By Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 25, no. 4, July-August 2003, pp. 22.
One popular game at both preschools and office parties is Telephone. You have one person pass on a message to someone else, and that person repeats it until the message has been passed on, one person at a time, to everyone in the room. You then compare the original message to the one heard by the last person. The results are almost always entertaining.
It would be just as entertaining to chart how normal conversation takes place at a party (or a preschool). Alas, tracking conversations is very difficult – but not on the Pi’s TCS. This venerable combination of forums and computer bulletin boards, now in its 20th year, has a nifty feature for diagramming “threads” of conversation. Someone posts a message, other people reply to it, still others reply to the replies rather than the original message, and soon you have a thriving, multi-faceted discussion.
The accompanying illustration shows one such thread over the first 13 days of the newly refurbished TCS. Abraham Brody posted some information on upgrading Macs and — it was off to the races, with 54 messages in less than two weeks.
Are there any budding sociology PhDs out there? You could write a dissertation on how conversations diverge, merge, and otherwise move all over the landscape, and it is all nice and neatly charted for you, automatically, by theTCS.
