Thanks very much. It remains an interesting feature this post Q225 telling us that 43 connections are on the map.
I remember some old breads (cbts or early qr) where an anon had another explanation – involved geometry somehow, would have to look it up to be sure.
I like the timestamp idea, and tried to understand what you did there. So here's what I took away so far:
Using the modulo 1200 of the HHMM timestamps of the first 227 Q posts, and through that
matching them to other posts you find 43 connections, consisting of 26 tupels, 7 tripels & 1 quadrupel of Q posts.
The sum checks out going by the numbers above (26 + 14 + 3), yet I have some questions:
You use ET (i.e. incl. DST), so using the notation you did, the modulo of, say,
19:07 1907 % 1200 707 ==> Q707
which is why Q61 can not be found in your pic.
I do find Q169 (13:19) and Q150 (13:04) in your pic, yet (among others) for example Q29 (02:13), Q46 (12:57) or Q50 (14:06) are missing. Why is that?
Why did you include Q228 among those first 227 Q posts?
The 3-timezone HTML in their headerlines to Q posts has ET looged, so it was pretty easy to use this one liner:
n=227; j=0; for i in grep "^<hr\ style=\"height:1px;\ border:none;\ color:#333;" extractHTML_Q.html | head -n${n} | grep -o "|\ [0-9][0-9]*\-[A-Z][a-z][a-z]\-[0-9][0-9]*\ [0-9][0-9]*:[0-9][0-9]*:[0-9][0-9]*\ (E.T)\ |" | awk -F"|" '{print $2}' | sed 's/\ (E.T)''//''g' | sed 's/^\ ''//''g' | sed 's/\ $''//''g' | sed 's/\ /T/g'; do j=expr $j + 1; a=echo ${i} | grep -o "T[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]" | sed 's/T''//''g' | sed 's/:''//''g'; a=echo ${a} % 1200 | bc; [[ $(echo "${a} <= ${n}" | bc) -eq 1 ]] && echo "Q-${j} ==Q-${a}"; done
which finds 83 connections (setting n=228 yields one more). But it was only a quick check, so I'm not sure if that correctly reproduces what you tried to do.