Facebook Science!

It's SCIENCEEEEEE!!!


Hello world of myself, it's been a while.  On today's show, we have Facebook Science!  Because math makes everything a fact.  So, the inspiration for writing this struck me as I listened to a friend say, "Why do I care if [redacted] went to Disneyland!"  And the sad truth is, you don't, and to be quite honest, no one is under the illusion that you do.  Most statuses are meant for a specific person, or group of people, and chances are, if you don't care, it wasn't meant for you.  Now this doesn't mean that no one cares if you care, but simply that you weren't the intended audience of the status/ link/ post/ whatever.  Now here comes the science/ math part:

Step One: So we figure that the amount of people that a particular post is intended for is probably around 10 on a case to case basis.  Then we have the amount of friends that each person has.  I'm willing to bet that the average is around 200, so we'll use that later.  So at this point we have:

Y =  C/F

Where Y is the percent chance you care, C is the number of people who were intended to care, and F is the number of friends the poster has.  But then there are other factors to consider.

Step Two: We now have to account for the possibility that you will care about something that wasn't intended for you.  For this we'll use this:

[ ( |S - 2| ) / 8] = Y

Where S is how much you like the person on a scale of 1 - 10 and Y is, once again, the percent chance you care.  I then subtracted 2 from S, because chances are you will care more about someone you absolutely hate  than someone you moderately dislike.

Step Three: So what is the real chance that you care?  To find out we need to combine the two equations.

Y = C/F + [ ( |S - 2| ) / 8]

But this cannot be because that would result in certain people caring more than 100% of the time, and we all know that isn't possible.  OH WELL.  Some people just care a little too much then!

Step Four: Test!  Let's use my latest Facebook status to test this theory:

"Kris [redacted], Miranda [redacted], Tom [redacted], Wilson [redacted], Cole [redacted], Josh [redacted], Jerry [redacted], Samantha [redacted], and anyone else who's interested: I'm calling it. Tinychat sheesh this Friday at 7:30-ish until whenever we decide to end it."

 How convenient!  My status was intended for exactly 8 people!  And I have 159 friends, and let's just assume that everyone loves me 9/10 (it would be 10/10, but I don't want to be conceded).  Plug it in:

Y = 8/159 + [ ( |9 - 2| ) / 8]

Solve:

Y = .05 + .875

Y= .925

So everyone will care about my postings approximately 92.5% of the time.  But lets be serious for a second, the last part of that equation is pretty goofy since liking someone is fairly subjective.  The real point of this blog post was to point out that chances are, the post wasn't intended for you.  In my case, only 5% of my friends should have legitimately cared about what I had to say, and that isn't much.  So to all you people who wonder, "Why would I care what so-and-so has to say?", keep this in mind.