UptownMaker

On the bus the other day, as I was rolling past waiting commuters on Marquette Ave in downtown Minneapolis, I saw a yawn traveling along through the crowd. Or at least, that was the appearance- it may have just been that people were randomly yawning as I passed. Regardless, that got me thinking: what is the propagation speed of a yawn through a given crowd? We should be able to express that as an equation, if we choose our parameters wisely. First, let's define "speed", for the purposes of this exercise, as the time required for a yawn to travel a given distance through a crowd in any direction. The reason for that wording will become clear later. So, that brings us to the equation: V = d * q * (m / r) * f(C) where d is the average delay between when a person sees a yawn start and starts yawning themselves m is some distance factor (it can be observed that someone closer is more likely to inspire a yawn than someone farther away- m will have to be determine experi...

So, I cast a fairly wide net in terms of things I passively track for potential food-for-thought. Blogs and tweeps, books, articles, etc- I try not to limit myself too much because I can skim pretty quickly across a fairly vast swath of content, even if it IS just a drop in the bucket. This morning, the following tweet came through, from Tim Hurson : To ourselves we are a complex of thoughts and feelings. To others we're just a bunch of behaviors. Really not engineering related, of course, but it meshed well with something else I saw come through my twitter stream- a post about Dunbar's number, which is the supposedly optimal group size of human culture: the number of people that you can conceivably know about and care about. That group of about 150 individuals is your monkeysphere , and people outside of it are, to some extent, not really people in your mind. I think there's a little more to that tweet than the 140 character limit allows. See, to people who consider y...