Hitchhiker’s Guide to Analytics — Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged
Thinking about Big Data
We’re here to talk about Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. You’ll meet him eventually, should you live long enough.
Whether you want to meet him is between you and your therapist.
There is a very small number of truly immortal beings in the Universe. Wowbagger is one of them.
Unlike the others, however, Wowbagger was not born into immortality.
Most of those who are born immortal know instinctively how to cope with it. It feels perfectly natural to them, as it should. Wowbagger had come to hate the lot of them, and they weren’t too fond of him, either.
Wowbagger had immortality thrust upon him inadvertently in an unfortunate accident involving an irrational (and possibly unhappy) particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of normal rubber bands.
The details are neither precisely known nor immediately irrelevant because anyone who has tried to duplicate the exact circumstances and the results has ended up looking very silly, very dead, or (most of the time) both.
Wowbagger enjoyed his immortality at first. He had a blast living dangerously, cleaning up on long-term investments, and generally outliving everyone who annoyed him.
Eventually, Wowbagger realized the joy was fading. He had done just about everything he had ever wanted to do and several things he hadn’t really wanted to do but was just bored enough to try.
Looking back, he thought he could have made it through the boredom if it weren’t for Sunday afternoons. Time drags on. The clock seems unwilling to move past, say, 3pm, and you enter the Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever.
Purpose
Wowbagger decided that he would insult the Universe.
He had long since come to despise the Universe in general, and everyone living within it particularly. So, he decided to insult each and every one.
Individually. Personally. And (this is where I start to make a point, more or less), he decided that he would do it in alphabetic order.
When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, “A man can dream, can’t he?”
Wowbagger found a spaceship that was built to last and equipped it with a computer capable of handling all the data processing involved in keeping track of the entire population of the known Universe and working out the horrifically complicated routes involved.
Space is big. We’ve covered that topic more than once.
Wowbagger decided to insult every single being in the Universe, in alphabetic order by name, despite the constant number of births and deaths, as well as the differences in how different species assign names and the astronomical (literally) distances involved at every step.
Analysis
Does any of this apply to analytics?
Of course it does. We’re in Big Data territory, here. The actual population of the universe, complete with multiple facts (birth, death, insulting them hopefully after the former and before the latter) and dimensions: names, addresses, language, what insults might sting in particular.
Insults aside (I rather like ‘knee-biter’ for some reason), Wowbagger decided to address a massive data set in a perfectly logical and utterly useless manner.
Let’s look at the oft-heralded “Four V” list of data discussion:
Volume: His data set was about as big as it gets. I mean, you could start counting blades of grass or grains of sand, but the entire sentient population of the Universe (and the location of each being at any given point in time) is a pretty impressive domain to tackle.
Variety: The population of the universe is constantly changing. Birth. Death. The spontaneous creation of brand new life forms on newer planets, as well as the extinction of other species. Hard to get news of those last two, if no one’s watching.
Velocity: The data changes have to be addressed constantly, as do the rotations and revolutions of planets, star systems, and the odd space traveler who might be next of the list. I don’t know what computer Wowbagger put on that ship (it wasn’t Deep Thought), but it is always busy. Friendly, too.
Uncertainty: Do I really need to restate everything I’ve said so far? Well, I’m not going to.
Wowbagger chose an impossible task, then he chose an even more impossible way to approach it. But at least he had a process.
Conclusion
Have to end this at some point. I do intend to live forever; I just don’t intend to be writing this article the whole time.
Modern data sets can be massive, dynamic, and unstructured. We can still manage them. We need to look at them realistically, choose our priorities, and set a plan. Still, at some point, we have to sit down and start actually working on whatever it is we plan to do with the data.
Wowbagger chose his task and his method because it would take forever (if it were even possible). He has time and wants to fill it. He’s also rather unpleasant and likes to share that unpleasantness with others.
Don’t be Wowbagger. I mean, you can be ‘Wowbagger’ if you prefer it to the name you have, and more power to you, but don’t be this Wowbagger.
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