The following is a text dump from an xterm (command-line prompt) on my workstation yesterday afternoon (with some extraneous cruft removed). It all started when a colleague of mine made an (incorrect) assertion ...:

yicky@workstation:~$ mkdir us_tmp
yicky@workstation:~$ cd us_tmp
yicky@workstation:us_tmp$ python
>>> import re
>>> s = file('/usr/share/dict/words').readlines()
>>> len(s)
234937
>>> vs = [x for x in s if x[0].islower() and x.endswith("us\n")]
>>> len(vs)
7545
>>> v = []; r = range(1,21)
>>> for i in r:
...     o = re.compile("^\w{%d}us$" % i)
...     c = 0
...     for j in vs:
...         if(o.match(j)): c+= 1
...     v.append(c)
...
>>> sum(v)
7544
>>> file('data', 'w').writelines(["%d\t%d\n" % (i,j) for i, j in zip(r, v)])
>>>
yicky@workstation:us_tmp$ cat data
1       3
2       9
3       82
4       197
5       318
6       482
7       718
8       1068
9       1204
10      1218
11      977
12      616
13      319
14      176
15      84
16      48
17      14
18      6
19      4
20      1
yicky@workstation:us_tmp$ gnuplot
gnuplot> plot 'data' with linespoints lt 3 pt 4
gnuplot> set grid
gnuplot> replot
gnuplot> set terminal postscript colour linewidth 3
Terminal type set to 'postscript'
Options are 'landscape noenhanced color colortext \
   dashed dashlength 1.0 linewidth 3.0 defaultplex \
   palfuncparam 2000,0.003 \
   butt "Helvetica" 14'
gnuplot> set output 'data.ps'
gnuplot> replot
gnuplot> exit
yicky@workstation:us_tmp$ (gimp &)
yicky@workstation:us_tmp$ ls -l
total 176
-rw-r--r--  1 yicky somegroup    123 Feb 23 15:11 data
-rw-r--r--  1 yicky somegroup  32850 Feb 23 15:14 data.jpg
-rw-r--r--  1 yicky somegroup 133611 Feb 23 15:13 data.ps

Graph:

The Question:

• What (beyond an overly-spoddish reaction to stultifying tedium) had motivated all of this in the first place? — i.e. What assertion had my colleague made, and why?

Being able to understand what was literally going on ("You grommeted x into y") isn't enough to get the full picture - it requires a small piece of Holmesian logical abduction. The people who can read the technutiae may possibly need help from those who can't.