Biotech Values

[the_busy_ant]

Len,

"Where did you get that information? Did you calculate it yourself? If so, why?"

Where? From my personal data-store of yahoo messages.
Yes, I did it myself. My web-site harvests yahoo messages and allows them to be searched, so it was a relatively easy calculation.

specifically, the calculation required a single SQL query (see below). If you don't know what SQL is, it's a language for extracting data from relational databases:

**select count(message_number), dayofyear(message_date) from messages where year(message_date) = 2006
group by dayofyear(message_date)**

for what it's worth, my database is now open to the public:

database type: MySQL
hostname: www.busyant.com
username: open_user
password: yahoo
schema: yahoomessages
privs: select ONLY. you can see/download the data, but you can't modify it.

if you use it, please keep other users in mind and only grab ~ 25,000 results in any single query.

there are ~ 130 boards present. all of them contain message-titles and authornames. MANY of them also contain full message-text.

advantages over yahoo search: you can query and group the data as you see fit (e.g. you can determine # of posts per day for the year 2006). You can do wild-card searches, etc. etc.

disadvantages: not all boards covered. You need to know SQL.