A Blog of the Ridiculous and Sublime, by Mark Sackler
“The main reason Santa is jolly is he knows where all the bad girls live.”–George Carlin
Hmmm.I Wonder what he’s looking for…(www.savagechickens.com, click for link)
I knew there was a reason I was jealous of the guy. I also now know what he is doing the other 364 days while the elves are making all the toys. At any rate, this non-theistic, almost-atheist existentialist wishes you a Merry Christmas, Season’s Greetings, happy pagan winter solstice, or whatever it is you celebrate.
This kind of bust? Well…maybe….
In the stirring first episode of this equation, we saw how the attention paid by the media to inane celebrity stories erodes naturally over time through a process I dubbed The Media-illogical Constant. But like many scientific theories, it is more complicated than it appears on paper. It seems that this equation works well in a comparative media vacuum, free from the interference of new, bigger and even more outrageous celebrity stories. And though a story may also, in the absence of said later distraction, sustain itself through the generation of new angles, it can still disappear in an instant. When a bigger celebrity story comes along and wipes clean the public attention-span slate, the previous prime meme is sucked into a media black hole. It succumbs to The Big Bust Theory. I may not be able to quantify this occurrence; but I can certainly give a primordial example.
It was 1994 and two key dates in that year represent the ground zero points for the archetypal media big bust.
On January 6, 1994 a man named Shane Stant swung a lead pipe at figure skater Nancy Kerrigan’s knee, causing sufficient injury to Kerrigan that she was forced to withdraw from the US championships. In and of itself, this would have kept the cable news and sports channels going for weeks on end, but it was only the beginning. Within a few days, the dastardly deed was traced back to associates of one Tonya Harding, who just happened to be Kerrigan’s main rival at the competition. The frenzy was on. All throughout the spring and summer the story took more twists and turns than a Dickens novel. (You can read the entire timeline here). The name Tonya Harding was on every front page and every evening news lead. On and on into the the spring and early summer, it reached the point that many–yours truly included–wished she and her story would just go away.
Be careful what you wish for.
Just when you thought there would be no end to the Harding nonsense–no “return to normalcy” to quote another famous American named Harding–the story imploded. On June 17, 1994 cable news channels broadcast, live and in living color, an event so momentous that it interrupted the broadcast of the NBA finals. It was the pursuit by the LAPD of O.J. Simpson. (Case timeline here.)
Poof. The Tonya Harding story was gone from the front pages and evening news leads, never to return to such prominence again.
As for trying to create and algorithm that describes this phenomenon, it has so far escaped me. In the same manner that the laws of physics seem to break down in the singularity at the center of a black hole, all measures of media (and public) vacuity in the face of these kinds of events defy calculation. The equations yield infinities. If you have any ideas, feel free to post them here. But have no fear, this scenario has given me yet another idea. It’s clear that two of the biggest media attractors going are inane celebrity antics and sensational crimes. When the two combine, as they did in both the OJ Simpson and Tonya Harding cases, the effect just screams for its own equation…and this might ultimately yield the mathematical solution to The Big Bust Theory.
“In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move.”–Douglas Adams
I’m kinda hoping this Mayan calendar thing is right as I haven’t paid my cable bill yet this month. And I’d endure almost anything to make sure the Cowboys miss the playoffs. On the other hand, I hate to think of all those unused frequent flyer miles I’d lose. Either way, I’m holding off writing my next post until Saturday–just in case.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”–Arthur C. Clarke
No, not that Magic!
To say that Arthur C. Clarke was a visionary is to put it lightly. In 1947 he published an article advocating a global satellite communication network. That was ten years before Sputnik, when many serious scientists were still calling space travel impossible. Yet even he didn’t always get it right. In the 1960’s he foresaw humanity’s 2001 future in outer space, but little progress was made in the following decades. It turned out the human future in the new millennium was in cyber space. My future, then and now, continues to be spaced out. I’ll see you in my dreams…
“I like to play dangerously… where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.”–Dave Brubek
(Note: The title of this post provides an apt, if inadvertent double entendre. I have used the title preface “Time Out” for posts that don’t readily fit into my existing threads. “Time Out” also just happens to be the title of The Dave Brubek Quartet’s signature album. It was issued in 1959 and became the first million selling jazz album ever. It is one of the greatest classics of the genre).
Brubek on the cover of Time, November, 1954.
I never met the man, yet somehow I knew him. In one of the choral groups I sang with in high school we performed a Brubek composition (yes he wrote choral music, too). Our director actually tried to get Brubek, who lived in a neighboring town, to make a guest appearance to conduct the piece at our concert. He was unavailable. I never gave it much thought then, though Brubek’s Greatest Hits was the first jazz album I owned–and in fact the only jazz in my collection until I was in my forties. I did not see him perform live until I was in my 50’s and he in his 80’s.
Below are two videos, courtesy of the Litchfield Jazz Festival, where I saw Dave Brubek perform twice. The first video is a promotional piece that begins with Brubek performing in the 2005 festival. In the shot of the audience applause that follows the visual of Brubek you’ll see two audience members stand up near the back. I’m pretty sure the partially obscured one farthest back is me. In the second video, taped at the 2008 festival, NPR interviews Brubek and Paquito D’Rivera. There was no seating in this tent. I was standing in the front row, about fifteen feet from Brubek during the entire interview. I witnessed history that day.
Dave Brubek was an icon, a living legend. He was not just a great artist, he was one of the great ambassadors for the arts. He died yesterday, one day short of his 92nd birthday, in the same hospital where my wife was born. So near, and yet so far away.
“It was my biggest blunder.”–Albert Einstein on his cosmological constant concept.
You have to love ‘ol Albert. It’s not that he admitted he was wrong. It’s that he turned out to be wrong about being wrong. In other words, the cosmological constant turned out not to be such a big blunder after all. He thought that there must be a force in the universe that counteracts gravity and prevents a static universe from contracting on itself. In 1917 he dubbed it the cosmological constant. Then came Hubble’s discovery in the 1920’s that the universe is expanding, which was closely followed by the big bang theory (the actual theory, not the TV show), and out the window went Einstein’s constant. But then, in 1998, it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and–bingo!–the cosmological constant, now referred to as dark energy, was reborn.
So what the hell does this have to do with the current equation? It’s also a constant, and it might turn out that it is as slippery and elusive as dark energy. The difference though, is that this one describes contraction, not expansion; more specifically, the contraction of media attention over time as pertains to inane celebrity behavior. I call it:
In plain English: the intensity of the media attention is proportionate to the inverse of the time since the story’s emergence to national (or international) attention, squared. So when Lindsay Lohan gets arrested–yet again–the media attention four days after the story will be 1/16th of what it was when the story broke. [Are you are wondering why this equation just doesn’t use an equal sign instead of a proportional to sign? It beats me. But one immutable rule of these posts is to always use the coolest looking symbol possible.]“If people think nature is their friend, then they don’t need an enemy.”–Kurt Vonnegut
Image credit: CartoonStock.com. Used by permission
Clearly, anyone who took the brunt of Sandy can identify with that quote. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, tsunamis. Nature packs plenty of punches. Wait, you mean it’s organic foods and natural remedies you embrace? OK, I’ll counter with hemlock, radon, arsenic, curare. Good grief, there are easily as many natural ways on this earth to kill us as their are to enhance us. And most of the rest of the universe would kill us in an instant. Sure, there is plenty of beauty and benefit in nature. But anyone who hasn’t grasped the implications of the second law of thermodynamics hasn’t a clue what nature really is–or how amazing it can be.
Chad Orzel is my kind of guy. If it wasn’t for the fact that How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog was copyrighted in 2010, I would have sworn he had read my Law of Canine Chaos before writing the following.
Sound waves are pressure in the air. When a dog barks, she forces air out through her mouth and sets up a vibrations that travel through the air in all directions. When it reaches another dog, that sound wave cause vibrations in the second dog’s eardrums, which are turned into signals in the brain that are processed as sound, causing the second dog to bark, producing more waves, until nearby humans get annoyed. [emphasis mine]
Amen, brother.
But the point is, he explains and summarizes beautifully–and expands upon lucidly–all the points in my first four Quantum Weirdness posts. He does so in a manner clear enough that, if you can’t understand it, at least your dog will. Maybe the pooch can then explain it to you. Either way, I recommend it highly. Unfortunately, though,it seems to be out of print in the US. It is available, mostly from the UK, from various resellers on ebay and barnesandnoble.com. Orzel has also written How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Before you know it, those clever mutts will be running the LHC at CERN. I doubt they will be looking for the Higgs Boson, though.
Copyright 1984, Chronicle Features
Part Two: Quantum Mechanics and The Future
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”–Alan Kay
Note: In case you had not surmised it, the most literal title for this conjecture would be “Every Physically Possible Future of Our Universe Exists.” There is probably not a future in our universe where the laws of physics will change to allow Harry Potter to cast a patronus spell on demontors.
Inventing the quantum future at NASA
Alan Kay’s proposition suggests a philosophical viewpoint that emerges from this conjecture. But for a better quote to describing its why and wherefore, I harken back to the E.B. White words from Conjecture #2. Everything that is not forbidden is mandatory. It all boils down to Quantum Mechanics. Many physicists have latched on to this notion; given enough time, every physically possible combination of matter and energy is bound to occur. It’s all just a matter of probability. That said, there are clearly at least two distinct ways of looking at it, depending on which interpretation of quantum mechanics you ascribe to: Copenhagen or Many Worlds. Although there are other interpretations, these two have garnered the lions share of advocates in the scientific community, and the notion that every possible future exists can emerge from either one of them. (See Quantum Weirdness 102 and 103 in this blog for an explanation of both ideas.)
The difference between the two as pertains to the future can easily be stated as virtual vs. actual. The Many Worlds interpretation asserts that every physical possibility will become an actual reality in an infinitely expanding sea of parallel universes. Every possible future is, or at least becomes, physically real. On the other hand, Copenhagen implies that there is no absolute physical reality until the quantum wave function breaks down, that there is only probability on the sub-atomic level until we observe it. From this we can infer that every possible future exists only as a statistical probability, and only the one we ultimately experience will actually exist.
So what’s the difference? There isn’t any. It makes no difference, from the practical experience of entities conscious in a single one of them, whether the futures are real or virtual; we can’t tell the difference. Every one of those physical realities is still a real possibility. The good news? There most certainly is a future out there where you win the lottery! The bad news? The only sure way to “invent” that future is to buy every possible number combination. I don’t recommend quitting your day job. 😦
Up next: The Conjecture of Composite Consciousness. (Warning: the next couple of conjectures will be quite a bit more radical and original than the those already stated herein. Actually, I’m warning myself. Anybody know where I can get some flame retardant garb?)
Image Credit: Doug Savage. Click for link.
If Sandy wasn’t enough, no sooner did our power come back then, in succession over the next few days, one of my two office desktop PCs died, followed by the monitor for the other one, followed by my cable modem. Then the icing on the cake was my business phone land line going dead. If it wasn’t for broken technology, I’d have no technology at all. At the rate this is going, I will soon be sending emails via pony express.
I'm not the most interesting man in the world, but I might have the most cluttered mind.
The Millennium Conjectures™ 