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Erdős–Bacon number

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Re: Erdős–Bacon number

#31

Post by ramblerman »

c3534l wrote: post #22
whalesalad wrote: post #11

My favorite Erdős trivia is that he was an avid amphetamine user. Erdős’s friends worried about his drug use, and in 1979 Graham bet Erdős $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős accepted, and went cold turkey for a complete month. Erdős’s comment at the end of the month was “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank pi…

"I'm not a drug addict, I just can't function without drugs. Totally different."

Going cold turkey to nothing for a month is not something a typical "addict" could do.

Re: Erdős–Bacon number

#33

Post by notrandom »

boulos wrote: post #13
Syzygies wrote: post #7

Erdős–Bacon numbers got their start when Simon Singh (reference 1 archived) was having lunch with me, and I observed that mine was 4. He writes for a living, so he wrote a column. Oddly, I was long ago written out of this Wikipedia article. There is a reasonable ambiguity about Erdős numbers, as people do publish posthumously with him, based on collaborations while he was alive. There is also an ambiguity about Bacon…

Thanks for the background! Why did you two choose to make it the sum of the two scores (so L1 distance) rather than L-inf/max? It seems to me that you'd want to have the minimum value be a 1, representing someone who co-authored a paper with Erdos and appeared in a film with Bacon. The sum will always be at least two though (whatever I guess), but that also (2,2) isn't that far away from the "origin" such that it fee…

I prefer the sum, as it describes the minimum-length path containing all participants. It seems like the intuitive expansion of the concept of the Erdös number.

Re: Erdős–Bacon number

#34

Post by whalesalad »

ta999999171 wrote: post #29
c3534l wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm not a drug addict, I just can't function without drugs. Totally different."

Some people have unfortunate brain chemistry/homeostasis, and are keen to adjust it. It's a real thing. Hard to separate from desiring the pleasure/illness, to be fair.

Spot on.

Re: Erdős–Bacon number

#35

Post by MrEldritch »

c3534l wrote: post #22
whalesalad wrote: post #11

My favorite Erdős trivia is that he was an avid amphetamine user. Erdős’s friends worried about his drug use, and in 1979 Graham bet Erdős $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős accepted, and went cold turkey for a complete month. Erdős’s comment at the end of the month was “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank pi…

"I'm not a drug addict, I just can't function without drugs. Totally different."

I don't think this is fair. I have ADHD. It is not an exaggeration to say that I can't function without drugs - I have trouble doing literally any task that requires switching focus or making long-term plans (including complex, multi-step tasks like "put on pants, go outside, find a place to eat, and eat some food so you don't starve".)

Specifically, I can't function without prescription amphetamines, in dosages substantially greater than Erdos was taking.

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