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Balls are Geeks

March 14, 2008 at 12:14 AM · Posted under · Tagged with geek, life

It’s true. We Balls are just super geeks. From our parents embracing of all cool technology, it just gets more geeky. From cooking to programming to videogames to music, we just love to know, which is the true essence of being geek.

Through reddit I found Matt Ball’s blog post Is 91 prime? (also in the quicklinks). Geeky last name? For sure. Post on mathematics? Check. Personal wiki? Oh yeah. Fan of NCAA men’s basketball? Yes!

I swear it’s like we’re related or something.

mom said

Mar 14, 2008 @ 01:09 PM

you actually might be cousins. uncle frank (granddaddy’s younger brother, one of twins) has a couple of guys about donald’s age, if memory serves, that are mathematical, computer geeks, etc. judy would know names and ages.

Mom said

Mar 14, 2008 @ 03:10 PM

laughing at myself…It would seem more likely that Uncle Robert’s kid’s kid would be Donald’s/your age. AND surely Matt could tell you his family info if you wanted to ask…of course Judy can too. Anyway there are definitely some computer/math geeks stemming from that part of the family. I remember Frank chatting about such.

Stephen said

Mar 16, 2008 @ 12:23 AM

That was actually more tongue in cheek than serious, because it is absolutely certain that we are related.

The Royal We is an article in The Atlantic Monthy that explains how just about everyone is related to everyone else:

The idea that virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from English royalty seems bizarre, but it accords perfectly with some recent research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University. The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex, because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly. These numbers are manageable in the first few generations—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents—but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived.

This constant churning of people makes it possible to apply Chang’s analysis to the world as a whole. For example, almost everyone in the New World must be descended from English royalty—even people of predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long history of intermarriage in the Americas. Similarly, everyone of European ancestry must descend from Muhammad. The line of descent for which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200. But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist.

Chang’s model has even more dramatic implications. Because people are always migrating from continent to continent, networks of descent quickly interconnect. This means that the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone’s ancestors.

Toward the end of our conversation Humphrys pointed out something I hadn’t considered. The same process works going forward in time; in essence every one of us who has children and whose line does not go extinct is suspended at the center of an immense genetic hourglass. Just as we are descended from most of the people alive on the planet a few thousand years ago, several thousand years hence each of us will be an ancestor of the entire human race—or of no one at all.

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