Philosophy
Actors have Bacon numbers, the number of steps you need to trace through fellow cast members until you get to Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon himself has a Bacon number of 0. Anyone who has been in a film with him has a number of 1. Anyone in a film with anyone who has a Bacon number of 1, has a Bacon number of 2. And so on.
Mathematicians have Erdos numbers, similarly, the number of co-authors you need to trace through until you get to Paul Erdos. The American Mathematical Society has anErdos calculator. It is a lot of fun to play with, although it is not entirely accurate (it gives me an Erdos number of 6 when, I will have you know, it is, in fact, 4, thank you very much).
But these measures are restricted to actors and mathematicians or intellectually promiscuous philosophers who like to write with mathematicians. There should be a similar concept that is more broadly applicable that traces the interconnectedness of us all to those whom we celebrate as being of particular cultural significance.
Our means of denoting that an individual is someone of note in our society is that he or she has a Wikipedia page dedicated to him or her. The standard of social connectedness is the "Facebook friend" relation. Hence, the expanded notion of the Bacon number, the Erdos number, or even the Bacon/Erdos number (the sum of the two), would be the WikiFace number. If you have a Wikipedia page dedicated to you, your WikiFace number is 0. If you are Facebook friends with someone who has a Wikipedia page dedicated to him/her, your WikiFace number is 1. And so on...
The questions then are (1) what is your WikiFace number? and more interestingly, (2) what do you think is the mean WikiFace number? What is the number such that if we selected a person at random, the odds would be 50/50 that s/he would be above or below the number? How connected are we to those to whom we afford special cultural status?
- God's Infinite Properties
A student and playground regular is working on a senior thesis with me about natural language uses of utterances referring to the infinite. He's got an interesting puzzle that I figured I'd throw out there for everyone to play with. There are...
- Why Do You Know That?
Let's have some more fun with this one. It's the converse of "auto mechanics to quantum mechanics," where the idea now is to contribute those bits of knowledge that seem really cool even if they are not directly applicable to anything. My contribution:The...
- Snow White And The Seven Habits Of Highly Successful Dwarves
I generally don't respond to blog-memes, partly because of an anti-authoritarian streak where I hate to be told what to think and write about and partly because I like for this to be a blog about ideas, not about me. But I got tagged with this one...
- To Infinity And Beyond
Apparently the title of this documentary also has something to do with Toy Story? Well, I haven't seen that movie, but I can tell you what this documentary is about... Infinity. The most obvious way to start thinking about infinity is through...
- Pulp Scifi Online
They are getting rare, expensive, and quite fragile. Here is a large assortment for reading online or download. [NOTE: Some of the files have been expurgated for copyright reasons.] Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Volume 15, Number 11, November 1941...
Philosophy
WikiFace Numbers
Actors have Bacon numbers, the number of steps you need to trace through fellow cast members until you get to Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon himself has a Bacon number of 0. Anyone who has been in a film with him has a number of 1. Anyone in a film with anyone who has a Bacon number of 1, has a Bacon number of 2. And so on.
Mathematicians have Erdos numbers, similarly, the number of co-authors you need to trace through until you get to Paul Erdos. The American Mathematical Society has anErdos calculator. It is a lot of fun to play with, although it is not entirely accurate (it gives me an Erdos number of 6 when, I will have you know, it is, in fact, 4, thank you very much).
But these measures are restricted to actors and mathematicians or intellectually promiscuous philosophers who like to write with mathematicians. There should be a similar concept that is more broadly applicable that traces the interconnectedness of us all to those whom we celebrate as being of particular cultural significance.
Our means of denoting that an individual is someone of note in our society is that he or she has a Wikipedia page dedicated to him or her. The standard of social connectedness is the "Facebook friend" relation. Hence, the expanded notion of the Bacon number, the Erdos number, or even the Bacon/Erdos number (the sum of the two), would be the WikiFace number. If you have a Wikipedia page dedicated to you, your WikiFace number is 0. If you are Facebook friends with someone who has a Wikipedia page dedicated to him/her, your WikiFace number is 1. And so on...
The questions then are (1) what is your WikiFace number? and more interestingly, (2) what do you think is the mean WikiFace number? What is the number such that if we selected a person at random, the odds would be 50/50 that s/he would be above or below the number? How connected are we to those to whom we afford special cultural status?
- God's Infinite Properties
A student and playground regular is working on a senior thesis with me about natural language uses of utterances referring to the infinite. He's got an interesting puzzle that I figured I'd throw out there for everyone to play with. There are...
- Why Do You Know That?
Let's have some more fun with this one. It's the converse of "auto mechanics to quantum mechanics," where the idea now is to contribute those bits of knowledge that seem really cool even if they are not directly applicable to anything. My contribution:The...
- Snow White And The Seven Habits Of Highly Successful Dwarves
I generally don't respond to blog-memes, partly because of an anti-authoritarian streak where I hate to be told what to think and write about and partly because I like for this to be a blog about ideas, not about me. But I got tagged with this one...
- To Infinity And Beyond
Apparently the title of this documentary also has something to do with Toy Story? Well, I haven't seen that movie, but I can tell you what this documentary is about... Infinity. The most obvious way to start thinking about infinity is through...
- Pulp Scifi Online
They are getting rare, expensive, and quite fragile. Here is a large assortment for reading online or download. [NOTE: Some of the files have been expurgated for copyright reasons.] Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Volume 15, Number 11, November 1941...