Updated again on 3/18/2007 at 12:35 p.m. to make some corrections to the meme propagation calculation.
Earlier this week, I received word from the author of the Have the T-Shirt blog that she had bestowed upon me a Thinking Blogger Award.
A recipient may present this meme-based award to five other bloggers whose postings have made the recipient think.
I would like to thank the author of Have the T-Shirt for including me in her list. I derive a sense of fulfillment in knowing that the content of this space has managed to challenge or inspire others as they deal with the big questions of their own lives.
I also would like to thank the bloggers onto whom I will pass this award, for I don't believe I would have been able to dig as deeply into my own issues without having read their postings or comments that they left in this space.
Finally, I would like to thank the readers who don't have blogs but leave challenging and insightful comments here. You keep this from degenerating into a circus of self pity and renew in me the resolve to persevere.
And now the envelope please...
2amsomewhere's Thinking Blogger Award Choices
- Anais, Dancing with Myself (mostly friends only content)
- Therese, Therese in Heaven
- m is for ______, The Whaling Wall
- Digger Jones, Unsolicited Advice: Wordpress Version
- Tom Allen, The Edge of Vanilla
Getting an honorable mention is Fear the Wrath of the Drunken Housewife. I chose not to give the Drunken Housewife an actual award because she is not that fond of chained communication, and I consider myself quite fortunate in getting her to participate (without propagation) with the last one that I tagged her.
Feel free to visit these quality blogs.
Mandatory Meme Participation Language
Should you choose to participate in this meme, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging.
- If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to five blogs that make you think.
- Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
- Optional: Proudly display the Thinking Blogger Award with a link to the post that you wrote (available in silver or gold version).
A Little Bit of Meme Mathematics
High school level math text books that deal with logarithms usually feature a word problem on the propagation of chain letters. Blog memes function the same way. If the person starting the meme gives the award to five recipients, and each recipient complies, and the process keeps repeating, the number of awards for each round will increase exponentially (5^i, where i = the number of rounds of awards).
A question one might ask is: Assuming that every recipient participates and succeeds in getting five additional recipients to participate in kind, how many iterations would it take for the entire blogosphere to have such an award? To answer the question, we need an estimate on the size of the blogosphere and a formula for computing exponential sums. To get the former, I'll use a blogger's critique of the Technorati estimate made in August 2006. The latter can be found as a MathWorld encyclopedia entry. A little massaging gives the formula:
The left hand side of the formula is what we're trying to compute, and the right hand side is much easier to calculate. We can then equate the right hand side with our estimate of the blogosphere, which we call a.
The goal then becomes to solve this equation for M, which can be done with some algebraic manipulation.
Setting r = 5, a = estimate of 1.6 million bloggers, and solving for M, we get a value of M = 8.74. That means it would take about 9 rounds.
For those of you who think that this is algebraic hocus pocus, I've included a small C program that computes the sum using the brute force formula.
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
int i;
const double memeChildren = 5.0;
const double blogosphereSize = 1.6e+6;
double runningProduct = 1;
double runningSum = 0;
for (i = 1; runningProduct < blogosphereSize; ++i)
{
runningProduct *= memeChildren;
runningSum += runningProduct;
printf("round %d:, number of recipients: %e\n", i, runningSum);
}
return 0;
}
And here is its output:
round 1:, number of recipients: 5.000000e+000
round 2:, number of recipients: 3.000000e+001
round 3:, number of recipients: 1.550000e+002
round 4:, number of recipients: 7.800000e+002
round 5:, number of recipients: 3.905000e+003
round 6:, number of recipients: 1.953000e+004
round 7:, number of recipients: 9.765500e+004
round 8:, number of recipients: 4.882800e+005
round 9:, number of recipients: 2.441405e+006
The "e+nnn" in the recipient count is to be read as "times ten to the nnnth power.
So how many generations did it take for me to get awarded? I managed to walk the entire chain of posts back to the originator, and here they are in reverse order, from leaf to root.
- Have the T-shirt
- ScrapbookingWithWords.com
- Iced Mocha
- Daily Piglet
- Ghost Stories
- My Grimm Reality
- Xalpharis.com
- The Fifth Column
- Original Man
- A Work of Art: Raising Our Exceptional Son
- The Journey
- Under the Mad Hat
- Bub andPie
- So Fast Away: Journal of a Joyful, Grateful, Manic Melancholic
- Life, the Ongoing Education
- CaliforniaTeacherGuy
- History Is Elementary
- another history blog
- Primordial Blog
- Sandwalk
- Greg Laden
- The Thinking Blog
Wow! 22 levels of award recipients separate me from the originating blog. That's more than double the best case estimate of 9 levels that I back-of-the-enveloped out in the original version of this post. It's interesting to look at the domains of interest for each blog. Along the way, one passes through a thicket of parenthood blogs, and as you get closer to the root, the focus shifts to education and science.
We all may be connected in more ways than we know. Paradoxically, that lack of awareness might be both a shame and a source of sanity, depending on where those connections lead.
9 comments:
Wow, I am honored! Thank you very much, 2am my friend. I think it may be more my comments here and my private emails and IMs may have prompted you to award me this honor, but I guess my blog is pretty interesting, too, and probably quite thought-provoking at times. I mostly use it to sort through my own thoughts and feelings, with the help of a few online friends.
If any of 2am's readers would like to read my blog, just comment over on mine and let me know who you are (what blog you write or just that you read here) and I'll probably let you in to read the substantive stuff. You'll need a LiveJournal account of your own to read it. Just so you know, I am married and very much involved, emotionally and sexually, with a married man, and that's mostly what my blog discusses. There is a heavy element of kink to our relationship, and I write explicitly about that once in a while (though probably not often enough to reflect the true proportion in real life). If any of that will disturb you, well, be forewarned. (Oh, and in case you are wondering, I have been discouraging 2am from even thinking about having an affair.)
Thanks again, 2am. I really enjoy reading your blog, too. I think it's probably the single blog I check on most often. Then again, you are alphabetically at the top of my private list. :-)
Hi 2am, I am on my volunteer work shift so I can only peruse your blog with half of my attention but I like it already and especially the links to thinking blogs and it seems that the two I had time to look at deal with diverse sexualities which I like alot. So I wanted to invite you to my blog as well it is metaphysicalpussy.blogspot
Well, I have to say, I certainly chose the best 'thinking' blogger out there to pass this too!
While the entire Mathematical equation went right over my blond head (and how sad is that? I make my living in numbers?) I love that you tracked this back and I find it humorous the path it took.
Should be interesting to see where else it lands.
The maths went right over my head - but the chain is certainly interesting! Thank you for doing this :)
Very interesting observation! Thank you for adding more to the meaning of these awards. This post means a lot to us "thinkers" =)
However, I doubt everyone is be willing to participate so I'm not surprised with the results you found.
i'm honored. not so much that i got a thinking blogger award (though it totally makes my month) but that it was YOU that awarded it to me. cuz you're like smart and stuff.
ok... now to figure out who i'm going to award it to... i'm assuming i should list those who have not yet received it?
m is for megalomaniac writes:
ok... now to figure out who i'm going to award it to... i'm assuming i should list those who have not yet received it?
The rules don't say anything about giving the award to a prior recipient, but I think the spirit of the meme presumes that you will attempt to pass it on to those who don't have an award yet. In computer science speak, the chain of award recipients should be a directed acyclic graph.
Your question brings up a problem with the sustainability of a successful meme. With each successive round, the pool of potential recipients shrinks at an increasingly faster rate. A similar problem manifests itself in pyramid investing schemes.
--
2amsomewhere
First of all, I'd like to thank my manager and the producer...(Whoops! That's my acceptance speech for the Academy Awards)
I've been out of town and so didn't see this sooner. But what a nice surprise it was when I did!
I have to concur with M is for Megalomaniac's comment that it is meaningful (and humbling I might add) coming from someone who does such an awful lot of thinking already! Thank you very much for this.
You know, 2am, yours was one of the very first blogs I started reading. I appreciate your thoughtful and analytical approach to coping with your struggles, and also appreciate that you put them in a place where they can be of benefit to others. Blogging is obviously therapy for the writers, but is often therapy for the readers as well.
I'm glad that you brought up pyramid scams, er, schemes. A few years back, a relative asked me to come to a demo, since he know that "as a businessman" I'd be "interested in making money."
"Is this Scamway?"
"Oh no, it's _____."
So I get there and of course it's Scamway. So after mentally shooting daggers at my kinfolk, I politely listened to the spiel, and asked intelligent questions. When the "demo" was over (during which the main guy admitted that they "discourage" newbies from telling people that it's a Scamway presentation) he asked if I were interested.
I pulled out my TI Business Analyst calculator, (it does factorials) I pointed out just how many relatives, friends, and cow-orkers I would need in order to make as much money as they claimed - virtually impossible when living out in East Podunk, because if even 1/10th of them started their own sub-level, then we'd all be buying from each other inside of two years.
They got upset, and my relatives later got upset with me for making them feel foolish. They bought into it anyway. That lasted for maybe two years.
I, of course, had to be hospitalized for lockjaw treatments... because of all the tongue-biting that I had to do.
The Edge of Vanilla
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