Interesting observation [ot]

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 05.03.2011 04:48, schrieb uri:
> This should likely go to d.learn or someplace else. As a simple exercise I tried to build a tool that fetches a list of random news articles written by a single person and determine his or hers time zone based on the frequencies.
>
> I first thought the period of sleep would determine the daily rhythm, but that doesn't seem to be the case. In http://piczasso.com/i/amj97.png I used bearophile's data points and the sleep period gave GMT-4 .. GMT-3, dinner time GMT+0 .. GMT+2, GMT+1 having the highest probability, which is the correct answer. I wish U sleep all well and don't work too hard 24/7, the AI is watching U.

Of course you could just find out someones timezone by parsing the first 
line of his replies (or the line before the quite)..
Like mine says "Am 05.03.2011 04:48, schrieb uri:" so you know that your 
post was posted at 04:48 at my local time - with the knowledge when the 
quoted post was posted in UTC (or your timezone or whatever) you can 
easily find out the timezone of the poster (or at least the timezone he 
uses on his computer).

Of course you can compare the real timezone with you calculated timezone 
to find out how screwed up the sleeping patterns of people are ;)

Cheers,
- Daniel