. Hence the poster for this post.
Y - 4/51 (8%)
This is the only deviation. If I'd rewatched just one more Y movie, that would have been 10%.
Z - 4/30 (13%)
It's kind of astonishing, isn't it?
But all it really means -- if it means anything -- is that a film's title has nothing to do with whether I want to rewatch it or not. Which you would have surely known without even reading this post.
I do think it's kind of strange that there is not more randomness. But the range bears out even to the grand total, which is 960/7240, or 13%. Which I guess is not such a surprise, since it would be the average of all these other figures.
Does this mean anything?
Hardly.
Was this worth writing a post about?
I don't know, but I sure did it.
No comments:
Post a Comment