930: Days of the Week

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Days of the Week

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]

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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)