the hard sciences and the soft sciences

I had a chance to read up on that Dunbar's number last night.  It was a little disappointing because the methods for determining it, seemed a little loose.  Well that is the problem with social sciences, they are all a little loosey goosey for a physics groupie such as myself.  Not that certain areas of physics don't have their own oddities,  There is the apocryphal story of the guy lecturing students on muons and gluons or some such, and he notices that there is some eye-rolling going on in the audience and he gets a little annoyed and he is about to say, "Say now, it's not like we are making this all up," but he stays his tongue because he realizes that they are making this all up. 

Anyway physicists  have an easier job than sociologists because electrons are easier to study than that huge ape brain, each one of them a little different.  All electrons are exactly alike.  Though you have to wonder how physicists know that.  The other thing is that since sociologists study people there is a lot more interest in it, and politics gets involved with different ideologies favoring different theories.

So the generally agreed on Dunbar number of 150 is not hard like the mass of an electron that everybody agrees is: approximately9.109×10−31 kilograms, or5.489×10−4 atomic mass units. On the basis of Einstein's principle of mass–energy equivalence, this mass corresponds to a rest energy of 0.511 MeV.    I don't know why I had to look up that number, you would think it would be at the tip of every physics groupie's tongue.

Anyway common sense says there has to be some kind of Dunbar number.  At Mom and Pop's grocery there may be no need for anything other than the weekly schedule of who shows up for work,  but when you get to running Wal-Mart you need at least several volumes and a separate division just to keep track of those rules and probably another book just to cover how those guys do their job.

So that's what I was getting to in the rise of civilization, within the tribe everybody knew each other and things worked out well enough, but when it got bigger, there had to be rules, and really you are going to have some kind of written language so that there is a book of some sort to consult when you have disagreements.


I have to admit that I found myself tuning in to Trump's West Virginia pep rally between the innings of last night's Cub game.  I know it's a sickness because if, or when, he says something truly outrageous I'll be able to see it two or three times an hour in clips on CNN, but you know you want to be there when he says it, like it's better to see the baseball soaring over the wall rather than read the box score the next day.  But he seemed to be more on script, his sentences were longer and grammatical, and beyond the repeat of no collusion there wasn't anything new.  He didn't say anything about  Cohen though.  I think Cohen is the dagger closest to his vile and slimy heart, but that, like all things, is subject to change.