Smart Guys Date in Parallel
There are few people in my life I admire more than my father. My father is the one who taught me how to swim, showed me my first BASIC programming, painstakingly explained algebra to me in fifth grade when I got annoyed at the confusing methods our my math teacher was teaching us, and demonstrated to me the value of problem-solving in high-anxiety situations when I was four by locking me in the child restraint seat and leaving me in the garage. I still turn to him when I’m in need of advice, support, or a good laugh.
Those who know me well know that I loathe Valentine’s Day. Part of that is just me being bitter—I’ve been in a stable relationship on Valentine’s Day exactly once—but a lot of it’s also that I don’t quite get why, on February 14th, everything is just supposed to be so much more hunky-dory than any other day. It’s a day created by card and flower companies to make sure you’re buying their products year-round, since otherwise, they’d have to go from Christmas to Mother’s Day without any real sales. If you really want to do something that will be romantically appreciated, in my experience, you’re much better off doing something random and out-of-the-blue when it’s least expected and your S.O. is feeling down than on a day whose main icon is a naked kid with bow-and-arrows who wanders around shooting people in the name of love. It’s like we have a whole holiday for John Hinckley.
So a few days ago, I was on the phone, whining to my dad about throwing a Fifth Annual F—— Valentine’s Day party and trying to figure out my personal life. My dad listened thoughtfully, and then began explaining to me what I was doing wrong.
The problem, he said, is that I date girls serially.
Let’s let V be potential difference between dating girls and doing something productive, I be current of love, and R be resistance to current flow. The problem with serial dating is the same as with serial circuits. If resistance starts to increase, you’re stuck: because V = IR, and R is increasing, I must decrease to hold the equality. Worse still, because P = IV, you’re just not going to have as much power with the increased resistance. Note on the above diagram that current is a lousy 214 mA, and we’re only able to get 1.93 “jewels” from our relationships. This is even worse than it seems: because there’s only one path—through all relationships—you’ll end up spending the majority of your energy on the relationship with the greatest resistance, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do.
Worst of all, if (horror of horrors) you actually blow out one of your relationships, all current stops until you can manually patch things up. Your love life will be at least momentarily in ruins.
Now let’s examine the case where you’re dating multiple girls at once.
Even before we try the (admittedly more complicated) calculations, we can already tell the situation has significantly improved. Because we’re dating in parallel, we compensate automatically for higher resistance. Even though Lisa clearly is just not putting out, the result isn’t the massive slow-down we saw before, but instead results in conservation of energy, as you expend less effort on a mostly dead branch and focus instead on more promising branches. Whereas before, Lisa sucked the majority of our energy, now Sally and Judy do—at 16.2 and 9 jewels, respectively.
A broken circuit also no longer really fazes us. In the case that one of the relationships completely evaporates (which, let’s face it, Lisa’s not heading in a good direction), we’ve still got other branches to take up the slack. Best of all, because Lisa was high-resistance anyway, her departure barely affected net current, which decreases from 3.1 A to 2.8 A—both radically higher than net series current.
And with that simple metaphor, I suddenly felt much better about how things are going in my life right now. Dads are awesome.
So, in summary, dating serially is for chumps. If you really want to have a better fail-safe, be less affected by resistance, and have a wonderful net increase in power, go for parallel relationships. It’s the only way.
Note: it saddens me to have to write this, but I know from experience that if I don’t, I’m going to get lots of hate mail. So, for pedantic people with no sense of humor: I know that it’s joules, not jewels, and I recognize that the analogies are actually exactly backwards if we’re going to try to match up things in real life. Now get a sense of humor or get off my blog. :)
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Have you considered the implications of other power sources being hooked into the circuit? It's reasonable to assume that Judy, Sally and Lisa would also be parallelized into different circuits which could cause some issues. Especially if the power sources are of different voltages.
To make things yet more complicated, I wonder how it would work out if, say, Judy were hooked to another parallel circuit and Sally hooked in parallel to a secondary serial circuit.
:-D
shit, i say crank up that power source until lisa's circuit blows...watching what you did to lisa, judy's and sally's resistance will go way down and they'll take all your voltage together...this will give lisa time to manually recuperate and start sucking your energy once again
Cool Blogg!!!...A dream for any electrical/electronic engg.
out there...will ask some of the universities to introduce an
electronic dating circuits 101 course
My three partners and I agree with you.
(which is to say, not really. Even for those of us who have multiple partners, losing one is not a negligable thing that "no longer fazes us". But still, geeky funny, and geeky funny is a good thing.)
I am certainly am not tuned into geek life or blogging, but a friend sent me your page and I couldn't resist responding. The poly lifestyle is most interesting, but definitely not for wimps. Living as a poly single certainly has its advantages as you noted, but if you thought a relationship made of 2 was a lot of work, three is definitely more than three times that amount of work. Not certain how that would look in a formula, circuit or program mode.
and as a matter of fact, it works with women as well.
thanks for proving it scientifically. ;)
this will work fabulously for my engineer who can't get a clue.
~smooches~
sthrn
True, but a poorly wired circuit can be deadly, if Lisa and Judy are friends (or sisters or possibly mom and daughter, yea) they will eventually find out. Once these wires cross a short circuit will occur, not good. If they tell Sally a fire could result and literaly burn down your house. Crazy bitches.
What if women are more like capacitors? Current becomes zero as t approaches infinity anyway. :P
Interesting but flawed. the reality of the above depicted diagram is incomplete. You should add onto Lisa, Sally, and Judy individual serial and parallel diagrams, after each of those add a few integrated loops as failsafes'. You'll need at least one after each one of them to inform you ahead of time which circuit is about to fail so that it can be bypassed and the loss in energy negated so that the circuit as a whole is not affected. Now, if one or more of the above noted "circuits" is "related" to another (as jeb pointed out) that could be a major problem in the overall circuit layout. Interesting but you seemed to bypass preplanning on this particular circuit. IMO your main concern should be "Jewel" protection, no matter what! Then worry about energy expenditure.
So, what happens if your loads are inductors and you are an AC power source instead of DC? Does mutual inductance explain what happens when Judy and Sally want a manage a trois?
ROFLMAO!!!!!!! These are EXACTLY the kinds of circuits I used to draw in my Electronics Technician class 20 years ago. I graduated #1 in the class. How come nobody ever told me it could be done with chicks??? That would have saved me two decades of blown circuits!
30 years ago in Elec. Tech. class, we used an old analog meter to 'measure' the resistance of everyone in the class by holding the meter probes - one in each hand. The guys were all >1 MegOhm while the two women were both
Sorry - bad post earlier
30 years ago in Elec. Tech. class, we used an old analog meter to ‘measure’ the resistance of everyone in the class by holding the meter probes - one in each hand. The guys were all >1 MegOhm while the two women were both less than 50kOhm. The secret was: moisturize, moisturize, moisturize. Your dog wants a new DVM.
you nerd.
Interesting... what would happen to the circuit if Sally, Judy, and Lisa were also connected to other circuts...let's say Sally is part of Jim, Ted and Bob's circuit, Judy is with Roger, and Mark, and well Lisa is gone in a different direction and is part of Janet and Mary's circuit now.
Wouldnt the output you are looking for diminish exponentially by the number of jewels being shared with the others?
Not sure parallel dating is a good thing!
agent_k
angus0000 and skullduggery -priceless!!! :) :) :)
You might try just putting some really weak circuit breakers on those lines and increasing your current frequency. So if they trip, just let that circuit fail and move on to the next.
-Otherwise, you're stuck with a trashcan-sized capacitor as Kronecker Delta so rightly points out!
Besides, their thin, frayed, unstable wiring will probably just superheat, fail, arc and end up burning down your house anyway. :) (three -hun- -dred- six-ty five -de- grees!!)