The seven people lemma nd my experiments with ORkut!!!>!>!>!?!?!?

Its a small world after all!

Listening to japanese music, always makes me quirky. And as it happened one day, I was listening to the sound track of some of my favorite anime and not understanding a single word of the songs, but nevertheless thoroughly enjoying it. And with the vigour of japanese rock, a thought , an idea if you will, slowly started to take form. (insert evil laugh with lightening here!). Yes , It was from a very simple statistical conjuncture, often misleading and errenoulsy called the ‘7 people Lemma’. The lemma states that,

‘On an average every person in this world knows every other person through atmost 7 people excluding himself’

This was what made me spend a whole sleepless night with this website called orkut. Now “orkut.com is a new social networking service named for the Google engineer who developed it, Orkut Buyukkokten. (Orkut is easier to spell and pronounce than Buyukkokten.)”. Self explainatory isin’t it. But thats not the point of this post anyway. Orkut, has an invite system, pretty much like google’s gmail . And, to get an acount you need to know someone already there. So, now you may ask what does all this have to do with the first few lines of this post.

Well, for starters, orkut is the perfect place to test the 7 person lemma. and orkut makes it even more comfortable to check it out, as it gives the shortest path to the person(yo! dijkstra!). So, now adapting the lemma for our cyberworld needs, I had to give the original conjuncture a bit more room. So, instead of 7 people, I had to increase the number to a comfortable 11(also because, I am the perfect asocialite possible!). And started experimenting.

And to say, the results were nothing short of astounding!. As I moved across communities, ethinicities, and sometimes even nationalities, the maximum length of path was mostly around 6 or 7. And the longest path I ever encountered on one whole day of ambling around in the orkut world, was around 10. And also, its always suprising when some person who you would never ever know, and possibly never meet in real life, is just 3 hops away. On the other hand, its also interesting to think about the fact that, when someone you reached through one friend, is even more easily by some other friend. Well, doesn’t this line of reasoning have a lot of interesting ramifications. So, what do you expect, Its a small world after all!!.

Signing off,
Sahil.

PS : any one, who wants an orkut invitation just mail me.(sahiilseth@gmail.com)

my dada (grand dad)  sent his views about pranayam, and here is a part of the reply i sent back

hi daddam,

It is actually amazing to see the results… it is the hard work of the ppl. In the Himalayas who had devised these simple exercises a thousand years ago…. those were the days when there were no BP machines … and the cause of the illness were seldom known and a few symptoms like ‘stress or pain’ the only ways to diagnose the illness of problems inside inside the body.

I wonder pulse rate or BP might have still been able to judge but how the hell can you know sugar levels..?????…

Thus were established the techniques of yoga

1. Which maintain your general health

2. Prevent stress

3 Give work to essential muscles, because many of the sadhus were believed to meditate for long—- so to prevent muscle Sagging…

And now remarkably WE the modern ppl sitting in front of the PC whole day long don’t give exercise our essential muscles… (lungs heart etc…)

Therefore, when after a long time when we do these excercises, we get remarkable results….

(Read more…)