216: Romantic Drama Equation
| Romantic Drama Equation |
 Title text: Real-life prospective-pairing curves over things like age can get depressing. |
Explanation
The equations in the comic and the graph show how many different love pairs can be made if you know number of females and males in a group. The text explains that it was inspired by TV Romantic Drama, but of course the formula is valid for any group of people. There are two graphs and equations - gay option is the case when we are looking for pairs with same gender, straight option in for heterosexual equations. The interesting/funny part about the results is that in most cases there are more possibilities when we consider the homosexual option. Also it is interesting to observe what is kind of obvious - in the heterosexual case the "best" case is if both genders are present equally and the possibilities drop very fast if there is substantial difference between genders.
Transcript
- TV Romantic Drama Equation (Derived during a series of "Queer as Folk" episodes)
- [A table shows equations for possible romantic pairings in a TV show. The equation under "gay" is n(n-1) = 2+x(x-n); the equation under "straight" is x(n-x).]
- x: Number of male (or female) cast members.
- n: total number of cast members.
- [A graph plots pairings (for large casts) against cast makeup. Each of the above equations forms a curve. "Gay cast" starts high for an all male cast, dips down at 50/50 cast makeup, and then rises again for all female. "Straight cast" starts at zero for an all male cast, peaks at 50/50 cast makeup, and then drops to zero again for an all female cast. The two curves intersect at two points close to the middle.]
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