: [...] In the last paragraph you say "human buyers/sellers," shouldn't
: that be corporate/human buyers/sellers? To extend the analogy, the humans
: would be the interstellar dust from which a protosystem is currently
: forming and the corperations would be the stars; initially chatoic, the
: system would become more ordered with time. The formation of the system
: would initially be more dependant on the distribution of 'dust,' but
: eventually dominated by the relative positions of the stars.
Let's back up a bit before we get too silly: The analogy would be better
still with no stars, just a lot of massive ships moving about unpredictably,
though usually their engines can't muster much acceleration. The nearest
thing to passive "stars", I think, would be the institutional investors
-- pension funds and the like, which tend to trade in a mechanical way.
To address your point: no group of people is a "point mass"; they all have
internal forces. I'd think of corporations as more like fleets of ships,
of various sizes ...
Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DASher@netcom.com