15 December 2005

I'm where chain letters go to die.

I've been tagged by Reader_IAm (I guess she was feeling a bit saucy). This particular game consists of the following;
So, Rules:"The first player of this game starts with the topic 'five weird habits of yourself,' and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don't forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says 'You are tagged' (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours."

I'm generally not that interested in myself as a subject (at least on my own blog, in other people's comments I'll talk about myself all day, I should have used that as one of my five)
  1. I eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (Skippy smooth/Smuckers Grape (keeping it simple)) nearly every day.
  2. I'm insensitive. Not just emotionally, but physically. And when I say insensitive, I mean like breaking a leg and not realizing it till the next day insensitive.
  3. When eating at a restaurant I generally order a beer from the country the food is from (Thai Beer and food is always good, Can't eat Japanese without Sapporo or Asahi, and there are some surprisingly tasty Indian beers if you go to the right places).
  4. I've never met an electronic device (other than TV's and monitors) that I haven't ripped apart (or wanted to rip apart but the idea of bricking something of value occaisonally restrains me) and put back together (and the putting back together doesn't always go so well, I'm not nearly as systematic or careful as most people who compulsively disassemble things usually are)
  5. I have noun problems. When speaking, not writing, and only with nouns. "Thingy" often stands in for what I mean, anyone who's known me for awhile usually has an internal translation matrix where they can fairly reliably posit what I meant. Another wiring problem I have is that I am susceptible to spoonerisms (and as my last name ends in 'spoon' that's either appropriate or ironic, I leave that to you to decide).
Now the hard part, who to TAG. I could just let this end here. afterall since this is accelerating out from a single post at 5 to a positive integer each generation within 10 generations you have presumably 9,765,625 people involved and by the 14th generation you have about as many people needing to be tagged as there are live folks on the planet (6,103,515,625). I can trace back this game of tag at least 6 generations (RIA, Pooh, Frankie, Jo, Christine, and beyond that it's behind a password).

So if everyone has been dutifully tagging 5 people with this meme then there should be at least (5^6-1)(or 15,624) other people looking for tagees and there have already been [(5^5)+(5^4)+(5^3)+(5^2)+5+1] (or 3906) people tagged (and for each person beyond the password who have been tag the numbers increase by an exponent of the number 5).

I guess another unlisted habit might be the compulsive need to 'do the math' of problems like this. I think that's a pretty rare habit for a non-mathematician/non-statistician (although former accounting data entry clerk).

So as the post indicates, I'm where chain letters go to die and though I'll participate as far as answering, I'll let the weight of those numbers give me an excuse for not tagging anyone else (as by the end of the week if everyone tagged did as they are instructed every living human on the planet would need to become literate, gain access to a computer, start a blog, write a post on this topic, and forward it along. By that time those last folks would then have to figure out a way to forward this meme to ants as despite their tiny size outweigh humans when totalled together so they could probably handle this meme well into the 20s (but probably not past) (but then, the thought of sentience and ants is the stuff of 70s Sci-Fi films (now there's a remake I wouldn't mind so much, it has possibilities that weren't properly explored in the original)).

1 comment:

Pooh said...

Well played on the math. Saving the world from over tagging is making it safe for democracy.