Face the Book

Face the Book

Don't look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there... ~Confucius

This short blog is written on these assumptions: Irresponsible and hopeless sharing - posts are not an exact mirror image of your exact self - controlled paradox.

Facebook has 1.1 billion active users and 95 billion friendship links. Facebook users have potentially tremendous reach in a quick time; any shared content only needs to pass a few steps across the network to reach a substantial fraction of the world’s population. As it has no peer-reviewing system in place, we need to think a second before posting anything.

Facebook users enjoys several advantages, it makes productive, boosts self-esteem, improves your love life etc. (all these taken from acceptable sources). One immediate advantage comes to my mind is that you can peer others content from a secrete vantage point and feel perfectly eudaemonistic. I would like to take on two interesting stuff, one is our own identity when doing an act on facebook (to like or to comment, here) and the other is hopeless oversharing.

“To Like” is an action you perform with a computer mouse, rather than our own state of mind. Facebook is an imaginary world where we believe a mere act of like is complete endorsement of our state of mind by others. So the act of “To Like” on facebook is not an accurate way of reflecting our agreement with something being posted, so don’t get mislead. Different people have different way of saying things; a novelist would say he might need 500 pages of heavy prose to express an emotion more precisely. Instead of living a social life we rely on likes and comments for being socially alive.

We live in the age of hopeless oversharing, firstly what’s likely to happen with this oversharing is…..nothing. This oversharing on facebook is getting to a point where nothing substantial and genuine can be distilled out of this never ending and dubious information overload. We are extremely in a helpless situation to judge what is accurate and what is not. Heaps of random baseless stuff going viral, are we taking a second to believe and share it.

What we need is substantial efforts from people on ground level, rather than “facebook warriors” sitting on their couches liking and sharing endlessly with no tangible outcome. Remember your status on FB is neither an indication or a measure of your responsibility on particular issue, nor a measure of your patriotism, nor an indicator for your commitment toward solving a social problem. Those exchanges of empty words only will get you nowhere.

Instead of this endless sharing of religious and political nonsense, think beyond that. Come up with actual solutions, think about how to breed creativity, redefine how we operate in democracy so that big/small, rich/poor all are counted, ideas on how you can impact society with what you have studied all these years, inspiring ideas for masses to respect woman or atleast this (which I believe to the core) helping someone in your own family instead of a pointless philanthropy.

Fill the world with good will and happy feelings.

How Easy to Fall in Love in Chennai? A Statistical Perspective.

Straight to the point, no honey and cream at the beginning as usual.

I recently came across a mathematical equation called Drake Equation, which is originally proposed to calculate civilizations that could possibly exist in our galaxy. And elsewhere, a mathematical genius applied to calculate number of singles in a given city and others to different purpose. I tried to twist a bit and applied to calculate probability of a guy to fall in love in Chennai city, it worked. As now it’s clear that this is not my own idea. But what exactly I have done is used this equation for a different case in study, which in turn is a new thinking.

Here we go.

Adopted and slightly modified Drake Equation

G = N * F_w * F_l *F_a *F_v  *F_b

G = Number of available women for a potential act of Love in Chennai who will qualify for your criteria.

N = Population in Chennai

F_w = Fraction of population who are women in Chennai.

F_c = Fraction of potential women who belong to your own community.

F_a = Fraction of women in appropriate age group you like.

F_v = Fraction of women who are educated with an engineering degree.

F_b = Fraction of women who you find as attractive.

N = Population in Chennai:

A quick Google search gave me a figure of 5.9 million in 2009, so I will stick to it without either any argument on its accuracy or looking into a more recent figure. This will do for the case in question. So a million have six zeros? (Correct me if I’m wrong). Then we have 5.9 ×10⁶ is the total population of Chennai.

F_w = Fraction of population who are women in Chennai.

No Google search this time, I roughly assume 50% of the population is women. So 0.50 of total are women.

F_c = Fraction of potential women who belong to your own community.

For safer side, if you like your girlfriend to be within your community this applies. Roughly, say 5% (0.05).

F_a = Fraction of women in appropriate age group you like.

Assuming you are 27 year old and looking for someone around that age group, between 22 and 28. Let’s assume 25% (0.25) fits in that bracket.

F_v = Fraction of women who are educated with an engineering degree.

Let’s say you prefer a girl who has an engineering degree. To add few words, Engineering is the most preferred course in Tamil Nadu. There are about 400 Engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu and each can host roughly 500 students per year, eventually 2,00,000 a year. Half are women between 22-24, so one lakh women for a given year fit in your condition. If you are 27/28 get all the girls in last 6/7 years who finished engineering 7×1,00,000. Discontinuing the calculation further, I roughly assume 10% (0.10).

F_b = Fraction of women who you find as attractive.

This is very easy to assume since, “most of the guys like most of the girls out there” and most of the Chennai girls are beautiful. I arrive at 50% (0.50)

Applying all the numbers

G = 5.9 × 10⁶ × 0.50 × 0.05 × 0.25 × 0.10 × 0.50

= 1843 women fit into your category.

So now you have 1843 women with whom you can potentially have an affair, who are in Chennai, belong to your community, in your age group, with an engineering degree and you find as attractive.

Now, we didn’t include their choices/preferences. They should also like you, which is “the biggest of all conditions”. Now it’s tricky to assume what fraction of women will like you. I am being generous here, say only 10% like you. We will end up with 184 women.

We can also take this further, like what is the probability to see one of the 184 women on a given weekend in a given month and so on. I think better I will stop here. Final comments: I neither encourage nor discourage anyone to fall in love desperately. When you are in a mood to fall in love, use this equation to know the probability. No philosophical ending here.

Maths, Love & Selfishness

Maths, Love & Selfishness

”Money can’t buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.” - Christopher Marlowe

Love is a complicated beast; you neither can generalize not idealize it. There are many theories on the physics, chemistry, biology and philosophy of love, but none of them convincingly answer any real questions about love. There are different dimensions to love, I would like to take up this argument based on my conscience rather than facts, I’m of the belief that love is always selfish. Which many will agree and equally many will disagree, I have slightly tweaked few cool mathematical equations to support my argument here.

(Warning before you proceed: Presence of advanced mathematics-unsuitable for liberal arts and biology majors. You may either love or hate this blog, depends on whether you are in love with someone or not)

At first, I have slightly alter a three-body problem to suit my argument. (for more see: For models of love affairs based on differential equations, see Section 5.3 in Strogatz, S. H. (1994) “Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos.” Perseus, Cambridge, MA.)

Let’s say Romeo was in love with Juliet possessing money (m) and beauty (b).

Romeo’s behavior will be transformed to the differential equation dR/dt = mbJ.

This equation above describes how Romeo’s love (represented by R) changes with time (represented by dt). The amount of change (dR) is a multiple of money (m) and beauty (b, which is a constant here) and of Juliet’s current love (J) for him. This equation idealizes that Romeo’s love goes up and stronger when Juliet loves him (m) money and (b) beauty. It says that Romeo’s love increases in direct linear proportion to how much Juliet loves him (in multiples of money and beauty). The inference is that all human love is conditional it is often packed with influence, limits, and contingencies.

Let’s look into another interesting formula by a Sydney (my favorite place on earth) based Professor Tony Dooley.  

A₀ = p + 0.368 (n-p)

n = oldest age by which you want to get married.

p = earliest age at which you'll start to consider a potential spouse.

A₀ = optimal proposal age

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, when you want to get married at 30 and at 20 years you start considering your potential spouse, your optimum proposal age becomes 23.68. I am taking this further to support my argument that, at 23.68 you are neither selfish nor selfless. But…….but above 23.68 you turn selfish with respect your love, where you take almost everything you can take into consideration. Anything below 23.68 is selfless love, where you don’t anything into account except love (or mutual attraction).

Below I modified Beckhap’s law to suite my argument, here the equation is bit crude since its devoid of any time points.

The girl equation:

Rating (amount of love/hate) = Money × (Look ± Intelligence)

The Guy equation:

Rating (amount of love/hate) = Looks × (intelligence ± money)

So again these equations votes against selfless love. Some philosophers have actually argued that parental love is the purest form of love and I too agree with it. Love for God, I will leave that to you to introspect. Let us stick here to unconditional love between two opposite sex homosapians. In general, we love others because of something, whether their beauty, goodness, because they belong to our families; or because they rich and powerful. We these days have a long check list in mind before falling in love, and the predominant reasons being beauty and money as represented in the differential equation above.

If you are in an unconditional love, you are less likely to be worried if you occasionally fall in and out of love with them, and less likely to scare them off by expecting their love to be of superhuman strength. Just because you love somebody unconditionally, doesn’t mean you don’t care about what they are or what they do. Possibly, if you love them, you want them to be their best self. You might even hope and believe that your love will help them become that. The “unconditional” part of unconditional love doesn’t guarantee that you won’t withdraw love when things go badly, if you can’t it’s an emotional-trap like situation.

So, love is always a function of something. You cannot love someone just for the sake of it, always there are untold-hidden-reasons guide your decision. In my theory, the very early in your age you fall in love the less selfish you are in your love. You got to redefine how we can love someone “in different ways” which is selfless, true and everlasting. I hint at “friends without benefits” where companionship, friendship, a pinch of lust, trust or benevolence rules rather than the designer-trap with full of selfishness.

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