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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
"Hey baby, wanna bounce off me in an enclosed area?"
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.
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?
"or who cheats on women constantly,"
Ok, but your rep can't be hurting you too much if you have plenty of women with which to cheat on the other ones.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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?
Actually, it's not stupid at all. There is lots of research into building formal models that describe and explain human behaviour. Some of it is game theoretic, this I suppose statistical. Of course you can argue that comparing human relationships to molecules bouncing around randomly doesn't make for a good model, but that's another issue.
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
no, READ the ROADMAP. I'm sick of reading posts like this.
human social interaction v 1.0 will be in Geek 2.1.0.4.5. Not 2.0.
people like you who can't be bothered to make any effort installing CVS (make SURE you use cvs-unstable-12-Mar-2006-0435am or later or your machine WILL be DESTROYED. DO NOT POST HERE COMPLAINING IF THIS HAPPENS!!!) and setting up a local CVS branch and pulling the latest unstable-tainted roadmap aren't worth talking to.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
....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 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 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