social knitting

The other day, when I was googling around for info on Alan Turing and his test(s), I noticed that the Turing entry on Wikipedia mentions that Turing achieved "world-class Marathon standards," which presumably means he was a world-class athlete at the time.

I'm probably not a world-class athlete (although there might be a few frisbee tricks where I'm "world-class") but I did burn 502 (kilo)calories this afternoon on the elliptical, which I haven't done for some time.

I also did 120 crunches on the balance ball (in four sets this time), which I've done before.

On the elliptical machine, I watched coverage at Duke University, which mentions that recent events have highlighted racial tensions on campus, and just idly thought about what would happen if you applied a kind of iterative people-pair contraction using an approximation algorithm like the furthest-point traversal -- making pairs of people socially far away on a Facebook or other social network work together for a semester -- what would happen to the social knitting of that institution? as measured anecdotally or using simple graph theoretic measurements.

There'd be some trouble, no doubt, and cries of unfairness, but in a crazy world like the one I like to dream of, you could just apply a theoretical algorithm that makes the system "fair," and hope that that makes people happy enough.

(It's theoretical of course, in that, I theorize it's doable but haven't done it yet :)