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The Physics of Friendship
Santosh Maharshi wrote to mention a Physorg story about a new way to model social networks. From the article: "Applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people presents difficulties not involved with more physical - and perhaps more rational - applications. The many factors that influence an individual's fate to meet an acquaintance and decide to become a friend are impossible to capture, but physicists have used techniques from physical systems to model social networks with near precision. By modeling people's interactions based on how particles bounce off each other in an enclosed area, physicists Marta Gonzalez, Pedro Lind and Hans Herrmann found that the characteristics of social networks emerge 'in a very natural way.'"
When you can't figure out why you have no friends, you hole yourself up in the basement for 3 years and come out with an equation that explains your shell of a social life. ;D
Calculating dependencies
emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy "in a very natural way.".
Unfortunately for the scientists responsible for the discovery, they still can't seem to get a hot date on Friday nights. :(
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
See that picture at the top of the article? The big cloud with lots of fuzzy stuff in the middle, and then a less populated border?
Most of us were probably the border in high school...
still not as good as this equation.
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
I wonder how this physics can be applied to make this particular single geek....not single?
Hmmm.... (goes off to find a solution)
I do not think friendships work in such a way that math can literally outline the direction they are headed. Friendship is based on loyalty, when someone involved is disloyal it usually ends, and this can happy at any time. So friendships by nature come and go, and all relationships are temporary. The goal in this I suppose is to try to find patterns, so here is a pattern
If you want to have stronger friendships, have leverage, enough money, or charisma to keep people hovering around you. These variables can be added into the equation and then there are patterns, but if you just look at it emotionally then it will be complete chaos because emotion is not logical. There are logical elements of friendship, logical components, and logical tools which one can use to keep a friendship together or tear it apart.
In highschool there is very few real friendships. Most of the time its just recognizeable faces, or people who are cool but don't actually matter.
When you get to college and beyond is when you begin to build your true friendships, and these friendships arent based on emotion anymore because by this age usually a person has the ability to reason and filter out the people they don't want. By this time people usually have a laser like focus on exactly the personality types they get along with and know how to avoid the personality clashes which don't mix.
Loyalty is glue.It holds a relationship together. Keep your word and your word means something, commit to friendships as one commits to family and you'll have something to protect. Without loyalty, friendship is just familiar faces and cool people who you talk to on a regular basis but who don't matter and who you don't miss when they are gone.
I think theres room for both friends, and cool people, but relationships based on coolness are completely based on logic.If they are useful to you, and you are useful to them, if they and you both have reasons to hang around each other, business reasons, then these relationships last as long as there is mutual benefit.
The emotional relationship can end overnight when someone cusses the other out. So logic is a core component of any relationship. Emotion is a component as well, but emotion cuts both ways, and usually emotional relationships do not and cannot last.
This is like reiventing the wheel, naming it the squeel,and calling it something new because its a square wheel. This is not new science, this is not news, all of us or at least those amount us who are wise, know this already. They just encoded it into a new physics language, thats all.
...what are the physics of getting laid? ;D
If you just want to find a woman, or a guy, simply go out and keep asking people on dates or to be with you until one of them says yes. If you want to be precise about it, do your research about the people around you, find the one who seems most vulnerable, desperate and lonely, and wait for the oppurtunity, wait for the right time, and then show them you are interested.
It's no different than anything else, you research and learn as much as you can about the target, you ask the target out on a date, if they say no, then you move on to the next target, if they say yes then you go out on a date. If the date goes well, then you date again and again.
The main problem with geeks, geeks don't know what they want, geeks are too picky about what they deserve or can get, and geeks use their brain everywhere but here. Finally the most important part about dating, be honest! Be honest about yourself. You'd think that being a liar would get you more dates, but it ruins your reputation, and when you piss the wrong woman off, it will stick. Don't lie. Don't cheat. Don't play women. Treat them as your equal, and have fun in a safe fashion.
I find this article a moderately interesting, but on the other hand feel :)
:)
:)
that these people may be getting a little overexcited with their
ideas... So I'll follow the example
Are we near the e=mc2 of social theory? Shall we produce a formula next
to rectify sociological programs throughout the world and create
paradise on earth?!
I'd like to see software to organize communities comprising large
volumes of people into revolutionary "collective intelligence units" (ie
like the borg) and motivate and stimulate these groups into solving
large scale problems..
Well ways more efficient than "forum" or "channel" style communication
must exist! Where is the "super" society of the future that the internet shall dawn?
...welcome our new cloudy diagrams overlords.
It's as if they get retarded real quick. It's complicated, but if you want to make a science out of it, it's very stupid to focus on the "physics" of friendship. This is like focising on the "shape" of love, or the weight of emotion. Well okay, it does make sense to focus on these things, but why focus on these things?
If your goal is to find dates, then the first rule, BE HONEST. A woman can smell a liar, and women gossip, so anything you do will spread around town. You want the gossip to go in your favor, you want the legions of women to highlight how good you were in bed, or how nice you treat them, so that news spreads around town and you become a teenage or college legend. You don't want to be the town player, who gets drunk and beats women, or who cheats on women constantly, you don't want to be that guy. Geeks must learn to create the Geek image. We need a Geek 2.0, and it's your job as slashdot geeks to create the Geek 2.0 image. Do your research, figure out how women think and what they want, then come up with a set of guidelines and rules that all Geeks should follow, complete with dress code and language.
...because crashing fat particles together at high velocities is too reminiscent of friendships and lobbyists in U.S. politics.
Disclaimer: I have skimmed the fine article as found on ArXiv, and apart from the obligatory and tiresome small-word references found little to get excited about either way. This rant merely applies to the entire field.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
This is a very interesting idea, saying basically that people "collide" socially with an updated velocity analogous to making acquiantances based on your most recent social activities. I drew something similar out in a notebook once illustrating a lot of people I knew, and how and through whom I had met them (with me at the center, of course). It was very interesting to see groups where people were concentrated, and how those connected to others. Suprisingly, I would find large amounts of people that I had known, all because of one person.
Now, what I found new and interesting from rtfa'ing was the practical applications. from tfa:
Although this particle motion does not literally model human motion, it represents connections among people - and it's these links that contain the most significance for social networking theories. For example, links can represent the flow of information traveling through a community. By knowing the shortest path, communicators can optimize the information flow and improve productivity in a business. With the ability to determine hot hubs or holes in a community, business managers can identify leaders or points that require an organizational change.
That could be applied to business practice, politics, military, world economics, or anything else important with a social foundation.
Cool stuff!
...to describe a riot?
The scientists were also able to apply this model to describe specific types of contacts to produce a distribution that again closely resembles real-life acquaintances. For example, to separate sexual contacts from all social contacts, the scientists assigned to the sexual contacts an intrinsic property that could then be used to model these distinct networks. In this case, the model reproduced the real sexual contact network found in a tracing study of HIV tests.
I wonder how it compares to the internet sex chart Similar properties? Or are the efneters of a different variety.
I'm sure I've been beaten to this observation.. But this is essentially the basis of Hari Seldon's [Isaac Asimov's) psychohistory - he developed the idea based on the physics which were being used to model particle movements in gases.
Score one for sci-fi?
fortune -o
They used Charm quarks
I recall being told a theory about social networks - that it's possible to link every person in the planet with a 6 degrees of freedom system. In other words, you can connect any two people on the planet by a chain of no more than six distinct individuals.
No karma-whoring here, as I don't have time to find a link atm.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
....having the creator of a social networking site add himself to everyone's friend's list isn't the way to create a social network?
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
When you can't figure out why you have no friends, you hole yourself up in the basement for 3 years and come out with an equation that explains your shell of a social life. ;D
You have misunderstood this completely. It is not an effort to explain the shell that is a Nerd's social life, this is already a well understood phenomenon. This research is part of an ongoing effort to find a sientifically sound solution to the tricky problem of enabling a Nerd to find a girlfriend. If you can't understand human females and their social behavior instinctively, analyze them mathematically until you do. Of course it might take a few more decades before we have quantum computers powerful enough to handle this daunting analytical task but until then basic mathematical research like this is vital.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Her: up, charm, top
You: down, strange, bottom
The social sciences have been doing this for years. Why is is that every year some physicist "discovers" how physics can apply to social sciences and especially social networks, and completely ignores how social science has been there and done that long ago?
Hey physics people, next time you have a brilliant idea like this, go to the Sociological Abstracts and type in "social networks" and see what pops up.
The model also produced a single integer as result: 42
Since the scientists could not explain the result, they decided to ignore it for now. One of the scientist was willing to give an anonymous comment:
For me it could have been 41 or 43 as result, but I can live with 42
Asking for further explanation, he denied further comments.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
I have had my own little pet theory about physics and social behavior. Its loosely based around quantum theory. Heisenberg uncertainty principle in particular.
You have a group... in the group people are "atoms/particles". You can predict how the group will react with reasonable probability. If the group is in a theater and you shout "fire!" there is a good chance that there will be a stamped... Its all very well and good, predictable enough.
The interesting bit comes in when you get down to individual quanta. Back in the theater, only this time its just you and me. If I shout "fire!" I would be hard pressed to predict your reaction. Many of you would respond "where?" one or two would say "shut up, this is the good bit" and maybe some of you would duck and try and avoid the firing squad. My theory of mind can deal well with masses of people, but reduce it on only one other mind, then my interaction with you changes the out come of my measurement... For example, I see my friend sitting at her desk staring into space, I ask her, "What are you thinking?" What ever it was she was thinking has now changed,..
like i said, its a pet theory... not a very good one, or very sound, but this article made me think of it.
Off to go find my black cat, its dark outside, I'll throw stones and listen for it to yowl, then I will know where it is.
Where does the whole casual dating/friendship thing figure into this?
where is in that cloud? Is it a pub called Oorts Cloud?
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I can clearly state that high school consisted of various mixed states of matter. Most good looking girls were made of highly organised chrystalline structures, very rigid, but could be reduced to a liquid state with the correct application of energy. Some girls were a good solid. Some girls were perfect examples of Brownian motion, all over the place.
On a quantum level, you were better off dating the larger Bosons, as they were always friends with the best looking low mass Photons, even though you had to put up with the odd crazy bit of anti-matter sometimes, getting into the mix of things can certainly help out generating loads of Super-Fluids...
Task Mangler
You know - that discipline which seeks to study social interactions, which can be reasonably predictive when taking a population en masse, but which is rediced to flipping coins at the individual level.
T&K.
Political language
This was already a plot of the show numb3rs, they modeled social interactions to find a terrorist.
Here are links to the paper in PDF format and Postscript format.
If I start liking Taco Bell, watching American Idol blowing all my savings on video games and hanging at the Mall after hours, my particle velocity will increase allowing a potential collisions to occur without disturbing Eisenberg's Principle or my Bean Burrito for that matter. The forehead tribal tattoo and my mom picking me up in the mini-van left my particle in a stationary pattern.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
And oddly enough, all those links go through Kevin Bacon for some reason.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I always seem to be missing mod-points when there is something that needs modding up.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Applying a mathematical model to the social dynamics of people...
:)
Did anyone else think of Psychohistory when they read that?
I used to always feel bad for most of the geek types (including myself) and thier inability to get women, but then I realized that maybe certain types of people just weren't meant to attract the other gender in the first place. Obviously women are more turned on by the "player" types and eventually settle down with them, and while geek types may eventually get a women they tend to lack certain...prerequisites. I feel this is somewhat of an evolutionary path, i.e. not everyone needs to reproduce to help the species/society as a whole. There are a lot of scientists/world leaders who helped humanity greatly and did not have any children. For those looking to only marry for companionship or whatever, that's cool, but most people marry because they want to have a family. The only thing that's worrying about this trend is the extinction of geek-like people. Or maybe it's a constant, i.e. the a minimal amount manage to reproduce, thus keeping the geek population normal. And of course even in the wildest of families there tends to be the more intellectual types. It's possible to be somewhat geek and very outward, but those people are rare. And it's hard because socializing burns a LOT of time, time that those who are not social spend pondering about the stars, coding, etc, eventually finding that "AH HAH!" moment that moves humanity forward another 20 years. I know it sounds sad but maybe some people weren't really meant to find women. Here's a clue...if you don't really miss not having a significant other, drop it. It'll either come or you'll just put yourself through a lot of pain and misery that you can live without. For people who really want but don't have the skills, I feel sorry for you. It's kind of my situation, I want one but none of the 15 or so I've asked out accepted. I think I'm reasonably sociable but something just doesn't come across right. I do also have this back in the head feeling whenever socializing that I'm wasting time even though on the outside I look like I'm having fun..which may contribute to it. I dunno. It just seems like I'm putting in a lot of effort for no output. Evolution is tough, and certain people get excluded from participating. Life's a bitch, life's not fair, but that's just the way it is. World wouldn't be real otherwise.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
For those who want to read the original article, the final published version is here (for a fee, looks like):v let?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000096000008088702000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=Yes
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsSer
It's available for free (possibly a draft version) from the arXiv network:
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0602091
Bon apetit.
In high school (before many /.ers were born) I used to watch groups of my fellow classmates and think of them as atoms. Collecting into various size groups as their needs/valences dictated. Some bonds were stronger or more stable than others and various relationship interactions would be like external energy (e.g. kinetic) stirring up the mix as it were.
You win! And to think that I used my last mod point yesterday!
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
I prefer to remember one of my first insights in college physics - following a cute girl out of class and instinctively grokking simple harmonic motion.
So, this study tells us that the only way to have a chance to become friends is if you actually have some interaction with another person? Brilliant! Sorry to break it to you all, but this is the way that real theoretical scientists get thier funding. By pretending to be doing some applied experiment when what they are really doing is studying some great theory. The US funding sources are so short sighted that the scientist resort to this kind of thing and we get lots of these silly reports.
I don't know where you are, but I know where you're not going.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Just wondering...did they give the particles beer to see how that would affect how they bounced around in a room? Generally after I've had a few beers I tend to have more friends. At least that's what I remember...