Converting Facebook Friends to Real Friends

Q: Dear Shlomo, I've got loads of friends! My Facebook profile will attest to that, but last weekend I went to the movies by myself. What is wrong? Respectfully, FACE TO FACEBOOK, Idaho.

A: FACE TO FACEBOOK, the formula for converting Facebook friends into real friends is

I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this blog is too superficial to contain. If you graph this function on your TI-85 you will notice that beyond a certain limit real friends decrease as your Facebook friends increase. So, simple math tells us that cutting back on asynchronous relationships will improve the amount of time spent in the vicinity of real live friends.

Facebook Extra Credit Problem: At the same moment, two trains leave Chicago and New York. They move towards each other with costant speeds. The train from Chicago is moving at speed of 3 miles per hour due to the large dose of horse tranquilizers that the engineer took. It carries 23 Facebook users with 3240 Facebook friends. The train from New York is moving at speed of 960 miles per hour due to the large vial of cocaine the conductor sold to the engineer. It carries 34 Facebook users with 5234 Facebook friends. The distance between Chicago and New York is 1000 miles. How many Scrabulous games will have been played by the time the trains meet?