>I like the timestamp idea, and tried to understand what you did there
You correctly deciphered the core of what I did, despite my logic being clobbered by markup.
One important thing I did not mention was that I restricted the connections to only allow connections from high to low. The theory being any new post would only connect to previously existing posts. I'm still checking the specific examples you give, but that's the general reason the one liner you give generates 83 connections since it does not have that restriction (which I didn't originally state).
>Why did you include Q228 among those first 227 Q posts?
because I made a very silly mistake.
I had been playing with counting Q0 as the first drop as mentioned here:
Fixing that mistake yields only 42 connections, which most likely indicates there is nothing here.
I really appreciate you taking the time to understand what I was trying to do. I'm sorry if I've wasted it.