I feel better knowing my homework is done and I don't have to go dredging up forgotten math skills for at least another week or so. Times like this make me wish I had paid better attention to Calc classes back in High School. You know back when Sigma, area under the curve, and the fancy Integral sign all made sense and we pretended they had immediate application in our lives. Suddenly, as I analyze my programs for efficiency, all the stuff I ignored (or well... ignored) became really fucking important. For some odd reason I had HS work with me in my closet, and was very grateful that I took some kind of notes that jogged my memory. Eventually, it was conquered, and I transitioned from "what the heck is an Inductive Proof" to "I will N-1 you! HA!" or something equally nerdy but appropriate. Backing up this C++ bundle of joy were some essays on Gandhi, sex, and community service.
I have also decided that the more obscure and pointless I make my essays, the more the professors are just writing it off as an A and leaving me be in my Technology Tutors class. Next week I get to address "Politically Correct or Socially Corrupt?" I am looking forward to playing with this and seeing what radical spin I can put on this, simply to make the analysis more amusing (and in turn, the work more enjoyable).
And now for something truly interesting. Amidst the math, the calculus, and the brain headaches, I came to realize that many of my links on my website go to the same sites as many of my friends' sites. Additionally, while there is some deviation, there is ultimately a connection that ends at one or two points. Like the issue of Americans and Wealth, there is something also similar about web traffic and hits. But if it isn't money, what is the investment? People are allocating a resource far more important than money into a website. This resource is time. Individuals only have a certain amount of time to dedicate to specific things. The time you are spending now, reading this, is time you are missing something like emma's blog, or missing the last bit of news off of Penny-Arcade. Time is a finite resource, and therefore infinite in value. So if time is distributed by humans who read websites, how does this fit into journaling and the Internet. The answer is something called Power Laws.
Power Laws mimic something similar to a decay function of a graph, growing smaller over time, but never reaching the asymptote of 0. This data model can be applied to the Internet, and things such as online journals. The investment is time (and traffic), and the wealth is in the server logs. An interesting blurb [link] talks about the LiveJournal structure, and what part of the infrastructure exists that lets such a software idea exist on the Internet. In many ways, LJ has "disconnected" from the Internet, where it can't be searched, can't be seen by outside sources. It has become a community, and it shares a distribution of hits within itself. And the shape is exactly what you would expect. A Power Curve decay function. For additional info, look at a really good bit of information done by Clay Shirky. It says things far better than I ever could. It also addresses some inequality of weblog issues that may catch your fancy.
crazy and yet stupid was never your style
[Update: Immediate thanks to Kirsten who within moments reminded me that 2*3 is not 12, but 6, proving the homework. It was fixed before submission. I can do area under the curve, but apparently simple addition gives me fits.]
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