I actually turned this exchange into a blog post -- I get some of my best ideas from lbo-talk, and the rest from Melissa Harris-Bracegirdle, or whatever her shotgunned surname is this week.
A commenter asked:
Overlapping less but not farther apart?
I love analogies. So: Imagine a room like the one in Pit and the Pendulum, where the walls are constantly closing in and the room is getting smaller. Initially the room is full of a mixed population of Crips and Bloods, who circulate fairly freely. There are some Crips standing habitually to the southwest of some Bloods, and some Bloods standing habitually to the northeast of some Crips, though everybody is moving around all the time.
But as the room becomes smaller all the Crips start to hang out a bit more in the northeast quadrant of the diminishing room, and the Bloods in the southwest. Overall the population is generally closer together -- since there's less room -- but there's also less overlap in the average positions.
Of course this does *not* mean that a Crip never stands for a while southwest of a Blood, or contrariwise. The numbers are averages. Any given Crip's average position is going to be northeast of a Blood's, but their position at any given moment may be the opposite.
And then there may be moments when all the Bloods pack really tightly together right down in their corner, and the Crips come wandering out to fill the space between. If the Bloods are packed tightly enough, a lot of the Crips might end up in the southwest quadrant -- which wouldn't change the averages, of course, since *relative* position is all that matters.
In one sense they're getting farther apart, and in another, closer together; and this will continue until they all get shoved into the Pit. Which can't happen too soon, if you ask me.
Of course the room is also on a supersonic airliner headed to the right; the dimension of motion is abstracted out, along with the size of the room, by the fact that you're just interested in who's more often close to whom on the increasingly exiguous pavement.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
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