Saturday 16 February 2013

London - Soho - party and IT


It's Saturday and in London you better be out somewhere drinking and cheering up the lads. One thing I really like here you find many things that can fit you well. It's not like the only pub in town where f(n) is only can be written with imaginary tags. Here you always have your local maximum where every f(n) has i,j where every i < n < j is less then f(n). So let me tell you how I see Soho:

Soho is a local optimum, where several nations can find their calm state during the night. I tend to observe social behavior - rather than just drinking ales. It's like a playground, really. First we went to a bar where you had to wait in line even for the drinks. The waiter served our order after 10-15 minutes. That's a pretty huge interval. So first they have to register the order - or keep it in head - which is quite challenging at midnight at a dark place. That interval is basically pre-fetching process. A drink you usually enjoy from 10 to 30 minutes. Which means they have to be expensive and deal with pricy orders in order to maintain the place. One thing I can imagine is a digital order application. It wouldn't be that far from a paper menu and could handle availability, special deals - and also API integrations. Foursquare or Yelp. I'd be happy to know if a guy is having an exceptionally great martini. Actually I'd also be interested to know the statistics of drunk people. How many works at IT, or management. How mant knows script or C-like languages.

Then we headed to a club. No idea where was it. Usually you keep the escape-path in your head only. There you can see social-self-organization (SSO) for real. It's interesting to see the density of various parts of the place. Where are the happier people. Where are the creepers. How social circles are made and where are the weak links. You see people dancing and then a moment later just standing. You know, there was somebody who felt cool and started shaking the bums, the creeper saw her and got the mood for dancing and then this whole unexpected chain of dance is beginning.

For me statistics are fascinating here too. How much time one guy waits to make another attempt for getting a girl. How many different dance-moves they can produce. Do they use a simple move-permutation system or do it randomly? (Which we all know is nearly impossible.) And then you feel stuck between the horny girl and the fat guy - and inevitably wonder what would be the optimal scattering of people on the dance floor if you take the various movements into account. We know the optimal space filling methods - but it's a dynamic system, rules are different.

And then you have drunken guys. What would be cool is an instant-responsive floor that could receive signals when they are about to fall and would make necessary rearrangements to avoid the loss of balance.

These are just my imaginations. I haven't talked about the obvious things. People use smartphones at parties, a lot. They check a lot of things - but in general they interested if anything happened - notifications, baby. And it's valid, usually I'm also interested in notifications. The movements that music makes you to do can consume the resonance of the phone-vibration. Probably we need something more radical to alert us when anything happened.

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All right mates. That was a special soho-it edition. If you have any party-it story - please let us know.

Peter

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