Unless you have been living under a rock since last September and assuming you are neither Dale Smither nor Matt Parkman, you surely heard about this NBC sci-fi series called Heroes. Great production, deep characters, abundance of resources (series, comics, blogs) and intriguing plot.

Maybe calling the plot intriguing does not do justice to its complexity. Hiro’s time-traveling ability adds an unusual twist in causality relations aboard Heroes universe. Many fans debate over which time-travel model should be considered when resolving the events and no model so far seems to be free of issues. However, in the wake of the latest issue of the Heroes’ Graphic Novels (comics that explain parallel arcs), it seems that Hiro has devised a “String Theory” model, representing distinct events with pictures, drawings, and news, chained by strings according to their causality relations. The result is big web (nerd-speak: graph) where Future Hiro tries to find a way to fix past events in order to save the world from a terrible catastrophe.

This is where I come in: I love playing with graphs. My first experience with them came after stumbling upon attrition’s sexchart, a diagram showing sexual relationships between IRCers that has grown to over 2000 people. I started assembling a version of it for the now-deceased IRC server I accessed in the glorious IRC days. Some friends, acting as informants, helped me and it quickly grew up to over 180 people. Maintaining it took me countless (nonetheless fun) nights rearranging the graph.

Back on topic, I realized that Heroes’ Hiro String Theory is a good case for collaborative graphing, so I’m releasing the first version of the graph, which details the most important events and conjectures after considering the nineteenth episode of the first season (%.07). Of course, it is by no means complete nor accurate, but this is where YOU readers come in: send your suggestions, corrections, flames, praises, money, cries of terror through my comment box below and we shall build a kick-ass String Theory graph.

Please be gentle with my bandwidth: if possible, mirror it at will. If you’re willing to mirror, please keep attribution (a link would be extra-cool!), license and non-commercial status (as per Creative Commons by-nc-sa license).

Before someone asks: No, I will not release my version of sexchart for, erm, my personal safety. Not for now, at least. Maybe in the future I’ll release an abridged version but, meanwhile, you will only be entitled to see it if you are part of it (which is the catch-22: how could possibly you know you’re inside without seeing it?).

Mas não se chama Anna. Esses tempos comecei a pensar em quais pessoas famosas eu conheci pessoalmente. Como é difícil definir fama, fico pelo conceito de “se é famoso/importante, tem artigo na Wikipedia”. Tenho certeza que falta gente nessa lista, mas aí vai:

• 2001 - Aleksander Lazutkin, astronauta russo, apresentou uma palestra na EPCAR uma vez. Ele estava na MIR quando esta começou a dar problemas.
• 2001 - Ten.-Cel. Marcos Cesar Pontes, astronauta brasileiro, apresentou uma palestra na EPCAR uma vez. Uma das pessoas mais humildes e brilhantes que conheci.
• 2005 - Jon “Maddog” Hall, diretor executivo da Linux International. Palestra e autógrafo, VI FISL.
• 2006 - Miguel de Icaza, programador. Teve em Porto Alegre apresentando uma palestra sobre o Mono em 2006, depois participou de uma janta numa pizzaria com o pessoal da ASL
• 2006 - Marcelo Tossati, desenvolvedor do Kernel do Linux. Mesma situação em que conheci o Icaza
• 2006 - Richard Stallman, ativista Software Livre. Esteve no VII FISL, do qual eu fiz parte da organização.

Pronto, aí está minha tentativa pífia de lançar um meme na blogosfera. E você? Que pessoas influentes, famosas, posers, has-been, que têm artigo na wikipedia você conhece pessoalmente, digamos, pelo menos por um aperto de mão? Eu sei que tem muita gente aí que vai escorar mais, mas enfim.

Interesting quote from wikipedia’s article about Durex:

Durex condoms represent around one quarter of the global market for prophylactic sheathes, manufacturing around one trillion units per year in 17 factories worldwide.

This means around four trillion condoms are produced worldwide per year. Therefore, assuming that all condoms are actually sold and used, each one off all 3 billion males around the world fuck more than 1332 times a year.

As if…
(inspired by an acoster’s post)