My tweets apparently have a half-life of about two hours, but I have no idea if that's unique to me. My spouse is new to Twitter and as I was showing him how he could see some data about his tweets, I noticed that the graph of the data looked familiar. Probably because I taught chemical kinetics twice last year (in pchem and general chemistry).
Over lunch today, while waiting for my car to be serviced, I decided to explore the kinetics of my tweets. I used data from the first 10 hours after I posted a tweet, and used tweets that had several hundred total impressions and few retweets. Using five data sets from the past month, I fit the tweets to linear models for 0th, 1st and 2nd order kinetics. R
2 values suggest that a 1st order model is most appropriate, with a rate constant of 0.35/hour, which translates to a half-life of 2.0 ± 0.4 hours. I'm curious if that's relatively constant for me, or whether it's characteristic of other parameters, but time is up.
Perhaps because I'm writing this outside in a park, I'm reminded of an infamous problem about the temperature dependence of the chirp rate of male snowy tree crickets in many general and physical chemistry texts. A discussion of the phenomenon (first recorded in the late 19th century, and not true of cricket everywhere) can be found in Thomas Walker and Nancy Collins. “
New World Thermometer Crickets: The Oecanthus Rileyi Species Group and a New Species from North America.”
Journal of Orthoptera Research19 (2010): 371–376.
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