What's needed is some convention as to which binary logical operator should be used when planning a parade which encompasses two or more opinions. Should it be AND or OR? - i.e. should an anti-gay St Patrick's day parade be open only to homophobic Irish, or to the homophobic and the Irish?In this context, NAND would be an interesting one - the "Gay Rights NAND Free Tibet Parade" would be open to everyone except those those who are in favour of both Gay Rights *and* Tibetan Freedom.-- hippo, Mar 16 2009 Kinsey scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scaleRating homosexuality on a 0..6 scale. Too simple, but better than yes/no. [jutta, Mar 17 2009] Halfbakery: Venn City Venn_20City [jutta, Mar 17 2009] ?-- eight_nine_tortoise, Mar 16 2009 Ha - but parades themselves, coming from the military tradition of "ha ha we won, you're rubbish" are inherently XOR type affairs.
When Napoleon's forces marched down the streets of Vienna, I doubt he would have wanted the defeated Austrian army to join in as well.
But, it makes sense, in these enlightened not-quite-so-openly militaristic days to allow alternate Non-XOR parades to take place, practicalities would dictate however some higher-level expression of what was or wasn't allowed - some form of Structured Query Language might be appropriate. e.g. PARADE * WHERE (HERITAGE = Irish and SEXUAL_ORIENTATION in (STRAIGHT, GAY, CURIOUS) and POLITICS < 5 and NOTHING_ELSE_TO_DO = True) OR (POLITICIAN = Yes and NOTHING_OVERTLY_CONTROVERSIAL = True and MEDIA_ATTENTION = False) AND SPECIAL_INTERESTS not in (RACISM, VIOLENCE, SEDITION)
Once composed, the full query could be compiled to a stored procedure held in a City Hall repository for future reference by the general public.-- zen_tom, Mar 16 2009 //some form of Structured Query Language might be appropriate// - or parade organisers should at least submit a set of Venn diagrams to City Hall when applying for their permit.-- hippo, Mar 16 2009 One of the others works just as well. It's whichever one takes the most convoluted sequent to reproduce with NAND, which i think is probably NOR. However, NAND is fantastic and i'm a big fan. Yes, definitely, i like. In fact, NAND should replace all other conjunctions in everyday conversation, which should of course be RPN.To rephrase: ("NAND is fantastic" NAND "I'm a big fan") NAND ("NAND is fantastic" NAND "I'm a big fan"). As RPN, "NAND fantastic is", "I a big fan am", "NAND fantastic is", "I a big fan am" NAND NAND NAND.-- nineteenthly, Mar 16 2009 Putting the "Queer" in SQL.-- jutta, Mar 16 2009 [nineteenthly]'s annotation gave me painful flashbacks of learning PROLOG.-- hippo, Mar 17 2009 Isn't PROLOG based on PROper LOGic? I don't know it but other people in my department used it back in the day.-- nineteenthly, Mar 17 2009 You could put a GROUP BY clause in there, or ORDER BY some alternative criteria, such as age, or - to make it really well distributed, calculate the modulus(10) of an MD5 key based on whatever fields serve to uniquely identify someone (such as birthdate, location, name, national insurance number) to give 10 effectively randomly assigned groups.-- zen_tom, Mar 17 2009 //What's needed is...//
I just *knew* something was needed. Glad I know what it is now.-- wagster, Mar 17 2009 Hmmm! This is a tricky one, isn't it! I'm not so sure about the Venn Diagrams, hippo. Any given parade could cover so many opinions & shades of opinion that your diagram would end up looking more like a Spirograph drawing. I think that some sort of weighting system, or perhaps a geek code, is required here. I think that bigsleep's colour coding suggestion is a good one as well. Perhaps what you actually want though is a single icon that sums up the whole parade. Use colours to represent the party political spectrum, the shape to represent the order:chaos ratio (so at one end of the scale you would have a square for fascists and this would transmogrify, by degrees as you proceeed along the scale to some irregular, wobbly shape with no hard edges for Discordians), a number to represent each religion or lack thereof, music could represent nationality, use tactile surface irregularities to represent sexuality and perhaps a scratch & sniff element to represent the likely level of violence.-- DrBob, Mar 17 2009 "Okay, from 17th to 31st this will be the joint Pastafarian and Broccolist march - the Broccolists will split off at 31st, the Pastafarians will go on till 40th, ar which point the Mustardites will join - some of the Pastafarian anti-mustard faction will march together with them for one block in a show of reconciliation, and then break off and become hecklers around 42nd..."-- smendler, Mar 17 2009 There's a scale? There was me thinking gay was a boolean value, and now you're telling me it's a continuum - is it an integer scale, or are we talking floating-point? It matters because I'm going to have to recompile the database scripts now.-- zen_tom, Mar 17 2009 Wouldn't an XOR parade be between two mutually disinterested parties?
Something like a march of chainsaw and lacemaking enthusiasts, carefully marshalled to make sure none is advocating the making of lace with chainsaws ...-- Aristotle, Mar 17 2009 That would be a coincidental XOR - a proper XOR from the olden days should involve quite a lot of fighting, death and running away, culminating in the eventual emergence of members from only one of the contestant groups.-- zen_tom, Mar 17 2009 Yes, there's a scale. It runs from zero to six. I would say it doesn't work terribly well because some people are asexual and for some people what you do may be more important than the gender of the participants. In any case, what purpose does it serve? It makes sense to distinguish five grades but not seven. Five gets you straight, gay, bi and almost completely gay and straight, but what does seven get you? Subtle and largely meaningless distinctions, i'd say.-- nineteenthly, Mar 17 2009 Mhh, I kind of like the distinction between "predominantly A, only incidentally B" and "predominantly A, but more than incidentally B". It distinguishes the very very large number of people who were "trying out" stuff they've since settled on not liking from ones who are mostly one thing, but open to others. You could argue whether it's worth distinguishing pure A from pure A with a smidgen of B, but I don't mind having clear extremes. But yes, there's all this other sexuality that doesn't fit the single dimension - I guess the final release would have a star-shaped diagram of user-extensible mutually orthogonal practices/kinks/desires and everyone's degree of involvement with them, from Ick! to Oh Yes!
Maybe the parade would amount to everybody traversing their own plot through Venn City, each street a scale, paths occasionally crossing.-- jutta, Mar 17 2009 But then wouldn't Venn City need to exist in an n-dimensional universe where n is the number of orthogonal parade topics?-- hippo, Mar 17 2009 //There's a scale?//
Yes, but you can remove it by soaking it in a dilute vinegar solution overnight.-- wagster, Mar 17 2009 Incidentally and more than incidentally does make sense. I expect there are a lot of people out there who think having an odd number of categories on the scale panders to people who are kidding themselves they're bisexual.I don't know about multidimensional Venn diagram universes because i have a more fun solution. Each operator should map onto a multidimensional but non-Euclidean truth value space which not only rejects the parallel postulate in some circumstances, but is Riemann in some sets of dimensions, hyperbolic in others and Euclidean in still others. So, there's tense-value logic along one axis, modal values along several others, semantic content along another set and probabilistic values along a further one, but not only are there third truth values, but not all are intermediate but arranged on one or the other side of truth and falsehood, in a different dimension, are on a continuum, i.e. real number-type values rather than integer-type ones, and also have such properties as cycling or doing some weird hyperbolic thing where one possible continuum of truth values is effectively infinitely far from the others. I think that would be much simpler.-- nineteenthly, Mar 17 2009 You lost me after Venn Diagram.-- eight_nine_tortoise, Mar 17 2009 But that would be like "the average man thinks about sex once every seven seconds." What did they do, give someone a counter with a button to press every time he thought about sex? I think you'd interpret the same situation differently according to your self-image. If you see yourself as straight, you might discount homosexual attraction. How would you tell? A plethysmograph isn't enough. I don't think it's that quantifiable. It's not completely unquantifiable either.-- nineteenthly, Mar 17 2009 I always remember Eddie Izzard remarking on a shop that was called Guns N Pianos. He suggested that it was a barometer of the current mood on the street ("Pianos are down this week but the guns are f**kin'; flying off the shelves". This idea is not about Gay/Non-Gay or any other demarcation or pigeon-holing per se, it is merely attempting to ensure that the correct social groups are informed as to their side of the fence; Allowed Protest/Allowed to celebrate/Allowed to sit in a bar close by and Tut. Its all important! Frank;y I am with the Venn Diagramme although it could end up being a big one.-- gnomethang, Mar 17 2009 Yes, it makes sense. I can't imagine any bureaucracy being sufficiently rational to take it on though.-- nineteenthly, Mar 17 2009 [bigsleep] just thought you'd like to know your terrible joke was appreciated[19thly] Come on - imagine a bit harder!-- hippo, Mar 18 2009 It could be worth throwing into the mix that people aren't only looking for sex when responding to people. We all need friends, allies, acquaintances and colleagues. We also need to take notes to ensure that we are being as competitive as possible with our direct "rivals".-- Aristotle, Mar 18 2009 I always thought leprechauns looked a little sissy anyway ;-)-- blissmiss, Mar 18 2009 //NAND//
Ah,yes; the logical chicken franchise operator: {fade into dream sequence} Reporter: "Looking around at the smoking ruins of your restaurant, still wet in places with fresh splashes of peri-peri, can you hazard any guess as to who might be behind this atrocity?" Franchisee: "I guess it must have been agents of our great nemesis, NAND1's" {fade out}-- pertinax, Mar 18 2009 OK then, [hippo], i envisage a series of buff forms with rectangles printed on them and various circles outlined with dotted lines. Some of these lines are made of short dashes, some with dots, some with long dashes and so forth. Next to each rectangle is a tick box, and underneath each a further series of tick boxes in three columns. Each Venn diagram represents a number of logical sequents which can be converted into each other, so for example, the rectangle with two intersecting circles can represent P NAND Q, P AND Q, P NXOR Q and so forth. You indicate what you mean by ticking the boxes underneath, but with a left or a right hand tick depending on whether you want to include or exclude the area within the circle. This system is administered by a committee of interest groups and civil servants who meet annually in an expensive hotel in Neutral Moresnet. The interest groups include Irish nationalists, neo-Pagans, unionists, intersectionists, subsetists, supersetists and memberists. The sub- and supersetist groups have further splinter groups including the propersubsetists and the propersupersetists, and there are also atleastoneists and someists. The whole administrative structure is opposed by further breakaway groups including the religious non-Cantorianists and the Fuzzy Logic Faction, the militant arm of the AUPSLAPTP, who go on regular marches to overthrow the committee. They have particular concerns about the use of magenta biros. They themselves have a committee to organise their own marches which meets in Baarle-Nassau. However, among them there are various splinter groups until finally there's this bloke with dissociative personality disorder who lives in a 'phone box on the edge of a field in Belgium, and is occasionally heard to mutter bits of Russell's Principia Mathematica. He survives on grants from the Arts Council of Forvik.-- nineteenthly, Mar 18 2009 random, halfbakery