These days we're all familiar with the concept of an Internet meme, whether it has amusing felines, revives hits of the 80s, or has stolen all our bases. One of the older Internet memes, having its origins from the mid 1990s, is the l33t term w00t!, which once graced the screens of many FPS Deathmatch players and IRC weenies with alarming regularity.
In “W00T” Population Statistics and Empirical Fit Ryan Hamerly performs an analysis of the distribution of the number of zeros in incidents of the word w00t as found through exhaustive Google search. He concludes the zero usage fits "a power law with an exponential cutoff", and furthermore debunks the widely debated "w00t paradox":
The so-called “w00t paradox” is the fact that there appear to be a finite, but nonzero, number of pages with w00t analogues for arbitrarily large Z.6 There are two reasons this does not qualify as a paradox: First, it is clear that there must exist some cutoff beyond the Google-imposed limit of Z = 126. Second, even if the distribution extended to infinity as the authors of the paradox suggest, its density is exponentially attenuated beyond Z = 30, and thus the distribution itself, along with all of its moments, is finite and well-behaved.
Thanks Ryan, you've really settled this one for me!
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