Derek ------> Kevin Bacon?
So I’m going to start this post off by saying that I’m a little frustrated today. It is my birthday (woop woop!), but due to exams, I am not able to celebrate accordingly. I have an exam this afternoon, and then another exam tomorrow. However, my roommates and I are having 2 parties this week (Thursday & Saturday), because all of our birthdays are very close (October 4,9,10,16). This time of year gets pretty ridiculous, and GPA points tend to drop slightly. Anybody in my 201 section is welcome to come, just ask me about it in class if you are interested.
Anyway, enough about that, and on to the important stuff. What did we talk about last week in discussion? Well, we talked about a lot actually. My favorite part of the discussion was talking about Duncan Watts and his writing called Six Degrees. For those of you not familiar with “six degrees”, it is in reference to the idea that any person is linked to any other person through six people or less. That idea is pretty crazy to think about, but very cool also. Anyway, Watts starts out his discussion by explaining networks in a way that most of us already understand. His biggest example is the power grid, and how it is linked. Most everybody in our country has electricity, and doesn’t think twice about it. We definitely take it for granted, but if you really stop to think about it, the electric power companies are huge networks of cables and power sources that link to all of our houses and buildings, and if a power outage like the one Watts describes occurs, there can be mass panic. An important idea I got from this is that people often over look the interdependencies in a network because they are made of many different components. As Watts put it, “The trouble with systems like the power grid is tha
t they are built up of many components whose individual behavior, like that of football crowds and stock market investors, can be sometimes orderly and sometimes chaotic…”(pg. 23). In class we brough up the example of Madison, and the big Halloween celebration. Currently, the city feels they have an idea of how the Halloween crowd will act simply by looking at the group as one, but they are failing to recognize that there are 80,000 people who make up this group, and it is nearly impossible to predict their actions.
In Suzy’s discussion we talked about how power in networks work. For example, our 201 section is a network in a way, and we all feed off of one another for ideas and discussion topics. However, if somebody in our class who maybe tends to talk a lot or is a “load bearer” is gone, other people in the network need to pick up the slack to keep the network functioning. Now back to the power lines. If a load bearing part of the power grid crashes, the rest of the network has to pick up the power and take it somewhere, and if this fails, the network crashes and you end up with a big power outage. The same could happen in class. If the load bearer is gone, and nobody picks up the slack, our discussion could suffer a huge malfunction, and we all sit there in silence. I am really trying to make a big deal out of a pretty boring example if you haven’t noticed. I hope I am making sense.
And now, a little bit more on the six degrees. My question for everybody else is, how many times have you met somebody that knows somebody you know, and then said to yourself, “wow, it’s a small world”? Well, this is why the six degrees of separation is so cool, mostly because most of us link it to Kevin Bacon. It makes this huge planet we live on seem a lot smaller. Watts says the reason this happens is because “Each person has a circle of acquaintances – network neighbors – who in turn have acquaintances, and so on, forming a global interlocking pattern of friendship, business, family, and community ties through which paths could be traced between any random person and any other” (pg. 37). The amount of people you can reach grows exponentially with each additional person you go through. This sort of thing happens all the time. To think that through 6 people, you can link to billions of people is mind blowing.
Anyway, enough about that, and on to the important stuff. What did we talk about last week in discussion? Well, we talked about a lot actually. My favorite part of the discussion was talking about Duncan Watts and his writing called Six Degrees. For those of you not familiar with “six degrees”, it is in reference to the idea that any person is linked to any other person through six people or less. That idea is pretty crazy to think about, but very cool also. Anyway, Watts starts out his discussion by explaining networks in a way that most of us already understand. His biggest example is the power grid, and how it is linked. Most everybody in our country has electricity, and doesn’t think twice about it. We definitely take it for granted, but if you really stop to think about it, the electric power companies are huge networks of cables and power sources that link to all of our houses and buildings, and if a power outage like the one Watts describes occurs, there can be mass panic. An important idea I got from this is that people often over look the interdependencies in a network because they are made of many different components. As Watts put it, “The trouble with systems like the power grid is tha
t they are built up of many components whose individual behavior, like that of football crowds and stock market investors, can be sometimes orderly and sometimes chaotic…”(pg. 23). In class we brough up the example of Madison, and the big Halloween celebration. Currently, the city feels they have an idea of how the Halloween crowd will act simply by looking at the group as one, but they are failing to recognize that there are 80,000 people who make up this group, and it is nearly impossible to predict their actions.In Suzy’s discussion we talked about how power in networks work. For example, our 201 section is a network in a way, and we all feed off of one another for ideas and discussion topics. However, if somebody in our class who maybe tends to talk a lot or is a “load bearer” is gone, other people in the network need to pick up the slack to keep the network functioning. Now back to the power lines. If a load bearing part of the power grid crashes, the rest of the network has to pick up the power and take it somewhere, and if this fails, the network crashes and you end up with a big power outage. The same could happen in class. If the load bearer is gone, and nobody picks up the slack, our discussion could suffer a huge malfunction, and we all sit there in silence. I am really trying to make a big deal out of a pretty boring example if you haven’t noticed. I hope I am making sense.
And now, a little bit more on the six degrees. My question for everybody else is, how many times have you met somebody that knows somebody you know, and then said to yourself, “wow, it’s a small world”? Well, this is why the six degrees of separation is so cool, mostly because most of us link it to Kevin Bacon. It makes this huge planet we live on seem a lot smaller. Watts says the reason this happens is because “Each person has a circle of acquaintances – network neighbors – who in turn have acquaintances, and so on, forming a global interlocking pattern of friendship, business, family, and community ties through which paths could be traced between any random person and any other” (pg. 37). The amount of people you can reach grows exponentially with each additional person you go through. This sort of thing happens all the time. To think that through 6 people, you can link to billions of people is mind blowing.
posted by Derek @ 1:21 PM
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