This is the answer.

Topic: A lesson I learned in school and maybe a lesson for D.buzz and social media.

The Hump

In college, I had two math courses to take. "College Algebra" sounded intimidating, yet I learned that algebra is algebra. It might be called "college algebra", but it's still algebra. It was an easy review from high school. Calculus was the next up the ladder. If we can have "college algebra", why can't we have "master's algebra" or "doctoral algebra"? I dunno. I would have to take calculus.

I was in calculus class, real calculus class, for one day. Or, for one hour. After the first day in calculus and after not understanding any of the professor's ramblings, I walked straight to the site to drop courses and did so. Still needing a math course, I stumbled into "Business Calculus". I had no idea what business calculus was, the but the notation informing me that it "satisfies math requirement" sold me.

I learned one thing in Business Calculus, and it got me an A- in the course.

And, it's been one of the most useful things I've learned in school. I learned this...

The top of the hump is the answer.

_{Know this and get an A- in Business Calculus in college.}

Usually the hump appeared in class like this.

Things began to click for me in Business Calculus. I was reminded of my high school algebra teacher. She had drawn this same shape on the board. For some reason, it made an impression on we high school boys when she drew it. I remembered it later in Business Calculus, and still do.

Anyway, the hump can be an upside-down as a "U" at times, or sideways like a flashlight's mirror. The point is that the dot on the hump, or curve, that's the sweet spot.

Use-cases galore

In Business Calculus and in economics, that hump is applied a lot. There's diminishing marginal utility or diminishing marginal returns. There's maximization of profits. There's productivity or efficiency of workers. There's the Laffer Curve.

In life, there's the number of little smoky sausages you might devour to maximize fun at the Super Bowl party.

Above, it's easy to see that you want to eat 20 little sausages to get the most fun at the party...13 Super Bowl party fun units! Eating only 10 is cutting the fun short. Eating 40 leaves you sick and in the lavatory, which is not fun. The top of the hump is the answer.

Did I just cheat?

A quick back story, which I hope to relate to social media later...

At the end of Business Calculus we had our exam. I knew about the hump and felt ready. I was pretty confident about the exam when I was done. After finishing, but before turning it in, I paused. My routine was to always take a deep breath at the beginning of an exam...just to calm myself while watching other people frantically digging into the questions like hungry kids-to-spaghetti. Or, as if their memories were deteriorating at such a frenetic pace they must answer as many things as possible before the memories are gone, like sand in an hour glass. Then, at the completion of an exam, I'd also take a pause and deep breath. I would sit back to allow my mind to kind of gel. Sometimes novel ideas might arise for an essay or careless mistakes might become apparent on multiple choice exams. I'd just wait a minute before the point-of-no-return of turning in the exam.

So, after the business calculus exam, I sat back to re-think it and double-check it and chill.

My college used "the honor code" and it was serious. On your honor, you were not to cheat. Students were supposed to kind of police ourselves...not cheat ourselves and even to report other cheaters, and such. The accused cheater went before "honor court"...an actual court with students as lawyers who tried and defended cases. Two of my buddies were found guilty (but they swore they didn't cheat!), were banned from athletics for quite some time, were put on probation, and nearly got kicked out of school. The honor code was serious and people took it seriously. Often, professors would simply pass out an exam, then leave. They were confident that people would not cheat, and if they did, it would be dealt with accordingly.

I never cheated. I think.

As I was kicked back and thinking about turning in my exam, I was feeling good. Right there on my paper was my graph, the hump, in all its glory and holding all of the answers. I felt good.

Then, the girl sitting in the desk directly in front of me startled me. She abruptly jumped up. She lunged to her left up out of her seat and into the walk between aisles. Her exam was still lying on her desk--directly in front of me and immediately visible. She'd hopped up so quickly that I naturally looked up, and naturally saw the exam just before me.

She snatched up her exam, walked to the front, and turned it in. I don't think she felt I was cheating because the time was merely a fraction of a second. She was just a lunging, snatching, startling girl. But, in that instant where her exam was exposed, I had seen her hump.

Like me, she too had a hump drawn on the front page of her exam response. It was big. Big ol' hump. It took at least half the page, which is why it could not not be seen. But, here's the rub...

Her hump was inverted!

Her "hump" was not a hump like a hill, it was flipped over into a "U" shape. Say what?! I glanced back at my graph and, what do you know...there was a little devil of a negative sign over there that I'd overlooked. That jumpy, snatchy girl was right with her inverted hump.

What do I do now? I see my mistake. I understand my mistake. That negative changes the graph and the answers. Do I leave the graph as is, knowing it's wrong? Do I correct it after seeing the girl's graph at no fault of my own?

I corrected it. I got an A- in Business Calculus.

And then there's social media.

It's new to me, but I like D.Buzz...Hive's alternative to Twitter. I'm very lukewarm on Twitter. It's often said that Twitter is the best invention ever and the worst invention ever. It's best because it democratizes regular people, effectively anyone, to report and speak out with a voice. It's the worst thing essentially for the exact same reason. Every fool now has a bullhorn. That and it draws out the absolute worst, most carnal and hateful instincts in humanity.

Some quick stats as evidence of my like and lukewarmness:

• I've "buzzed" (or posted) on @crrdlx D.Buzz 15 times in under one month.
• I've tweeted on Twitter with my @crrdlx account 10 times in 18 months (and one of them was a buzz from D.Buzz).

Based only on the frequency of names that I see, D.Buzz seems to me to still be small. D.Buzz also seems to be still under construction to a degree. I read this morning that the D.Buzz team has plans though. This includes a marketing campaign very soon. The goal is to onboard 1,000 to 3,000 new users during quarter 1 of 2021. That's ambitious and admirable, but still small in comparison to Twitter.

And this returns me to the hump.

D.Buzz is fun to me. It's small in numbers and it's getting better. Plus, there seems to be rather little nonsense, trash talk, trolling, grandstanding, etc. I see D.Buzz going up the hump toward the dot at the top. To me, Twitter has moved over to the over side of the hump and has slid on down. The weight of tremendous numbers has crushed down onto itself. The enjoyment and usefulness on Twitter, to me, is lackluster.

Final case-studies

There are useful nuggets on Twitter, no doubt. But, I simply must sludge through so, so much nonsense and misbehavior to find those useful nuggets. Two case studies:

1. As a for-instance, when that passenger jet was shot down in Ukraine a few years ago, I saw the "breaking news" on a mainstream news site. There were essentially zero details. I went to Twitter, and not only were there details, there were already photos from people on the scene. Of course, you had to weed through a lot of comments and rumors and try to sift to the truth, but the tool was there.

2. When Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather fought, I was interested. I wanted to watch it but I did not want to pay-per-view. I went to Twitter with the intent of just reading tweets as the fight went along. That way, if someone went down, I'd surely read that almost immediately. It quickly became apparent that I needed to read 20, "Conor my dawg! He gon' - up May-wedder!" tweets before I saw one, "Mayweather just landed a hard right." It was frustrating.

Then, as I scrolled, someone was streaming the fight, live, embedded right inside Twitter somehow.

Suddenly, I was back in my desk in Business Calculus after seeing the jumpy girls inverted hump. I now had another moral dilemma. What do I do now? Do I pretend that I just don't see the fight being livestreamed right there and return to weeding through trash talk? Or, do I watch it?

Mayweather won.

If you’re new to Hive, consider signing up. The #1 benefit...YOU own your content and YOU earn the rewards your that content generates.

Hive is 100% free, but having a little bit of the HIVE token helps with some things. If you sign up with my my referral link, then I'll be notified and give you a bit of HIVE to get you started. It’s a win-win…you get free HIVE and get started, I get some kind of percentage of something-or-other (I'm not sure exactly what).

Learn more or get your free account here.

:)