The Jesse Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle

I've decided that just because I have no idea what the precipitous drop of facebook's stock price since its initial public offering means doesn't mean I don't understand it. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it's not unlike the way I'm confounded as to the reasoning behind Ryan Seacrest's apparent wild success, but I feel like I know enough to base a deep and abiding resentment on. There are facts and there are things we know. The two are neither causal nor binary nor mutually exclusive. It's just that sometimes having a little bit of the former can really bung up a voluminous earth-mound of the latter that needs a hurried expressing.

What is the baseline amount of knowledge needed to form an opinion? It seems like with every iteration of the internet, the recordable amount gets progressively smaller, as did the diminishing base models of physical science from elements to cells to molecules to atoms to protons/electrons/neutrons to quarks to gluons to, the currently smallest known thing, dust mites. Every time I hear about dust mites, there are more and more of them theorized to be literally everywhere. 90% of my pillow's weight is apparently dust mites. As is nearly all of my bed, my clothing, my skin and hair, my pets and, inevitably, my gluons. The theorized ubiquity of these tiny little unseeable bugs living and breathing and eating and excreting all over your bed and skin and body holes is equal parts gross and terrifying. You're free to daydream all you like about inventing the machine, chemical or process that rids the world of dust mites. I have no such fantasy. On the one hand, no more microscopic bugs. On the other hand, the nullification of matter as a concept. That sounds like trouble.

With the facebook stock thing, I'm supposed to understand that there are hundreds of millions of eyeballs glued to this thing, literally* all over the world, which means that facebook commands the attention of an unprecedented global marketplace of adherents standing by to encourage one another to Like something at the same time, in exactly the same way HIV "likes" T-cells, spreading quickly into a happy, systemic infection, controllable but only with a significant financial outlay by the host organism.

But all of this we do... for free? I'm meant to buy stock in a business that produces nothing and throughout its life history has generated no sales and in its form and intent will, by definition, never approach doing either. And yet somehow the arbitrarily-set initial stock price was dismissed immediately and the subsequent plunge has been both precipitous and steady. See, I "get" it. But there are, no doubt, people lining up to explain to me market vagaries and the valuation algorithms used to price something as ephemeral as media in general and as imaginary as social media in particular and why, if we'd just hold on, this thing that produces nothing will one day pay off by producing nothing at a much healthier pace we can all get behind and agree to gouge each other over.

So while I think I get it, I clearly don't understand it. I can't. It's not because I'm stupid, it's because I went to college and read philosophy instead of economic theory. Even the philosophy guys who deigned to talk about money, like Marx, thought it was a good idea to get rid of all of it anyway. This is not an anti-capitalist manifesto, however. This is more the lament of a misspent youth. High-minded ideals and basic critical thinking skills are great, but I'd trade either one for the right Italian roadster or a summer place on St. Bart's. Either of these can be construed as opening offers.





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*I'm using "literally" in its traditional sense here, meaning "literally"

Lone Wolf

I don't think of myself as a racist, but I don't think most people do. Well, some people do. Racists, for example. But the rest of us, if given a moment to reflect, would probably come to the conclusion that, while imperfect, we tend to give everyone a fair chance to impress or disappoint us based strictly on the content of their character as exhibited by their actions. Or the things they say. Or their clothes. Or how they stand, like upright and normal, not all slouchy and weird. Or how much money they have. Or how much money their parents have. Or their religion. Or sexual orientation. Or skin color.

OK, there might be some prejudices. Like most people my age, I was raised by my television mostly, with all that that implies. My perception of white people was shaped far less by my own experience as a white person and more in how I perceived them in 30-minute increments, punctuated by a laugh track. Well, 22 minutes if you take out for commercials. Commercials featuring more white people with excellent teeth and clothes that smelled so much like flowers, little cartoon petals wafted gently off them.

The programs themselves told me what I should think of white people: they lived in oversized houses with walls on three sides, looked nothing like their family members and peppered their conversations with weisenheimer punchlines every second or third line. They were cartoonish, petty, indiscriminately harsh with the feeling of their fellow man in pursuit of an easy joke and burdened with hair and skin unnaturally impervious to the ravages of weather or sun. Creepy, in a word. But somehow... safe. Models of stability and role-consistency no matter what the circumstance. Marcia meets Davy Jones, Richie comes back from the Army and punches Fonzie, the baby from Growing Pains ages seven years over the course of one summer... it didn't matter. At the end of the episode, Dad would sum it all up with a life lesson about responsibility, human dignity, a sex shaming or expounding on the wonders of the American heteronormative hegemony and we'd all assume our starting places again just in time for the next episode to begin.

As a child, of course, this was terrifying. What no one in charge of these programs considered was that I didn't actually know any white people outside of my family. This was my only base of comparison. I can't remember a time when I wasn't absolutely convinced that I wasn't being raised correctly. I didn't know how the universe had been wronged by myself or those in charge of my upbringing, but I was being denied the fruits of my patrimony. Thirteen years of public school and not one sock-hop. Not one super-witty, ultra-flexible, maximally relaxed teacher giving me three chances to pass the big test (using the power of song!) just in time so I would be able to play in the Big Game. Nobody on Family Ties was stirring a jug of powdered milk using their arm. Maybe that shit went down on Sanford and Son, but that was before my time.

Right then I probably could have become a racist, but then The Cosby Show happened and it turned out it wasn't only white people living like that. Blew up my whole theory of ethnic entitlement. That in conjunction with my core-soul desire to see Lisa Bonet naked put to rest any hope I had to life of happy reflex judgment of a large portion of the world I cohabit. If you want to know how far I've fallen, I voted for Obama. And God help me, I'm going to do it again.

There's no going back. The racists out there today--the really committed ones--they wouldn't take me if I offered now. I don't fit the most basic criteria. I've read things. I've seen things. I can tell the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim. There's no hope for me.

You Give Me Fever

I wanted to write something here about how, as expected, I had planned to be disinterested in the Olympics only to find myself up at 2 in the morning watching time trials for the women's cycling road race event, whipped into a nationalistic lather by the marketing geniuses at NBC to the point where I'm trying to invent racist things to say about Uzbeks. I think in the past, just trying and failing at that last endeavor is proof that racism isn't 100% rooted in ignorance. You have to know something about a people to hone the kind of invective that's really going to land.

But I can't say that any of that is happening because... well, it's just not. It's not for lack of trying. I've avoided the spoilers ahead of the tape-delay coverage and watched a few hours here and there, but I just haven't found myself entirely rapt as yet. I've been rapt-ish, but not quite a full-on rapting.

I think the problem is I've finally reached a tipping point in my life experience where I know enough about all the events presented that none of them are quite exotic enough anymore to pull me in out of sheer curiosity. I've seen enough cycling, enough swimming, enough gymnastics, enough soccer, enough fucking horse jumping to know the basics of the intent behind the action and the scoring systems and for me to realize that maybe I just don't really give a shit. Which I say without cynicism or sanctimony of self-righteousness. That's all the slow wheeze of deflation as I realize the lucky curse of longevity has robbed me again of the chance to enjoy something I took such great pleasure in when I was younger.

The only thing left going that's really bizarre enough to pull me in is team handball, but even that I think I'm starting to figure out. If you watch it long enough, you'll be confused at first, sure, but that's only until you realize what's going on isn't a sporting competition at all but instead a highly ritualized form of interpretive, improvised group dance meant to convey a complex matrix of nationalist, nihilist and sexual sentiments built around an elaborate metaphor of international sport. The France-Tunisia match looked like a win for France, but you had to watch it to get the subtle message of post-colonial criticism of the western imperial impulse.

Maybe my ennui has less to do with the burden of my life experience and just that we haven't started the events I'm usually interested in. The track events are usually a lot more visually inviting than swimming, which, let's be honest, is really just a lot of splashing followed by a video graphic of a spreadsheet. The track and field events, in the Olympic stadium, above ground, not hindered by happening in an obscuring fluid medium, are always so much more dynamic to watch. You've got what is usually the crown jewel of monumental sporting architecture in the Olympic stadium, the immense, electrified crowd, the fissile chain of starbursts as cameras flash in the post-dusk setting of the glamor events like the 100 meter finals. Also, the hammer throw? That maybe might kill someone. Who isn't interested in that?

I'm hoping that's it: that my events of preference haven't started yet and less that I'm standing on the fat edge of a falling-away wedge-shaped ramp of diminishing emotional returns for the rest of days, however many I am graced to endure. There have been flickers, little sparks to remind me of the embered fire that once raged. I mean, that opening ceremony was fucking weird, right? Was there a giant mannequin baby at one point? I think there was. Straight out of Trainspotting. I was attuned as all hell to that shit.

Hot Topic

Writing about the Colorado movie shooting is probably the right thing to do, but I don't know that I have a lot to say about it. The incident has inspired some gun control debate, but mostly even that has played out how anything else in the public sphere plays out anymore, in the exchange of tepid one-liners on Twitter or in ideas expressed in word balloons coming out of the heads of kittens in pictures posted on Facebook. Seriously, I'm waiting for popular culture to hit the media saturation point where we all get over the cuteness of kittens due to abusive overexposure the same way we all once got sick of looking at the cast of Friends.

I'm not saying that things are necessarily worse now than they have ever been or in any way fundamentally different than in America's past in terms of popular culture. We were, as a nation, born after the invention of moveable type and thus have always been, even from conception, a mass media culture. The pace is a bit faster, sure, but the only evidence we really have left of how things used to be is in examples of stuff people chose to hold on to or were popular enough to have survived by sheer weight of numbers. Both groups are self-selecting for quality. I don't know what the colonial equivalent of lolcats was, but I'm certain there was something that made parents throw their tricornered hats in vexation when faced with the degenerate wastrels and blackguards their children were withering in to, wasting all their time with penny broadsheets, writing in their inane truncated language to save precious paper space.

What feels like the white-hot pace of news and information is only relative. It has to have felt just as modern and overheated when the first mail trains arrived, delivering news from three states away in a blinding, unprecedented four to seven days. Imagine the cultural exhaustion of, just a few years later, trying to wrap your head around the communicational ephemera of the telegraph.

It took over 2,000 years to get from Pheidippides running a message from Marathon to the telegraph and only 200 years or so to get from there to naked pictures of Snooki on a smartphone, so I can see the argument that a) the rate of advancement has increased somewhat and b) sometimes evil happens because of it. I guess my point is that, yes, sometimes the result of the New Now is a plugged-in immediacy that both informs and inundates; it breeds both paranoia and numbed indifference, depending on the subject. And yes, a vast majority of what's produced in the rolling digital media isn't always an efficient or worthwhile use of your time. I guess what I'm saying is: thanks for reading.

City on a Hill

So I'm back. Vacation was good. Yeah, kids are... you know... good. I... well, lots of shit happened. Fuck the preamble. Let's get vulnerable.

I decided to take the kids to San Francisco for vacation. There are several reasons for this: 1) It's a driveable distance from me. Or at least it appears so on paper. Seven-to-ten hours in a car with three sweaty boy-children turns meters into miles and miles into moonshots. All of this, the length of our nation's loveliest state, was lost on them in favor of tiny 3"x4" screens of Pokémon fighting Marios or some shit. AND YET they still found a way to annoy the fuck out of each other and, as collateral damage, me for just about the duration of both rides, up and back. Normally I embrace the distracting technology parents and educators disdain. I was promised soporifics and borderline catatonia from video games and I got neither. How can you be entirely disengaged AND joined in the most violent of verbal slanging matches at the exact same time? I think TV psychologists have got it all wrong. I think kids today might actually be multitasking social geniuses the like of which we have never been burdened to see.

2) I was also promised a full court recruitment of my kids by the Gay Community. I have no daughters, so I'm hoping at some point to convince one of my boys to turn out to be a homosexual. I like my kids, but what I've always really wanted was a son-in-law. Someone to make passive-aggresive comments about at Awkward Christmas. Someone desperate for my approval and attention, knowing full well it will always be reserved for the actual children of my loins, but still determined to try and try and try to impress me in that grasping, quixotic dance of failure only sons-in-law can really fully express. But no, no recruitment. Not a sniff. Every time we saw a couple of dudes holding hands I would nudge my oldest boy into them "accidentally" on the outside chance The Gay might actually be contagious, but still nothing. Not a single One Direction poster in his room. Ah well. I'm not out of options. I guess it's back to the Boy Scouts.

So the driving thing was part of a clever strategy to save myself money on this vacation. Where the plan fell down, I realize in retrospect, was driving to one of the top five most expensive locations in the world. San Francisco is not cheap. It can be, but I'm too hairy to be a twink but not quite enough to be a bear. I'm a tweener. I'm doomed to a life where I have to buy my own appletinis.

Some other shit happened, but I'm not ready to go all the way there yet. When I said "let's get vulnerable," I meant in relative terms. I was looking at a mostly blank page at the time. This is way more revealing than that was.

The only other thing happening is that I have a dog again. But only temporarily. See, I had two, the one died and the other I sent to live with the ex-wife. She has another dog, a bigger yard and a better premium cable channel package, so it seemed like the humane thing to do. Only she went away on vacation with the kids (ha, she'll fucking see) and the dog I gave her--the healthy dog I gave her--came down with horrible kennel cough and can't be boarded. So he's here now. I followed up my vacation with alone time in my big empty house wiping up little puddles of noisily-achieved dog phlegm. I don't know how your week is going, but I fucking win.

I'm going back to last week's post to watch the bunny video again. There is lightness in the world. Thank God we have the interwebs to help us find it.

Summer Break

I'm on vacation from work this week, which any of you with children will know means I'm way more exhausted than I would be at my place of employment. Thank God only four more days until I can go back to the quiet comfort of laboring thanklessly in exchange for an inadequate wage.

In the meantime, here's a video of a bunny eating a carrot.

I'm Not Wearing Anything Under This Lab Coat

Wow! So...

A 20th-century breakthrough figured out that atoms were made up of three particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Then, as physicists are wont to do, they started smashing the particles, which broke down into even smaller particles.

OK... and?

Scientists figured these itty-bitty particles were quarks, held together by gluons. Then scientist Peter Higgs proposed the burning, yearning question: Surely there must be one uber-particle that creates an invisible field (called the Higgs field) that adds mass to matter.

Ha! Totally. Is that... oh there's more? Sorry...

It's theoretically possible for a particle to have no actual mass at all, and indeed, the photon is massless. But that's the exception. All other particles -- protons, electrons, neutrons, neutrinos -- are eventually pinged by the Higgs bosons that suffuse the field. That tiny collision converts the particle from a packet of energy to a packet of matter. (The Higgs acquires its own mass through its own interactions with the field.)

Right. But I...

It can explain why some particles have mass, but why others, such as photons of light, do not.

I bet that's not it, is it? Fuck, I knew it...

A Higgs boson particle is essential to the so-called standard model of physics -- the generally accepted theory about how the universe works. Finding it would effectively confirm the standard model.

Standard model. Naturally. You know what, just go ahead...

Space.com thinks the particle could explain dark matter... ZeeNews ponders that perhaps inertia (or drag) can be reduced in future technologies, like a jumbo jet. Two Vanderbilt University theoretical physicists propose a "long shot" pipe dream about time travel

I'm pretty sure that's it. And this is from the article designed to explain this shit to dummies like myself. Let me see if I can paraphrase it: invisible glue-y stuff will give us better gas mileage for planes and also time travel. Got it. Although I think that last one is something of a fudge because if I can get from New York to LA 20 minutes faster than I now can, that kind of already counts as time travel.

Just to be clear, I'm glad someone is out there doing it for us. It doesn't bother me greatly that I have no idea what "it" is and less about how it's done. Given the right metaphor, I can kind of grasp the mechanical idea of hybrid cars, the ballpoint pen or different types of yoga, but there are going to be limits. I'm happy to accept that my iPhone works essentially by magic. I appreciate the effort put into articles about the Higgs boson widget, but I think I can respectfully ask that the well-meaning journalists trying to lay out these things for us just leave us in the dark. Not only is it a battle lost before the first trumpet sounds* but the lonely wail of the rallying call is lost in the hurricane klaxon of roaring bandwidth carrying the great concerning conundra of why Tom Cruise called his wife Kate instead of Katie and the like.

Down among the intellectual lumpenproletariat, there are only two things we need to know science is doing: 1) working on the cancer thing and 2) faster download speeds. Essentially, we want to live long enough to get our porn delivered right now. If we figure out what "dark matter" is in the meantime, that'll be gravy.

Also: as far as I know, dark matter is indistinguishable from gravy.




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*you know what the uneducated do with trumpet players, yes?