Achilles’ Tortoise

No. Not like that.

One of my friends’ sister-in-law used to watch the ShowTime series “The L Word” religiously. For those of you like myself who don’t follow the show, it is about the lives and relationships of a group of twenty- to thirty- somethings who live in LA. There is a plethora of interesting and odd characters and their intertwined experiences make for good television.

One of the main characters, Alice, decided to map all the affairs around her to a whiteboard in her apartment. This map is refered to on the show as “The Chart.” As the series advances, the Chart becomes increasingly bigger and more complex, as you can imagine.

See the original chart here.

No different from the old six degree of separation social networking deal, but I still find it interesting.

Inspired by my friend’s posting on Graphviz, I thought, why not?

Five minutes later – that’s literally how long it took – I am adding names in the config file and Graphviz cranks out “The Chart” in a split second.

It’s fun!

Here is my first try:

Neat,eh? I like this better than the original one. But here is the question, does the picture tell you anything useful?

For example, why is Dana Fairbanks on the top of the Chart? Is she the center of that little clique? Does she have anything special that make it all tick? Is she all that?

//Sidenote: she is all that, but that’s a different story.

//Sidenote 2: Graphviz has different engines that construct the images differently. I am using “dot” here. “neato”, for example, does not output the hierarchy in the same way.

I thought it might have something to do with the sequence of the config file. So I stuck Dana at the very bottom this time, and guess what, the output is exactly the same.

Hmmm, Okay, let’s push the envelope a bit more.

What would happen, if…

She dies???

I am not being morbid, turns out in the last season finale, our beloved hero Dana, the top of the social pyramid, bit the big one.

What happens to the pyramid now?

Here is my second try:

Now it looks a bit awkward. Lara Perkins is not even a main character. We have Tonya and Melissa hanging out there all by themselves like some lost souls. The pyramid lost some of its symmetry.

Bring Dana back!

I am not sure if it means anything after using it for twenty minutes or so. It is a very easy tool to use and the images are interesting to look at. I need to look into how to tweak some options.

Can you see anything from the Chart? Where is that next link going to be? I can’t wait for the next season, I mean, hear from my friend’s sister-in-law.