h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: The Bore-Bridge Egg Theory - A843527
Author: Dr Montague Trout - U188966

Go on - let's see how long this can last before I have to take it back anbd submit it to Master B's collaboratvie on unconventional theories.

Am looking for support from the "Girl Ben Who's Doing it in a Tin" here.

Before I say something about the article, I have a few questions:

According to the entry, that Egg Shell looks like a cuboid. Correct?

How is a 3D hypothenuse constructed?

Do the axes span in both direction (positive and negative)?

Is there some reference you could give?

Sorry, but since there is no graphics ...

Hi there Dr M, you subversive old thing, you!

Ok PR, leddim havvit! akk-akk-akk!

Suffice to say I enjoyed working my way through this very fine piece of academic dexterity.

the whole 3D illustration thing reminded me of an idea i once had for a kind of 'installation' in the 'artistic' sense. I wanted to produce a computer programme that would provide a highly detailed map of the world, extremely versatile in terms of zoom, and equally equipped with a 4th dimensional aspect. time would be shown in terms of distance away from the planet surface.

bear with me

so, you then plot a series of co-ordinates, illustrating the whereabouts of a single individual at every moment in their life. time would cause this point to move away from the surface, of course but only at a very slow rate; just enough to differentiate between being somewhere at one stage, and again later on. I picture a life as being like an ever-rising paper-thin line, solid between the point in time and the planet surface. How interesting it would look would probly depend a lot on where people travelled to, and where the zoom was set to.

For example, take a 19th century farm labourer. There'd be no point setting the zoom much further than the area within a mile of his home, most days! whereas if you take an average airline pilot you'd have to be able to see the whole planet, so zoom out, baby!

I also thought of comparing more than one person's 'lifeline', seeing where the crossed each other. For a couple, the lines would be very different until they met and then become intertwined (though not identical, of course. And at the other extreme, imagine you go on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday to... well, anywhere but only once, that bit of the thread would be all alone, and might cross a thread of, say, some guy in the street somewhere in this place, just one time, for one solitary moment, their paths cross. I like that sense of lives passing in the night.

sorry about going off on one in your thread. All the best with the theory. Do read the Post? Have I pointed you in the direction of our li'l <./>agg-gag</.> column there before? Yes hundreds of times? ok, I won't bore you with it now, then. I only mention it coz Ben's piece is one of ish 42's featured entries.

cya
spiff

You have asssumed that compatability is aligned with similarity, whereas it may in fact be an inverse relationship. For example is it possible for any of these figures to be negative ? The model would also imply that people excessively blessed in any particular area may find themselves so off the scale as to be unable to find anyone they could form a relationship with.

Should the relationship be based upon opposites - then the 'pretty women out walking with gorillas' syndrome could reasonably be explained......

No.

I see some tweaking is required. First of all it is important to note that each person needs to be graded twice.

The first grading is to see where you fit on your own gender population axes, e.g., how you measure up in each department in terms of your own gender. If you score 1 for beauty you are the optimum. Score 0 ... and you're plug ugly. Likewise intelligence, score 1 for genius+ and 0 for complete and utter simpleton. Likewise for the other one, 1 for magnetic charisma, 0 for the charisma of a magnet. Put all of one sex-kind onto one set of axes and you'll have a sort of squarish bee-swarm with a dense-spot around 0.5, 0.5, 0.5.

Then you personally need to be measured to see what you can achieve in terms of the opposite sex, in each of the same three attributes and plot those maxima on their gender population axes, not your own. Then you link these three points with (not a cuboid but) an eight part of a sphere, or as close to you can get, depending on where you scored on each of the 3 axes. That is your Bore-Bridge egg-shell. The 3-d hypotenuse is the SQRT(x2 + y2 + z2) using your personal achievable maxima (not your own characteristics). Draw the line. Where it passes through the shell is the Fawcett Point.

Likewise someone of the opposite sex will draw their personal egg-shell and fawcett point on your-axes. If you fall outside their shell, you are out bounds to them, unachievable. If you fall inside their shell, you are fair game ... watch out. If you're inside their yolk, then they won't even give you the time of day ... probably.

I still don't get it.

Which guy could have a date with a (0.7,0.7,0.7) girl? Or, more accurately, with a (x,y,z) girl with x²+y²+z² > 1?

The 3-d hypotenuse is not a point ... it is a line in 3-d space.

Yes, I know.

'First of all it is important to note that each person needs to be graded twice.' -- Well, (1) everybody has a position in his sex'es space, and (2) everybody has desires concerning the partner. But the two positions you describe in your posting both look pretty much like position (1). I'm totally lost.

Well, I understood it this way: If I am male and I have the three qualities a,b,c with a,b,c \in [0;1], then in the female xyz space my reachable partners are within the ellipsoid sector defined by (x/a)²+(x/b)²+(x/c)² < 1.

But then all women with x²+y²+z² > 1 can never be reached even not by the Ghandi-Einstein-Adonis a=b=c=1.

Yes. You're a better man than me gunga-cefpret.

The way I see it is that

(a) the shell need not be regular ... perhaps it can be cuboid as you stated in Post 2 (sorry) for Ghandi-Einstein-Adonis. Sorry to have doubted you. Maybe it can be like a jelly, sort of wobbling?

or (somewhat controversially)

(b) the (1,1,1) woman doesn't exist! The woman who is one-third-root-three on all three axes (Carol Phwoar-derman?) is equaivalent in radial distance from the origin to the three women (1,0,0), (0,1,0) and (0,0,1) ... as such she is the ultimate woman on that direction-vector.

I'm glad I've managed to convey the idea of how the theory works anyway, even if it is turning out to be funadmentally flawed. Still Newtonian Physics fails at its extremeties doesn't it?

Trout

In practice, scenario 1 would work because Ghandi-Einstein-Adonis does he?

The only thing I couldn't understand was paboply. Do you mean panoply?


Alji (Join The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

Yes that's right. N and B are inconveniently juxtapositioned ob my keynoard.

This entries looking better all the time - although I don't think it's an adequate substitute for 'getting a life and going down the pub.'

Master N

Do you mean I should go down the pub, you should go down the pub, or anyone looking for their perfect mate should go down the pub?

Whichever, it's a sound philopsophy which has always worked for me.

DMT

to that

B

I remember that when I sat together with some fellow students in one of these tiny student appartements, we created similar ideas. A pity that this thread cannot do the same. After half an hour we would have something ready for publication in Nature (with h2g2 in the references list).

Let us assume that there are n characteristic features that are of importance. (In DMT's case, n was 3.) Now this spans an n dimentional space of sexiness. All axes must be normalised, i.e. there are only values between 0 and 1, and no units. As DMT said, for eg beauty, 0 means Arafat, 1 means Clooney.

This enables us to define the randy surface, which essentially is the number of points where the weighted mean of the n values of a person equals 1. It is sensible to take a weighted mean, because in reality certain weaknesses might be ironed out by other strengths. It's defined by the following: (i = 1..n)

(1) 1/E_i * F_i(x_i) = 1.

(I used Einstein's sum convention here.) The F's must meet the following conditions:

(2) F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1
(3) F'(x) > 0.

The E_i are the values DMT suggested; I call them the expectation limits. they are the intersections with the axes. The F's are mapping functions from [0;1] to [0;1].

The essential question is which F's to use. Actually it doesn't matter, because we don't know what the values on the axes exactly mean anyway. So we can choose F's that lead to sophistically looking randy surfaces. By the way, normally we will choose F's that are the same for all i, although this is not necessary.

Let F(x):=x. That's boring, because then the randy surface is a triangular plane connecting the three limit values on the axes.

Let F(x):=x². That's the egg shell, a (hyper-)ellipsoid, or actually a quandrant of such a thing.

Let F(x):=sqrt(x). That's some sort of hyperboloid, with a negative spatial curvature. It represents a behaviour where small values of a certain feature (eg intelligence) rapidly outweigh another feature (eg beauty), however the difference between 'much' and 'very much' is not so important. An interesting mapping, too.

There are also randy surfaces that may be called anholonomic, because their surfaces can't be described by functions but only by other means, eg systems of unequations. Examples are people who want to have a certain intelligence, no matter what the other properties are, or people that want a certain minimum in all properties, regardless of their inter-relations. Cases where people are intimidated by eg a too big intelligence or beauty must be seen as anholonomic, too.

And, indeed, you have to have two of such randy surfaces: Your personal expectations and the other person's expectations, defined by two n-tuples (E_i). Your qualities and the other person's qualities are mere points in the sexiness space, also two n-tuples (q_i), which both must be outside the respective other's surface:

1/E_i * F_i(q_i) > 1.

That's it. At least that is the formula of *special* attractiveness. The formula of *general* attractiveness is the anholonomic case:

F_i(E_i,q_j) > 0

(with i again 1..n, and j, too.) Note that the F_i have a totally different meaning here, they stand for arbitary expressions.

It makes also sense to define the volume of pretension P by the spatial integral between the axial planes and the randy surface. The calculation of P for special cases (special F_i's, relative attractiveness) remains as an exercise for the reader.


I hope that nothing is clear anymore. If you have any confusion you might want to add, don't hesitate.

n=3 for convenience of thought. In reality, n is probably more.

This is precisely why mathematicians don't have many girlfriends.

B