James - very cool. let me know if you'd like a stylized venn diagram to accompany your article. On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:45 PM, Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote:

You could use "A friends B" in the sense of the Facebook social network; that's symmetric and still has one syllable for your washerwoman song.

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 12:08 PM, James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu> wrote:

...

Lots of helpful responses; thanks, everyone!

I was indeed assuming that "A knows B" is a symmetric relation. And it's not clear to me that this agrees with most people's informal use of the word.  I'll have to think about this.

Jim

_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun

-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com

_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun