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sincerity with a motive

sidebar of the people

i asked when the party was. kirk said 5 pm. i thought that sounded pretty early and asked when i should actually show up. i received the tasty response below:

"Obviously the answer must be a carefully calculated equation of how much you like us, how cool you expect the party to be, what stage of the party you hope to arrive at, whether you'd rather be an instigator or a coat-tail rider, how much you'd like to drink, do you want to stake out an area in one room in particular, how late do you plan to stay, are you going to sneak off to watch meteors, how much food do you plan to consume, are you going to play any games, how(un)comfortable your outfits will be, what do you think the odds of EB and family showing up are, how early you have to get up the next morning, how much does the decor bug you, would you like to get distracted in my book collection, do you or FoSOSO have some built in time/crowd limits that could be at risk of being tripped, how much do you think you'll like the music, etc etc etc. You should probably calculate a weighting for all of these factors, plus a scalar factor for each one of how much it should impact the designated arrival time. Your "mad excel skillz" may come in useful for this one, or FoSOSO might be able to put together a small program in PHP or some other scripting language.

Or, I dunno, like 6, give or take 20 minutes? How the heck should I know!?"


kirk, in order to properly derive a formula for an 'arrival time model' i would have to take observations of at least 30+ parties, decide what kind of probability distribution was appropriate for the data, devise the weightings and factors, perform significant back testing and real trials upon the resultant formula, and then be prepared for it to function quite poorly. since much of this data is impossible to know in advance, there would be an extra layer of error from my undoubtedly poor forecast of the party conditions. some of these data points would have no bearing at all on the optimal arrival time and others would indicate a high level of predictive ability which might well be spurious. still more error comes from not having a good enough statistical package to do all this properly - excel sucks. while this might be acceptable in such disciplines as money management, i fear that i'd be QUITE partied out should i make an attempt...
--FoSO
(4 comments)
2006.11.17
That's some amazingly mild weather we've been having as of late. Boston folks enjoy it while it lasts!

Quotes of the Moment
And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people trend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"
Self-mocking irony is always 'Sincerity, with a motive'
Lewis Hyde, quoted by David Foster Wallace
A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler's List
David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"
...all about his time on a luxury cruise. Man, that WOULD be pretty spooky.

As you can gather, I'd highly recommend David Foster Wallace. So frickin' smart! Not the lightest reads, but worth it.

Link of the Moment
Fantasy League Congress is a bit amusing how it quantifies the "political achievements" of our congresscritters. Right now, Republicans lead the heavy hitters, I wonder if that will change with the next session, given all the committee switcheroo that will be happening.