YGOLANA|ANALOGY

A blog about analogies found on the web.

Economics is like Thermodynamic Entropy

I found one paper from Cambridge, England that is trying to explain why financial crisis occur. There are far too many books available in bookstores currently, but what is interesting about this one, is that it comes from 1991! So, what is the theory? The author argues that economics and thermodynamic entropy have a lot in common.

Here is an abstract from the paper:

" Classical economics was built largely on the analogy to mechanics, as it was known in the time of Adam Smith; particularly the idea of mechanical equilibrium. But a macroeconomic system is in some ways more like a thermodynamic system than a mechanical one, so we develop that analogy. Since the time of J. Willard Gibbs it has been known that prediction of chemical processes - reversible or irreversible - could not possibly have succeeded until the entropy of a macrostate was recognized and taken into account. We conjecture that the same may be true in economics; the direction of economic change may have as much to do with the entropies of neighboring macrostates as with any of the other `dynamical' factors now recognized."

Check the full paper for more detailed explanation, It is not a quick read so if your attention span does not go beyond couple of minutes for one topic, forget it.

Bible is like Software licence

Source: tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com

Editor is like Chef

Here is a very good post from Scott Adams:
 
There's no intellectual property protection for food recipes. And everyone has access to the same ingredients as their local restaurants, at least for the most part. You might think that the gap between great cooking and merely competent cooking would shrink over time, as the recipes and methods of the greatest chefs leak into the mainstream.  But that doesn't seem to be happening. There is enough art in cooking that you either have that skill or you don't. At the highest level, you're part psychologist, part visual artist, part explorer, and your sense of smell is freakish. Collectively, call it an x-factor.
 
A few years ago I went to an oddly named restaurant called The French Laundry. It's billed as one of the greatest restaurants in the world, and you need reservations months in advance. I'm no foodie, so I didn't expect much, frankly, beyond high prices. Instead, I experienced a euphoria that transcends words. There was something about the order and proximity of tastes that lit up my brain's pleasure centers in the most unexpected way. Calling whatever happened there "eating" would truly miss the point. The place is a mood enhancer masquerading as a restaurant. It borders on pharmacology.
 
I was thinking about this as an analogy to where the Internet is heading. Consider a web site like www.Newser.com that summarizes content from all over the Internet. They get away with it by quoting or rewording only the most interesting points from larger bodies of work, and providing a link if you'd like to see the rest. Apparently their business model conforms to copyright laws because they are still in business. Newser has borrowed from my blog, and that's okay with me because it drives traffic this way.
 
Consider that Newser has access to the same raw ingredients as anyone else. Newser's website design is little more than a grid of boxes. The photos - and this fascinates me - are nothing but stock photos that have at best a casual relationship to the story they are summarizing. I mention this site because I am psychologically addicted to it. I feel a need to check it twenty times a day. WTF?
 
Newser's business reminds me of cooking in the sense that there is no barrier to entry. Everyone has access to the same ingredients, which in this case is content from the Internet. Anyone can summarize that content and put it in little boxes on a website. Anyone can buy stock photos. But there's something else going on.
 
Editors are the chefs of the Internet. Newser works, I believe, because somewhere in their back kitchen is an editor who has an uncommon feel for what stories to highlight, how to summarize them in a folksy voice, and in what order and combination they should appear. There's some genius happening there. When I read news from other places, I often come away feeling deflated. When I read Newser, I always leave in a good mood. That's why I return so often. It's a mood enhancer masquerading as some sort of news site.
 
And that's your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I'm adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren't artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn't giving me information; he's adjusting my mood. That's art. That's the future.
 
I know my readers, and you're going to piss all over poor Newser for being simplistic in design, having annoying ads, dumbing down the news, and stretching the limits of copyright. We can agree on all of those points. I'm just saying the editor is an artist.
 
Source: dilbert.com 
 

Governance is like Sex

If you did not like yesterday's analogy, perhaps this one will float your boat ;-)

Governance is like sex.

  • People tend to talk about it more than they do it, and...
  • ...Most people don't do it as much as they'd like
  • At least one key player needs to really want it or it will never get started
  • There are many different ways to do it satisfactorily
  • It's more art than science
  • It's more successful in environments characterized by mutual trust
  • Other people can give you a lot of good advice, but only you can make it happen
  • You may not get it right at first, but that shouldn't stop you from trying
  • A shared sense of fairness encourages repeatability
  • In the end, bad governance is better than no governance at all

Governance is like Driving

If you are not sure what exactly does governance mean, you have two quick options to find out - read Wikipedia definition:
Governance is the activity of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists either of a separate process or of a specific part of management or leadership processes. Sometimes people set up a government to administer these processes and systems.
 
or check this analogy:
 
The government passes laws telling us what we can & must do when driving our cars.  These are the rules - the first step in an effective governance structure.  The cars are then equipped with monitoring devices (speedometers, warning bells if our seat belts are off, etc.) to assist us in complying to the regulations, the rest is up to the driver to obey or comply with.  The police offer real-time 3rd party monitoring - the auditors.  They have monitoring tools as well - radar guns, etc.  But they cannot be everywhere so they have instituted automated warning and monitoring systems (signs which tell you what speed you are going - incenting you to comply and cameras that capture your license number and speed - automated reporting on non-compliance or exceptions).  The traffic court is in business to make sure that non-compliance results in appropriate consequences and penalties.  A safe driving record often gets a reward of a lower insurance rate. 

Beer Cap is like Foam

Source: behance.net

City is like Taxicab

       
Click here to download:
City_is_like_Taxicab_tag_analo.zip (303 KB)

Happiness is like Peeing

Source: twitter.com

Knowledge is like Circle

 

Source: matt.might.net (via 9gag.com)

Man is like Geometric Shape

 

Source: joeyroth.com

Human Body is like HTML

 

Bow Tie is like Dice

French Fries is like Pedestrian Crossing

Pillow is like Biscuit

Influenza A (H1N1) is like Computer Virus

This analogy will most likely make sense only for computer geeks. The post is excellent read and make sure you read the comments, too.

For those not familiar with molecular biology, DNA is information-equivalent to RNA on a 1 to 1 mapping; DNA is like a program stored on disk, and RNA is like a program loaded into RAM. Upon loading DNA, a transcription occurs where “T” bases are replaced with “U” bases. Remember, each base pair specifies one of four possible symbols (A [T/U] G C), so a single base pair corresponds to 2 bits of information.

Proteins are the output of running an RNA program. Proteins are synthesized according to the instructions in RNA on a 3 to 1 mapping. You can think of proteins a bit like pixels in a frame buffer. A complete protein is like an image on the screen; each amino acid on a protein is like a pixel; each pixel has a depth of 6 bits (3 to 1 mapping of a medium that stores 2 bits per base pair); and each pixel has to go through a color palette (the codon translation table) to transform the raw data into a final rendered color. Unlike a computer frame buffer, different biological proteins vary in amino acid count (pixel count).

To ground this in a specific example, six bits stored as “ATG” on your hard drive (DNA) is loaded into RAM (RNA) as “AUG” (remember the T->U transcription). When the RNA program in RAM is executed, “AUG” is translated to a pixel (amino acid) of color “M”, or methionine (which is incidentally the biological “start” codon, the first instruction in every valid RNA program). As a short-hand, since DNA and RNA are 1:1 equivalent, bioinformaticists represent gene sequences in DNA format, even if the biological mechanism is in RNA format (as is the case for Influenza–more on the significance of that later!).

OK, back to the main point of this post. The particular RNA subroutine mentioned above codes for the HA gene which produces the Hemagglutinin protein: in particular, an H1 variety. This is the “H1″ in the H1N1 designation.

If you thought of organisms as computers with IP addresses, each functional group of cells in the organism would be listening to the environment through its own active port. So, as port 25 maps specifically to SMTP services on a computer, port H1 maps specifically to the windpipe region on a human. Interestingly, the same port H1 maps to the intestinal tract on a bird. Thus, the same H1N1 virus will attack the respiratory system of a human, and the gut of a bird. In contrast, H5 — the variety found in H5N1, or the deadly “avian flu” — specifies the port for your inner lungs. As a result, H5N1 is much more deadly because it attacks your inner lung tissue, causing severe pneumonia. H1N1 is not as deadly because it is attacking a much more benign port that just causes you to blow your nose a lot and cough up loogies, instead of ceasing to breathe.

Researchers are still discovering more about the H5 port; the Nature article indicates that perhaps certain human mutants have lungs that do not listen on the H5 port. So, those of us with the mutation that causes lungs to ignore the H5 port would have a better chance of surviving an Avian flu infection, whereas as those of us that open port H5 on the lungs have no chance to survive make your time / all your base pairs are belong to H5N1.

So how many bits are in this instance of H1N1? The raw number of bits, by my count, is 26,022; the actual number of coding bits approximately 25,054 — I say approximately because the virus does the equivalent of self-modifying code to create two proteins out of a single gene in some places (pretty interesting stuff actually), so it’s hard to say what counts as code and what counts as incidental non-executing NOP sleds that are required for self-modifying code.

So it takes about 25 kilobits — 3.2 kbytes — of data to code for a virus that has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 kbytes

Entity Resolution is like Grapes

Entity resolution, (aka identity resolution) is is an operational intelligence process, typically powered by an identity resolution engine or middleware stack, whereby organizations can connect disparate data sources with a view to understanding possible identity matches and non-obvious relationships across multiple data silos. It analyzes all of the information relating to individuals and/or entities from multiple sources of data, and then applies likelihood and probability scoring to determine which identities are a match and what, if any, non-obvious relationships exist between those identities.

If you could not follow above, read this analogy:
Say you want to learn about Cabernet grapes using Google.  When you search on 'Cabernet' you get millions of links spanning multiple websites.  As you start clicking and reading you find you are reading the same text copied over and over again or worst you waste time reading about something like red wine, which isn't what you wanted. You get frustrated and you quit after learning just a little...but what if the thing you really wanted to know was a combination of what was on three websites, two of which you never bothered to get to? Instead of one big list, wouldn't it be better if those websites were studied and then grouped in a way you didn't have to painstakingly click multiple places to learn a little bit more each time? You wouldn't have to read the exact same text over and over because something else picked the bits and pieces of unique text about Cabernet grapes from the websites and put it in one place for you to read.If you wanted to, you  see the actual websites containing the text about Cabernet grapes to assess their validity. Even better, you see the relationship of your subject (Cabernet grapes) to something similar (Cabernet grape vines).The system already pulled together everything about Cabernet grape vines together into one place like it did for Cabernet grapes, so it is easy to read. Maybe you really wanted to learn how to grow the vine itself. If you could study your subject this way, you would save a lot of time and you wouldn't miss anything important about Cabernet grapes that you would likely miss the other way.We do that not for websites, but for files and records inside a business or across multiple businesses. Customers save loads of time, offer better service because they know everything they need to, or find what they are really looking for like a terrorist or criminal by having our software make sense out of the massive piles of data around them.

Immune System is like Spam Detector

From this post about diabetes. Read the whole thing, it is worth it:

The immune system is my body’s spam detector.

Basically, the immune system is a biological classification system. In the simplest terms, its job is to label entities found in the body as “pathogen” or “safe”– much like your email system labels email as “spam” or “eh, let it through.” The trick is, as with any good classification system, the world is not black and white to my immune system; every decision is a question of weights and probabilities, of likelihoods and comparisons. Is entity X a pathogen? Well, this molecular compound indicates maybe, but only if it co-occurs with another particular molecule that I don’t see here; let it by for now.

As with a spam detector, certain rules are innate, built in to my immune system. Any email with no subject and only a link is spam, no matter how many times I tell my spam detector it’s not. Likewise, certain bacterial mechanisms and molecular structures are known at birth by my immune system to be unwanted, and it doesn’t have to develop immunity over time.

Other rules, though, are learned; spammers are smart, and they keep changing to try to trick spam detectors. When all emails with “Viagra” and a link were marked as spam, spammers started sending “V1agra” and paragraphs of Old English text. Enough of those emails get labeled as “spam” by their recipients, and the spam detectors learn– both “Viagra” and “V1agra” are bad, and so is random text from old books. Similarly, my immune system might let certain pathogens through the first time around, but, seeing the ill-effects on other parts of the body, and seeing that the pathogen causes bad reactions, will train T-cells to look out for that particular pathogen, and to lie in wait if it ever comes back.

The problem is that sometimes classification systems get a bit overzealous and learn rules they shouldn’t. In spam detection, this means all my boss’s emails keep getting caught in the spam filter, and I miss important pieces of information. In immunology, this means I have an autoimmune disease, and my immune system keeps labeling my precious beta cells for destruction.

Why does this happen? Somewhere during training, the classification system learns rules that it applies to each new scenario, and it layers these rules to come up with a likelihood that the entity at hand is either good or bad. Is the email short? Does it have links? Is it addressed by name? Is the recipient in the to-line or BCCed? No single feature here gives a certain positive, but merely adds a weighting to the likelihood overall that the email is spam.

Similarly, in the immune system, maybe at some point I got a virus that had a certain peptide– GAD, let’s say, for the sake of example– and my body learned to look for GAD, and to assign protein sequences that had the peptide GAD with a certain weighting towards “pathogen.” Well, it just so happens that beta cells also have that peptide sequence. And it also just so happens that perhaps genetically, perhaps by the luck of the draw, perhaps by the individual variation that is possible in any biological system, I have too few NKT cells in my immune system. Or too weak regulatory T-cells. Or some minor imbalance of another kind. And the weighting against that one peptide doesn’t get out-weighed by some other factor of my beta cells. And my immune system labels my beta cells as pathogens.

And the rest is history. Once the beta cells are initially labeled, the attack begins. To complicate matters, over time my immune system, out of balance and unaware that it’s doing damage to its own body, begins to think it’s doing the right thing by killing beta cells. And so it starts to train itself based on other features of the beta cells. Then it’s not just the initial peptide that indicates pathogenicity, but others associated with beta cells and insulin generation likewise get weighted as likely indicators of an unwanted entity. And pretty soon every beta cell in my body has been tossed into the spam folder, and my body is incapable of producing the insulin it needs to regulate blood sugar, and I am a Type 1 diabetic.

Paddle is like Frying Pan

Source: good.kz

Helmet is like Ball

Source: good.kz

       
Click here to download:
Helmet_is_like_Ball_tag_analog.zip (374 KB)

Cloud Computing is like IKEA

There are plenty of analogies to cloud computing, such as utility, money, airline or office rental business.
Here is another one:
One of the most interesting and relatively nascent markets to emerge from the rise of cloud infrastructure is PaaS. While Infrastructure-as-a-Service forces a developer to set up, configure, deploy and manage an application from scratch, a PaaS hides all of this complexity, often allowing a software developer to simply upload application code to run. The platform handles all the gritty details that system administrators usually handle and lets the developer focus on the software. In the non-technical world you could compare this to buying a piece of furniture at IKEA, lugging it home and then figuring out how to put it together, vs. buying it online and having it delivered and set up in your living room.
 

Cloth is like Magnet

Source: ibelieveinadv.com

Earphone is like Note

Source: ibelieveinadv.com

     
Click here to download:
Earphone_is_like_Note_tag_anal.zip (57 KB)

Chair is like Music

Source: threadless.com

Coat Rack is like Wet Paint

 

Coffee is like Pie Chart

Source: 9gag.com

Oldboy is like Chocolate

I have just watched Oldboy and although I think it is really difficult to impress me, this movie is simply fantastic! Normally I forget what was the movie about before it even finishes, but in this case I am still thinking about it, even if it was already three days since I watched it. There is a very nice review on imdb.com and I think the analogy is quite a good one:

After going through the comments, i must say i'm impressed how many people out there don't have a slightest clue of beauty or intelligent screenplays. there are so many comments from people that totally disliked the movie. which is plain and simple not possible, if you got an open mind and a open heart (and are not drunk). I would compare it to chocolate. You may find it too sweet and prefer bitter chocolate. or you like white chocolate more. Or you got diabetes and can only sometimes eat one. But people that totally dislike chocolate scare me to death. Same goes for Oldboy, you gotta admit some of the genius art-form it contains. Its everything in there. Its heartwarming , disgusting, intelligent, beautiful and lead with outstanding performance of any actor . You HAVE to like something, cause it wont get much better. Its chocolate. If you disliked the movie so much and on a constant basis, why even bother to write a comment? My guess is you just could not follow the movie at all. which is my only guess actually. well enough rambling.

Magnet is like Vuvuzela

Ever wondered how does magnet work? After the World Cup there is hardly anyone who wouldn't know vuvuzela. So, let's use vuvuzela to explain the principle of magnetism, shall we?
Imagine, if you will, a crowd bearing vuvuzelas. Individuals in this crowd can blow their vuvuzelas in any direction they please, however much we might wish they didn't. In a ferromagnet groups of vuvuzela players spotting their neighbours spontaneously face the same direction to play their devilish instruments. The whole crowd may not be blowing them in the same direction but groups of them will. They can be marshalled to all blow their horns in the same direction by a band leader, and once pointing in the same direction they will continue to face that way, even in the absence of the band leader.
The individuals in this group are atoms in a material, and the vuvuzelas represent the magnetic field of a single atom. Groups of players facing in the same direction represent magnetic domains and the band leader represents an applied magnetic field. The point about ferromagnets is they massively enhance an a magnetic field applied by something like a coil of wire with a current flowing through it - this is how you make an electromagnet. The difference between a "magnet" and any old bit of ferromagnet is that in a "magnet" all the domains have been lined up to face the same way.
In paramagnetic materials vuvuzelas players ignore their neighbours and play away in random directions, they respond in a somewhat feeble fashion to the directions of the band leader.
In diamagnetic materials the crowd have no vuvuzelas but use their hands as a substitute, rather petulantly they face the opposite direction to that proposed by the band leader. In scientific language the hands represent induced magnetic dipole moments.
Read the full article here.

Smartphone is like Car

There are so many different smartphones out there and it is getting increasingly more difficult to be able to decide which one to buy (unless you are a fanboy, of course). Jason Himer wrote a post on Techrepublic.com comparing 20 different smartphones to cars. Although he probably did not intended it, I think this can be one way of selecting the device. Probably I am more likely to know which car I would buy so using 'reverse analogy';-) I can see which would be the most appropriate smartphone for me (assuming I agree with his analogies, of course). Read the original post where every single comparision is explained.

                                       
Click here to download:
Smartphone_is_like_Car_tag_ana.zip (4166 KB)

Fork is like Hand

Source: 9gag.com

Broccoli is like Tree

 

Source: 9gag.com
 

Stock Market is like Louis Vuitton Bag

One day, a plain-looking man came with a pretty-looking young woman to the Louis Vuitton store in Rockwell Makati.  He chose an LV bag worth P50,000 for the young woman.  When it came time to pay, the man took out a checkbook and wrote out a check.  The salesperson was hesitant because the couple hadn't shopped there before.       
  
The man discerned what the salesperson was thinking and he said calmly:  "I sense that you are concerned that this check may bounce, right?   Today is Saturday and the banks are closed.  Let me suggest that I leave the check and the handbag here. When the check clears on Monday, you can deliver the handbag to this lady.  How about that?"  The salesperson was reassured and gladly accepted the suggestion.   
  
On Monday, the salesperson took the check to the nearby bank.  The check was no good!  The irate salesperson called up the client and complained bitterly and called him names.  The client calmly told him:  "What is the big deal?  Neither you nor I have suffered any loss.  Last Saturday night, I went to bed with that girl and had a night of terrific sex.  Oh, by the way, I thank you for your cooperation. "   
  
This story reveals the nature of the stock market.  When people have high hopes for huge future returns, they lower their guard about the potential risks. This pretty girl thought that the P50,000 Louis Vuitton bag was going to come home on Monday, and so she lowered her guard.   She believed that her investment in the ONS (one night stand) was worth it even though it was based upon huge and highly uncertain risks.    The stock market speculators are like this pretty woman."

Although I beg to disagree.  The person who wrote this is probably a stock market loser, as he/she identifies with the pretty woman who lost one night's worth of sex with a manipulative man.  As with all replies to people who raise eyebrows at me and say, "why are you in stocks? That's bad! That's no good! That's Gambling".  I say the same to them as with my reply to this analogy, "not all are losers like you, just because you can't hack it doesn't mean nobody can".

Website is like Anatomy

 
Great post comparing website to human anatomy:
 
Many people find it hard to picture a website as more than a bundle of content. This often makes explaining the mixture of languages used and the way everything comes together a difficult task.

Because what makes up a website can be related and linked to the physiology of a human body, this article’s comparison should help clients and beginners alike understand the complex nature of a site’s creation and components.

Money is like Gasoline

 
Inc. Magazine's article about Tim O'Reilly is very good read and filled with analogies. I like this one the most (nota bene he is very very rich):
 
"Money is like gasoline during a road trip," he says. "You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money."
 
 

Music Business is like Cork

 
It appears that music business and cork business have (or hopefully will have) quite some commonalities. According to WSJ article, in the 90s the wine industry was complaining about quality of natural cork but nobody with the 95-97% market share felt like there is a need to take it seriously. Now, they are losing market share big time to plastic corks.
This post has number of lessons from that experience for the music business.

Adobe is like Milk

Even Adobe seem to like using analogies - this one is for their volume discount licencing model

Source: yfrog.com

City is like Elephant

Excerpt from the SEED Magazine article:

 
A few years ago, West started to wonder if social organizations, like cities, could also be described with a set of simple equations. Did cities behave like living things? What were the constants of urban life? Or was each city its own city, an eminently local construction? The first problem was finding the data. Modeling a metropolis requires a vast amount of information. “It wasn’t easy to locate this stuff,” says Luis Bettencourt, a physicist at Los Alamos and a lead researcher on the project. “We ended up looking at all sorts of crazy statistics. I never thought I’d know so much about the electrical consumption of German cities.”
 
 
The researchers began by analyzing the data on urban infrastructure. They wanted to know if big cities were more “metabolically” efficient than smaller cities. Living things utilize economies of scale. But what about urban areas? Does efficiency scale with population?
 
 
After analyzing the statistics, the answer was clear: Cities are like elephants. They get more economical with size. It doesn’t matter whether the city is located in China, Europe, or the American Midwest; every city is simply a scaled version of the same city. In metropolis after metropolis, the indicators of urban “metabolism”—like the per-capita consumption of gasoline or the surface area of roads or the total length of electrical cables—scaled to an exponent of (population)0.8, which is very similar to the biological equivalent of (mass)0.75. This means that a city can double its population without doubling its resource consumption. “One of the basic principles of cities is that it’s more efficient to bring people together,” West says. “You need a little bit less of everything per person. It’s the exact same way in biology. As animals get bigger, they require less energy to support each unit of tissue.”
 

Read the full article, it is really interesting.