Tuesday, November 23, 2010

An odd activity you can think of or have done V.s. When Hanging out, what is the optimum number of friends to be present?

An odd activity you can think of or have done (besides underwater basket weaving)When Hanging out, what is the optimum number of friends to be present?
?Pi^2
(sqrt(n)+i)(sqrt(n)-i), n= let them define
Fishing in a river with no fish6
Tight rope walkinginfinity +1
Shaving my eyebrows (both) for a scavanger hunt (we won)5 (including oneself)
nonesqrt(3)
scalloping?
hanging off the back of a pig delivery truckFacebook
win a lottery 7
4
Riding a scooter in one hand and holding a baby in the other hand5
Cleaned a fridge with the hot water hose of a washer-dryerAny, with alcohol
Dead Turkey hunting3
Prayer-gathering at a Club :)Depends on the friends
6


With this survey I took my liberty to throw some odd questions at people to try to truly discover some interesting activities people may have partook in as well as asking people how many friends they like to hang out with. These two questions may have a correlation between them that could be interesting to analyze a bit later.

A few of the highlights of some of the random activities people choose were; Dead turkey hunting and a prayer-gathering at a Club. Just odd events really and a few of them seam to have been actually performed before. I appreciate students racking their brain to really develop an odd activity for this survey. Thinking of two or three random activities and putting them into one fun enjoyable activity is never easy. When asking the question, I was looking more for answers along the line of Underwater Basket Weaving, or Disk Golf, or Polo. I was really hoping for some random activity that people actually perform, like Underwater Whistle Blowing, or Slosh Frisbee Baseball, or even Hang gliding! Maybe well have to try again next year with a new set of people to really develop some new activities that deviate from the norm.


This later question comes out of my wonderment from the Situational Comedy development. For example, Seinfeld had 4 main characters, while Friends had 6 main characters. While more current TV shows, such as The Big Bang Theory has 5 main characters and Community has 7 main characters. Each of these presenting a totally different dynamic as well as different situational comedy opportunities. A past sitcom that had only 3 main characters was Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place. It seams with only 3 characters the TV show would be more flexible but limited in the number of core characters story plots. With all these different shows using a different amount of characters, I wonder what the magic number is for a group of friends. I felt one show that was really pushing the limit on how many characters viewers can follow was; Lost. Lost presents viewers from season 1 with an ample amount of characters to learn about and be interested in. However one thing this show was limited to was that it basically all took place on an Island. Having a single location to build off of simplified the setting, and allowed for further character development of more characters. Now applying this knowledge of TV shows to groups of friends in real life, we can take the Legitimate answers above to find the optimum number of people to hang out with. We could hypothesize this number to be between 4 and 6 based on the popularity of Seinfeld and Friends.

The Average of the 9 valid answers above turns out to be 5.29 for the optimum number of friends to hang out with. This agrees almost exactly with our TV show hypothesis. This dynamic of about 5 people seams to be working well with such shows as The Big Bang Theory, Entourage, and How I Met Your Mother, among probably many more. Although our analysis is short and our data truncated significantly from what it should be, we have come upon, what I believe to be some Profound results!

That being, Individuals have a hard time of developing random activities, yet we humans are at our social optimum with 5 others.

1 comment:

Kerry said...

wow.
what about college teams that play quiddich?

you are so funny, Matt.