Luke warm Solo Yoga where a group class seems so far far away

Not sure how many Star Wars references I have managed to cram into that blog post title...

This is the dairy entry of a hot yoga junkie:

Day 5 of stay in place : In what was yet another attempt to sweat and sweat a lot, progress was made. Ditched the crammed bathroom and restricted movements. Went back to guest room and set up the space heater to "max". It was still luke warm to say the least. Saw my friend Sid's post on the BYSJ group where he was in his bathroom but had a lot more sweat than me.. that got me thinking.. was it because he was still wearing a shirt? So I decide to wear a fleece jacket to force the sweat.

I did sweat a lot more .. but in the jacket. Finally at the end of class two drops of sweat landed on my mat... normally I have two buckets of sweat after class.. calm down I tell myself. Every deluge has to start with a few drops.. I look at those precious two drops and cry.. make that four drops..

My teachers are posting their dialogues as youtube videos. Only problem is the unreliable internet connection at prime time where things start buffering in the middle of the class. I have started recording these in the middle of the night to save them as audio files only. This way the class can go on uniterrupted.  Only problem is that there is a loud pinging noise in the middle of holding poses.. Found out that this is the outlook incoming mail notification going through the internal microphone. Matt Newman will have to recite the dialogue to an empty room at midnight for me to record this again.. Last night I actually fell asleep while this was recording.. had set an alarm just in case to wake up after 90 minutes to turn off the recording. Who knew Bikram Yoga dialogues make for good lullabies?!

Had no idea that last Sunday's class would be my last group class. Given everything we know about the virus, we would probably have quarantined ourselves a lot earlier. Good thing is all my friends seem to be doing okay and posting their own solo yoga experiences from crammed bathrooms and other spaces. 

Tomorrow will be two years since I stopped drinking water during class. That Mary Jarvis class that changed the water habbit seems ages ago. Last Sunday's yoga class seems ages ago! 

I am a social animal of the huggy type. It is not easy to isolate myself, but it is being done. Have been working on a yoga mat all week. It is surreal to be cooped up in a room all day. I see my kids for maybe 5-10 minutes a day. They are on a different time zone within the house. My MIL is still in her own room and watching TV and chatting with friends. We all go for walks one at a time twice a day around the block. The kids have shown no signs of exercising. Perpetually in their beds. I am thinking of going for a family bike ride tomorrow, weather permitting. Things are changing rapidly.. I am the designated shopper for the family. On Monday I made a Costco run at lunch break and this was the situation..

that was one person out one person in with a limit to how many folks who could be inside costco.. but we were all pretty close to each other.. would not call it social distancing... most of the stuff we needed were out of stock.. we do have a lot of cuties.. eating them on a regular basis to get more vitamin C.. which works for colds but not sure if it helps with the new virus..

There are lessons learned in self control, trying to set up the right environments and most importantly hydrating myself. At work we would all walk around between meetings, take a water break, restroom break. At home the meetings just keep coming one after the other.. you cannot just see who is at their desk to go grab the team for an impromptu meeting.. everything has to be scheduled and that means no breaks. 

The last two days, I took one hour breaks in the middle of the day to drink water and walk around the block. 

The yoga journey continues. Hope we get over the virus soon and get to be in a hot room.. something tells me that this is not going to happen anytime soon... but the community is there and everyone is working on cheering up the others. 

Yoga is a blessing, as are my fellow yogis!

Angel card for 2020

BYSJ has these Angel cards at the beginning of the year. Something positive to center your thoughts around when your mind wanders around in the hot room, and turst me, it wanders a lot...

This year's card for me is 

The irony of this is that since coming back to reality in 2020, Joy is the one thing that is really needed. Things are hectic at home as usual.. but work is another thing altogether. Someone told me recently that I am not smiling enough in the office. 

I can always smile, but the card doesn't say smile.. it says Joy! That is something that has to be felt. It will come.. the Joy will come! Till then, it is time to hold that thought and show the Joy at least while doing Yoga or watching the kids interact very differently now that Jr. is in Sr. year of high school. 

There is hope that they will be closer than what they let other's percieve.. and there is Joy in that!

Facebook and data..

This is a post on Facebook data.. my Facebook friend list data..

Given I tell FB a lot, it was quite interesting to see how FB doesn't make it easy for me to even track what is going on with my Friend list and update me on what is changing. 

A few hours ago, I was trying to see how many of my friends post politial stuff on my feed. I could count 8 people off the top of my head and by skimming my feed over last week. Given it is holiday season, it is easy to spot the political posts.. My count was accurate. My entire feed is pretty much overwhelmed by these 8 people. Maybe the others dont post much? Maybe the most vocal ones are the ones that keep forwarding stuff to everyone on their timeline? Maybe the things they are forwarding are paid ads masquerading as meme's or just regular forwards? Maybe the people are not who they claim to be on FB and the account is hijacked? a lot of thoughts led me to try and find out again how after reducing my friend list to 150 two years ago, it is back at 318 now.. what has changed in the friend mix etc. etc.

Any analysis starts with the data set. Trying to export just the list of friends and the number of friends they have (or mutual friends) is not trivial. I did spend a lot of time copy pasting stuff from HTML to csv to JMP and had to do some clean up just to get the data in three Columns.. (Friends name, their friends total, mutual friends). Now why FB lists only Mutual friends in some cases I do not know. At first glance it looks like some folks do NOT want to even disclose how many friends they have!! I don't know what the point is of being on a social network if you are that worried. Let's move on..

Then I found that some of my friends have deactivated their accounts. Their pictures are blank and there was nothing listed. When I click on that friends page it says "this account is deactivated. you have the option to unfriend this person". WTH? This was for multiple people. So the person just left FB without a note of any kind to say they are deactivating it? 

72 of my friends show only a mutual friend count. So it makes it difficult to do a fair distribution.. that was a painful realization that there was no way to get the friend count. You have to go to that friends page and see if it will show up. Even my wife's page will only show we have 152 mutual friends. It wont tell me how many friends she has in total. Not that this count matters but if you are looking at data and you try to see patterns it makes sense to have apples to apples. 

Then I put in a classification by how they are my friends. 

F- Family (anyone related by blood or marriage)

HS- high school (PS. Senior)

C- college (classmates, juniors, seniors) from IT-BHU

GS - Grad school (All the Drexel and RPI connections)

FF- Family friends (this one is tricky because some of these people we met in social settings, my kids classmates, but Majority are spouses of friends from HS, C, GS or my wifes classmates and their spouses)

BL- friends from my Blogger days who I have managed to stay in touch with till now!

Y- Yoga (there are teachers and there are students, but I just lumped it into one)

W- Friends I made at Cypress Semi at work

Here are the distributions given this classification:

This one is the distribution of the friends my friends have (unfortunately for the 72 people out of 318 where it listed only mutual friends, that data is not included in this). 

If you read the anthropology books Guns Germs and Steel or Sapiens, the authors make a case that tribes split up into rival tribes or multiple tribes after their populations cross 140-150. The social structure at that point is unmanageable and the connections become meaningless. At any one point everyone closely interacts with 15 people on a day to day basis. In the last 2 years I have observed this at work, at home, at gatherings and on my social media feeds. People simply become inactive.

Given that there are some celebrities in my FB friend list (read star Yoga teachers, music teachers, public figures) I took them out of the distribution to see what it looks like for the bottom two bars in the previous graph.. ie, people with under 1000 friends.. The people who are between 600 and 1000 are mostly inactive but keep accepting friend requests and looking at some of their pages, I am seriously wondering if there are account issues. Again, companies that pride themselves on AI should be able to see patterns and alert people that one of their friends is multiplying on their friend count in an abnormal fashion that does not make sense.

117/212 still have <300 friends.. and 78/212 are within 200.. Gave this 150 number a lot of thought for the "average person".. read "not someone who is trying to get a following like a Business person or Brand ambassador)  and maybe given todays ability to connect more easily, that number can be 300.. It should be able to plot the number of active interactions between me and my friends to verify this. I am sure FB does this or has the capability to do this, but it would be nice for me to do it with data at least as it relates to my account and friends.

In the graph above the top four points on the Family (F) are wife, MIL, SIL and co-sister (see graph below) why it will only give the number of mutual friends for these four people is beyond me.  You can see that a lot of my High school and college friends are connected to each other by looking at the mutual friend count and it is the case with the Yoga community. I really don't have an apples to apples on this one as technically all the mutual friend counts are not available.

The graph below is the mutual friend list distribution where FB wont list their total friends but only mutual. Each bar is the number of friends who have a mutual friend list between those windows.. eg. 1 friend (wife) with 150-160 mutual friends, 1 with 50-60 (MIL), 2 friends with 40-50 mutual connections (SIL, co-sister), etc. etc.

The bottom 32 people with 0-10 mutual friends are mostly not sharing their friend list?

So what did I learn from all these exercises of graphing and charting and cleaning up data sets?

1- It is not easy to get exportable data out of Facebook.

2- There is no notification if your friends deactivate accounts or become inactive for prolonged periods of time

3- There is no warning if your friends account is showing abnormal increases in friend counts

4- A lot of my friends on the list have way more than 150 friends just like me. 

5- Never got to the actual reason why I started doing this.. which was to see what % of my friends post political stuff. That count is still 8/318 but there is no easy way to classify the posts on an excel file and put a code next to it and pareto it!  Out of almost 200 most recent posts in my feed, 50 were political and they came from 8 people.. They all seem to have posts on their pets, yoga, family which always seems to be anywhere between 50-70% of their posts. If there was a select way to mute that, I would be a happier person. 

The real question is "Am I seeing all their posts?" or "is FB only showing me select posts from these people that are political?" or "are these people deliberately posting this only to me and a select group?"

No way to tell. 

Majority of the posts are travel realated or family photos and pets. For that, I will gladly keep reviewing accounts periodically, clean up stuff and go explain to people why there is no point on being "friends" on FB when I don't get to see what they look like after 5 years but keep getting memes and political forwards for years. 

I am just having data withdrawal symptoms.. there is a lull at work and Christmas/New Year is coming.. next I will go look at my Yoga class graphs and charts.. Thankfully, that dataset was generated by me and is very accurate!