Just Plane Silly

No, I’m not going to defend overweight baggage fees. I’m also not going to come right out and call them BS, but I think there’s a lot of good discussion to be had about how arbitrary these fees are. Look here, here, here, and here to find out why. Instead, I want to take a minute to talk about the physics of airplane flight, and to explain why the remarkable Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCAs) are not necessarily an argument against overweight baggage fees.

Although the mechanics of flight are tricky, they boil down to four essential forces: lift, weight, thrust, and drag. Weight is Enemy Number One; unless you intend to drive your 747 as a very large bus, you have to generate more than enough upward lift to compensate for the vehicle’s considerable weight. That’s what the wings are for, and there are two ways to increase the lift provided by the wings. The first method involves increasing the angle at which wind strikes the bottom of the wings (the angle of attack), and the second method involves increasing the airplane’s speed. That’s why big heavy airplanes like passenger jets need long runways on which to accelerate. A Boeing 747 has to reach about 160 knots (184 mph), although the necessary takeoff speed can vary considerably depending on weight and weather. People are pretty smart to have figured this out.

Bottom line: increase the weight of the airplane and you increase the amount of lift necessary to get in the air and stay there, which means you increase the amount of fuel the airplane must consume in keeping its speed up. More fuel means higher costs for the airline, which they are only too happy to pass on to you, the passenger, in the form of extra baggage fees. Here’s the controversial part: some of these baggage fees are becoming ridiculous, and baggage fees haven’t gone away – or even been reduced – as fuel prices have dropped. Ah well, I suppose that’s the price one must pay to keep a money-losing business aloft.

So where do the SCAs come into this? The Shuttle Carrier Aircraft are two heavily modified Boeing 747s acquired by NASA in the 1970’s and 1980’s to ferry the Space Shuttle orbiters to and fro. The regular 747s used by airlines are in no way prepared to handle the task of carrying the Shuttle, so the SCAs were gutted of all seats except for those in first-class, which were reserved for NASA passengers (cushy!). The airplanes’ bodies were reinforced to accommodate the weight of the orbiter. Their engines were upgraded to meet the stresses of their unique mission, but the upgrade went to power, not efficiency.

All of these modifications placed limitations on the SCAs’ range and altitude. While the 747s used to ferry passengers have a maximum range of about 7300 nautical miles (8400 miles) and can fly at 0.85 Mach at an altitude of 35,000 feet, the SCAs had a range of only 1000 nautical miles (1150 miles) when carrying the orbiter, at a maximum speed of 0.6 Mach at an altitude of 15,000 feet. An airline’s 747 can cross the continental United States without breaking a sweat, but the SCAs would have to land and refuel a number of times when making the same flight. Needless to say, if passengers elected to travel on a plane fitted to SCA specifications, they’d be paying a whole lot more than a simple overweight baggage fee. Therefore, comparing the airlines’ 747s to the SCAs is like comparing apples to oranges. Oranges that carry freakin’ Space Shuttles!

Speaking of airline fees…

Ehhh…this seems like wishful thinking to me. We humans always want to make sense from the senseless, and airline pricing policies seem to be the epitome of senselessness. Some people swear that airline prices jump when they revisit certain search websites, but then plummet to the original offer when they clear their browsing history and cookies. The timing may be suspicious, but that doesn’t mean there’s a causal link. The cost of a single seat on an airplane can fluctuate wildly during the day due to a sophisticated formula and a number of “short-cuts” used by airlines to custom-tailor fare offers. It’s tempting to think that those wily airlines are engaging in bait-and-switch tactics, but the evidence is, in my opinion, scarce and unconvincing.

I leave it as an exercise for the astute reader to determine whether airlines track cookies in order to jack up fees for interested buyers. Consider these opposing pieces, both submitted on USA Today’s website. The first, written by Bill McGee, alleges that airline prices do indeed change in response to your personal browsing history, and advises a level of CIA-like caution in using computers to book flights. On the other hand, Rick Seaney believes the airfare cookie myth is just that – a myth – similar to myths about how car insurance companies charge more for red cars than they do for other colors.

Regardless of whether or not airlines use cookie-tracking technology to adjust fees, it wouldn’t hurt them to make their pricing policies more transparent. As these two memes illustrate, there are already plenty of people who don’t trust airlines. Given their recent financial difficulties, now is not the time to stiff potential flyers.

Despicable Meme

No matter how gruesome a tragedy is, there’s always some jerk ready to claim that it didn’t happen, or that it was all a government plot. The Holocaust, 9/11, the Sandy Hook massacre, the Boston Marathon bombing…there’s no catastrophe too enormous for paranoid conspiracy theorists to wrap into their twisted dark fantasies. If the actual facts of the case don’t support their pre-formed conclusion, they will distort or fabricate new facts with a shameless ease that can only come from a total disregard for both reality and other people’s emotions.

Correcting these individuals is next to hopeless: they are thoroughly invested in their fantasies and will steadfastly refuse to see reality. Confronted with evidence that denies their position, the paranoid conspiracy theorist throws up the same comfortable and impenetrable shield: anybody who adopts a more mainstream point of view is among the uneducated sheeple. They manage to insult not only the memories of the people who died in these tragic events, but also the intelligence of anybody who doesn’t rush to blame the government / Illuminati / freemasons / Jews / etc.

Ask me about shady goings-on in the government, and I’ll tell you that I’m sure the government has its share of dirty secrets (*cough* NSA spying *cough*), but that doesn’t mean every disaster is somehow the work of Uncle Sam. And if you point to a specific tragedy as proof of a government conspiracy, you’d better have some damn compelling evidence. So without further ado, let’s examine the “evidence” suggesting that the Sandy Hook massacre was in fact a government-perpetrated hoax, and while we’re at it, let’s discuss the assumptions that one must make in order to swallow this evidence.

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To this day, no parent or witness has shed one tear on camera. They attempt to cry but no tears ever show.

The Response: Ever? So you’ve watched every parent and witness interview that has ever been filmed? I sincerely doubt that, or you would have seen many mourners who cried freely. Here’s what Hunter Stuart, writing in Huffington Post, says about this particular “truther” claim:

Of course, there were plenty of tears shed in Newtown. One of the most widely-circulated photos of the event shows the sister of Victoria Soto, the first-grade teacher who died in the shooting, as she sobs into her phone on Dec. 14. ABC News interviewed Krista Rekos with her husband Richard, the parents of a 6-year-old girl who died that day. During the interview, Rekos broke into tears as cameras were rolling. Gene Rosen also cried on camera while telling his story to the Associated Press. Robbie Parker, a parent of a slain first-grader who has also been accused of being an actor, also broke down on camera while speaking at a press conference the day after the shooting. Even President Barack Obama cried.

The Assumption: I know enough psychology to determine the proper amount of public grief that should be expressed by people I’ve never met who are experiencing a tragedy I’ve never experienced. If I don’t count the correct number of tears during a two-minute interview with a parent or witness, then it’s all fake! Still photos that show people not crying are definitive proof that those people never cried. If anybody did cry, they were obviously paid actors who know how to make themselves cry on cue. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether I saw people crying or not: it’s fake!

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Parents and family appeared just hours and within a few days on t.v. shows and interviews, nice and cleaned up ready to talk about their slain kids and siblings.

The Response: Which is it: did parents and family appear just hours after the shooting, or within a few days? Oh no, a minor inconsistency! YOU MUST BE LYING!

The Assumption: Everyone deals with grief in the same way. People who have experienced tragedy are incapable of taking showers or putting on nice clothes and makeup to hide the dark circles under their red eyes. Also, television crews should shove cameras in the faces of disheveled emotional wrecks who are virtually unintelligible through their heaving sobs, instead of people who are able to pull themselves together, despite their tremendous pain, for a few minutes to talk to the press.

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Children eyewitness testimony contradict the official story that a mass shooting even took place

The Response: With no disrespect to the children who survived the Sandy Hook massacre, many psychologists dispute the validity of eyewitness testimony. High-stress situations like a mass shooting are particularly likely to blur the memories of eyewitnesses, according to Saul McLeod writing in Simply Psychology, so it is neither surprising nor damning that some children’s eyewitness testimony contradicts the official version of events. In fact, I would be much more suspicious if everybody’s story was the same: that would smack of rehearsal.

The Assumption: People’s memories are perfect, especially those of children, and especially in life-threatening situations. If anybody’s story varies from the official record, then that person must be lying which means the whole thing is fake!

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Cameras at entrance of the school would show if there was a shooter or not, but they will not release it.

The Response: I can only assume that a “truther” traveled back in time to the morning of December 14, 2012, to assess the location and operational status of security cameras near the front entrance of Sandy Hook Elementary School, because that seems like the only foolproof way to determine what those cameras could or couldn’t see. Let’s be serious: investigators are under no obligation to release the footage for public scrutiny. There are numerous reasons to withhold the footage, not the least of which include the privacy of and respect for Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach, both of whom were murdered within seconds of Adam Lanza violently forcing his way into the school.

Besides, even if officials did release the footage showing Lanza forcing his way into the school and shooting his second and third victims (his first was his mother, Nancy Lanza), Sandy Hook “truthers” would simply claim that the video was faked.

The Assumption: There is only one possible reason why the CCTV footage has not been released, and that’s because the shooting did not happen as it has been reported in the media. Even if footage is released clearly showing Adam Lanza shooting Dawn Hochsprung and Mary Sherlach in cold blood, it will obviously be faked video filmed later using doubles; ergo, the Sandy Hook shooting was fake regardless of whether video is released or not.

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Only handguns were found at the school next to Adam Lanza, no Assault Rifle was even used.

The Response: “Truthers” probably get this false nugget from the predictable confusion that surrounded the shooting in the first few days. Following the shooting spree, law enforcement officials rushed to secure the crime scene and to determine what happened, while the press scrambled to provide up-to-the-second coverage of the unfolding disaster; of course mistakes were inevitable. One of those mistakes involved the number and kind of weapons used by Lanza during his attack.

Original reports indicated that Lanza had carried four handguns into the school, and that a Bushmaster XM-15 (an AR-15-type assault rifle) was found in the trunk of his car. In fact, his primary weapon – the one he used while inside the school – was the Bushmaster. The weapon found in the trunk of his car was a shotgun. Lanza also carried two handguns into the school. So the “truther” version is a mixture of fact and misinformation from various points in the investigation: Lanza did have four guns, but he only carried three of them into the school, one of which was an assault rifle. “Truthers” cling to this confused narrative, even months after it was officially cleared up, despite the fact that it makes them look woefully out of touch.

The Assumption: The government wants to demonize assault rifles, so they invented the involvement of the Bushmaster XM-15 out of whole cloth, then paid off or coerced numerous law enforcement officials and private citizens to support their narrative. Oh, and remember all those times I questioned whether the shooting even happened or if Lanza was there? Ignore that: there was absolutely a shooting, and he was totally there, but he didn’t use an assault rifle. It’s okay if I make conflicting statements, because I’m telling the truth! Please don’t take my guns away!

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The sick irony of the Sandy Hook “truther” movement is that they are doing exactly what they accuse the government of doing – whether intentionally or not, they are using inconsistent facts, half-truths, and outright lies to piece together a narrative that pushes a political agenda. While some “truthers” may simply be incapable of accepting harsh realities, I suspect that most of these jerks are motivated by a fear of stricter gun control laws. Why else would you pour salt on the wounds of the families of twenty-seven innocent victims?

Bad “truther”. Bad.

No Wonder She Left You

Get it? The word miss can have different meanings: it can mean to notice the absence of, as in “I miss my ex-girlfriend since she broke up with me and won’t talk to me”, or it can mean to fail to hit something for which you’re aiming, as in “My bullets missed my ex-girlfriend, but I’m going to keep trying to murder her because I think brutal violence is hilarious!”

Ah, humor.

Here’s another puzzler for you: What’s the difference between this meme and all those awful memes that make light of rape and other forms of sexual abuse?

No really, what’s the difference? I don’t see any. Memes like this send the impression that domestic violence really isn’t that serious, as if it’s perfectly okay to joke about shooting exes. According to Click to Empower, 1 in 4 women report experiencing domestic violence in their lifetimes, leading to 2 million injuries and 1300 deaths per year. These statistics vary from source to source, but the message is clear: this is not something to be taken lightly. Forgive me for finger-wagging, but it’s not funny at all to pretend, even in meme form, that you would consider shooting a firearm at an ex.

Laughing at this meme does not make you a potential abuser: I get that. I would never suggest that the people who circulate this meme are all capable of murdering a former lover. As with all memes, though, you must must must consider your audience before passing it along. What strikes you as hilarious may be a serious emotional trigger for somebody else. It won’t kill you to be more sensitive.

The Non-Case of Veterans v Robertson

Don’t you love these memes that express outrage about the discrepancy of attention paid to two completely non-related issues? Aren’t they even better when they paint an inaccurate picture about who’s getting worked up about what, and why?

I’ll admit that it gives me a headache to think or write about the federal budget, which is why I try to avoid it, but like many Americans, I think we should help support our military veterans after they leave the service. Whether you agree with the causes of the wars in which they fought or not, these people selflessly put their lives on the line and we owe them a debt of gratitude.

That’s what makes the veteran benefit issue so vexing, and yes, a great many people have batted one or both eyes about it. The recent budget compromise passed by the Senate applies a one percent cut over ten years to the cost of living adjustments for military retirees with twenty years of service who are still of working age. In other words: If you’re retiring from the military after 20+ years, but you’re still under age 62, the federal government won’t be bumping up your benefits as much to help cover the rapidly swelling price tag of simply being alive.

Many Congresscritters and their constituents find that unconscionable, and I can understand their anger. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that the passage of this deal maybe averts another shutdown (I’m sure there’s still some way to screw this all up). To loosely paraphrase Frankenstein’s monster: SHUTDOWN BAD! Still, it kind of sucks to ask veterans to foot the bill for keeping the government running.

Now, about the second part of this terrible meme: nobody’s really losing their minds about the fact that Phil Robertson thinks homosexuality is a sin. One side is going crazy over the fact that Robertson compared homosexuality to bestiality, prostitution, and various other morally questionable activities, then displayed breathtaking stupidity regarding the plight of black Americans during the pre-civil rights era; the other side is going crazy over the fact that A&E made a business-savvy decision to suspend him. (A third subgroup thinks the entire thing is a publicity ploy; we cannot discount that possibility, but if so, it’s a sick one.)

Being upset about what Robertson said in no way precludes one from being upset about what’s happening to veterans’ benefits. In fact, both issues need addressing. Robertson’s comments could (and should) open the door for further discussion about tolerance in America (and why some people seem hell-bent on preventing our society from becoming more accepting of various ethnic groups, sexual orientations, religious beliefs, etc). The veterans’ benefits debate should draw peoples’ attention to how we elect to spend money in this country, and how we treat those who have served. There’s room at the table for both discussions. Please don’t pretend that one issue subtracts from another.

A Real Philemma

One of these days, a celebrity I actually like is going to say something stupid. When that day comes, I hope I don’t find myself thinking of ways to excuse his or her behavior.

As soon as I heard about the firestorm that grew up around Duck Dynasty patriarch and ZZ Top Fan Club President Phil Robertson, I knew I’d be writing about it. It’s not that I care about Duck Dynasty – nothing could be further from the truth – but this has all the makings of a Paula Deen style scandal. In fact, it’s bigger than the Deen scandal: Deen’s reprehensible behavior could only be hand-waved away by saying that she was a product of another era, but Robertson’s old-fashioned bigotry supposedly has the backing of the Big Man himself. Of course, that all depends on your reading of the Bible (Shh, don’t tell conservatives that there are different opinions on religious matters – it just upsets them), but the religious right is perfectly happy to conclude that anybody who finds Robertson’s recent comments in GQ disgusting must be violently anti-Christian, and therefore worthy of scorn.

What did Robertson say that was so appalling? Man, what didn’t he say? Robertson’s GQ interview is a veritable grab bag of ignorance and bigotry. Said Robertson:

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

Dear God. I simply don’t know where to start. Robertson is with the blacks, because his family is white trash? So does Robertson actually conflate black people in general with “white trash”? That’s not a flattering comparison by anybody’s standards. And if Robertson failed to witness the suffering of blacks under Jim Crow, then it was only because he was blind to it. I cannot believe that Robertson spent his entire life huddled in an isolated bubble where all the local black people were just as happy as they could be about the hand they’d been dealt. Robertson must know that was not the situation everywhere.

But racial insensitivity aside, what does Phil Robertson think about gay people?

Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong… Sin becomes fine. Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right. It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical

You know how sometimes you realize you’ve said way too much but for some reason your mouth just won’t stop running? I think Robertson experienced that about the time he started discussing vaginas and anuses. I’m so sorry, gentle reader, to have exposed you to that. Nobody should have to think about the places Phil Robertson does or doesn’t want to stick his wang.

The first thing that’s blatantly obvious is that Phil Robertson doesn’t understand anything about homosexuality; or to be fair, he understands about as much as he thinks he needs to, which is nothing. He manages to work bestiality into his discussion about homosexuality, as if they are two sides of the same coin. Of course that isn’t true: a gay man or woman is no more likely to have sex with an animal than a straight man or woman is, but that distinction is not important to somebody who wants to make homosexuality sound as icky as possible.

Also, Robertson seems to think that human sexuality is driven solely by our attraction to various orifices. Unfortunately for him, this idea doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A gay man is not gay simply because he wants to…you know. He’s gay because he is attracted to men, not their body parts. How does Robertson not understand this? Oh right, because he doesn’t want to.

Now let’s be honest: you don’t have to interview Phil Robertson to guess how he feels about certain social, religious, and political issues. I’m sure the bigwigs at A&E knew from the start that the Robertson clan would have fairly staunch Christian conservative values, including an open disdain for homosexuality. They took a chance on the Robertsons because they thought the show could be successful, and it has been. Robertson was just speaking his mind: no matter how abhorrent his beliefs are, he is still entitled to them. But just as with the Paula Deen kerfuffle earlier this year, people need to understand that A&E is a business, first and foremost. They are not bound by the Constitution to respect free speech, which means they can make their own decisions about which of their stars’ comments they will support. Robertson was either gutsy or foolish – depending on your point of view – for admitting to feelings that a reasonable person would know were controversial; now come the fireworks. Nobody should be surprised.

I Would Be Remass Not To Mention This

I know what you’re thinking: What could possibly be wrong with this meme that warrants a precision smackdown by Stupid Bad Memes? It’s got a Viking, a unicorn, an assault weapon (to appeal to gun enthusiasts), space travel, inexplicable space lightning. Only a professional grump could find something to complain about.

And that’s my cue.

Yes, this meme is pretty sweet, but there’s a tiny, tiny issue. See, the unicorn isn’t really fueled by rainbow farts.

Your basic rocket (or rocket-like unicorn) works by squirting some kind of material – called reaction mass or remass – through a nozzle. Newton’s Third Law does the driving; just as the rocket pushes against its remass, the remass pushes against the rocket with an equal force in the opposite direction. Thus does the rocket accelerate forward.

In chemical rockets, the remass is born from the fiery combustion of a fuel. On Earth, fires are supported by atmospheric oxygen, but in outer space O₂ is conspicuously absent; ergo, chemical rockets in space must also bring along an oxidizer. The hot, expanding mixture of burnt fuel and oxidizer becomes the reaction mass against which the rocket pushes.

That’s one way to fly a rocket, but it’s not the only way. There’s no law that says that a rocket’s reaction mass and its fuel must be the same material. The thermal nuclear rocket – which has been ground-tested but never flown – uses the heat from a nuclear reactor to push compressed hydrogen through a nozzle. The expanding cloud of superheated hydrogen never comes into direct contact with the nuclear fuel.

On a more user-friendly level, the water bottle rocket uses water as the reaction mass and air pressure as the “fuel”. Again, the fuel and reaction mass need not be the same material.

So it might not be correct to say that this unicorn, magnificent as it is, is fueled by rainbows. Clearly it uses some rainbowish material as its reaction mass, but there’s no indication about what’s being used to generate the energy that pushes the rainbow-stuff out through the unicorn’s…um…nozzle. In other words, if rainbow-stuff is the unicorn’s reaction mass, what is the fuel? Could the unicorn be nuclear powered? Given the level of incredibleness already displayed in this meme, that seems like a safe bet.

One other quibble: argument is properly spelled without an e in the middle of it.

Other than that…awesome.

A Christmas Naïvety

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a meme with a theme similar to this one, implying that some Christian-themed image or message is being banned by the politically correct cyber-thugs of Facebook on the grounds of “offensiveness”. It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. Facebook is in no way, shape, or form banning religious imagery. If you need proof of this, add a devout Christian to your friends list and wait ten minutes. Your friend page will be flooded with so many religious images that you’ll think you’ve been transported to the Vatican. If Facebook intends to pressure its users into removing religious images, it’s doing a terrible job.

And yet, all evidence to the contrary, some Christians persist in their belief that their religious freedoms are under persecution by the forces of political correctness. Folks, there’s no point in holding on to these fantasies except to make yourself feel falsely oppressed. And that’s a particularly loathesome trait, because if you’re a relatively wealthy white straight Christian American male, you have almost no idea what it’s like to be oppressed. How do I know? Because you have to make stuff up to show how oppressed you are.

I notice that none of the people who pass this meme along (usually via Facebook) actually quit using Facebook in protest. I think they inherently understand that this meme is what the bull leaves behind, but it fits so beautifully into the “poor little Christian” mentality that it proves too irresistible to pass up. Come on guys, you can post nativity images to your little hearts’ content. In fact, you can post just about anything as long as it doesn’t contain hate speech, gratuitous violence (minus beheadings), threats, or porn. Don’t turn this into a persecution complex.

Complex Opinions Made Unrealistically Simple

Back in April I wrote about a meme that encouraged your Facebook friends to inbox you a color indicating their grammatically-questionable feelings for you. That meme assured you that the interaction would be private, which made me wonder: why not just have your friends tell you how they feel in plain syntax instead of having them color code it?

Today’s meme proves that you needn’t type out the names of colors; you can also express your deepest-held emotions about another human being using various smileys and frowneys. So this is what we’ve been reduced to – encoding our relationship desires and fears into smiley icons. How wonderful. Then again, given the apparent difficulty of constructing short, grammatically correct English sentences, maybe it is best that we throw in the towel and switch to an icon-based form of written communication.

We might as well get our hands dirty. Let’s examine these personal revelations one by one.

• 1) “Can I keep you” The word order implies that this is a question, but I don’t see a question mark at the end. The meaning is a bit ambiguous. Can I keep you…in a cage? Can I keep you…on the phone while I describe my recent root canal in excruciating detail? The heart-shaped eyes indicate some measure of romantic intent. Can I keep you…from pursuing romantic relationships with people whose eyes aren’t grossly misshapen?
• 2) “Your a jerk” Given the number of grammar purists (I prefer that term to “grammar Nazis”) roaming the Internet, you know this memer has heard about the distinction between your and you’re. To continue to make this most basic grammatical mistake smacks of malice. Why do you hate my ability to clearly understand your meaning? Also, why would you include “You’re a jerk” as an option? If you suspect that some of your friends think you’re a jerk, why do you have them as friends?
• 3) “Kik me” Thank Glob for Google. I was about to poke massive fun at the author of this meme for misspelling the word kick, but now I know that Kik is a smartphone messaging app. Who are you calling a noob? At any rate, is it wrong of me to think that the author probably deserves a reak kick as well? Not a hard one…just a gentle boot in the pants to emphasize the importance of clear communication.
• 4) “Your cute” My cute what?
• 5) “Gorgeous” Here the author employs a minimalist approach to communication. Why bother with nouns and verbs to clarify your meaning when you can spurt forth a single adjective and leave your meaning subjective? Truly, this person is an artist.
• 6) “Fake” Ah, the author brings us another masterpiece of austerity! What could he mean by “fake”? Is the meme fake? Is the author fake, and if so, in which sense: is the author disingenuous or does he truly not exist as a corporeal entity? So many questions! So many possibilities!
• 7) “You scare me” Yes, I frequently contact people on Facebook who frighten me, then wait patiently for the exact moment that I can send them a squinty face to indicate how much they scare me. And now my patience has paid off!
• 8) “We should date” If I wanted to ask you out, I would respect you enough to ask you in person instead of by sending you an icon. That’s just me.
• 9) “Sporty” Sporty means flashy or showy in dress or behavior. It has nothing to do with actual sports. So now I’m confused: Is the baseball icon meant to be a pun, or does the author not understand the actual meaning of the word sporty?
• 10) “I love you” I don’t have a problem with this one, as long as you’re not confessing your love for the very first time via icon.
• 12) “I stalk you” I bet people who have been stalked don’t find this all that cute.
• 13) “Your cool” My cool what?
• 14) “I’d hit that” Violence is never the answer and communicating threats is a serious offense. Oh wait…you were just expressing your willingness to become sexually involved? Oh…how charming of you.
• 15) “Your funny” My funny what? My funny inability to count without skipping the number 11? What about it?
• 16) “I miss you” Then stop sending me ridiculous icons and let’s actually communicate.
• 17) “Be mine” Aww, it’s the icon equivalent of a candy heart. Remember candy hearts? Man, those things were terrible!
• 18) “Text me” But please, spell out your words and use proper grammar.
• 19) “Weird” You know, to the aliens we would be the weird ones. Did you ever think about that, Mr Earth-centric?
• 20) “Your ugly” My ugly what? My ugly intolerance for people who cannot distinguish between your and you’re? What about it?
• 21) “Marry me” Even if I weren’t already married, I’d have to take a pass on this one. I just don’t think the author of this meme knows enough about life to consider getting married.

A Slice of Infinity Pi

Remember pi from your high school math classes? Well just in case you’ve forgotten, pi is the ratio between the distance around a circle (its circumference) and the distance across a circle (its diameter). A perfectly round, perfectly planar circle is about 3.14 times farther around than it is across. But it’s not exactly 3.14 times longer. In fact, there’s no way to write the exact relationship, because pi is irrational.

I don’t mean to say that pi isn’t logical or reasonable; I mean that pi cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers. The numbers 18, 5/9, and -54.5 are all rational because they can all be written as fractions with whole numbers (positive or negative) in the numerator and the denominator. All rational numbers have a few traits in common: when written in decimal form, the digits after the decimal either come to an end (as in -54.5) or repeat the same pattern infinitely (as in 5/9, which is the same as 0.555555…).

Pi isn’t like that. There are no two integers you can think of that, when written as a fraction, will be exactly equal to pi. The fraction 22/7 is fairly close to pi, but not exactly equal.

And it’s not just that mathematicians have not yet been successful in finding the magic fraction that precisely captures the value of pi; it is utterly impossible to do so. The absolute irrationality of pi was first proved in 1761 by Johann Heinrich Lambert. But I digress.

What about the rest of this meme? Is it really possible to find every picture, every word, every social security number buried within the digits of pi? To be honest…nobody really knows.

Imagine that you had a random number generator – I mean a truly random number generator (you get them at the same place you buy frictionless pulleys and absolute zero meat lockers). Let’s say you set the generator to run day and night, churning out digits to fill the decimal places of a number that is to be infinitely long. In other words, eighty squillion years from now, when the last proton decays into a burst of energy and all other matter is gone, this random number generator will still be cranking out digits (having somehow avoided decaying itself…I’m still working out the logistics on that one). Invoke your God-like powers to travel to the end of space and time, where existence is an abstraction, and examine the infinite sequence of random digits. Yes, in this infinitely long sequence of randomly generated digits, you will truly find every conceivable series of digits. Want to find the telephone number of your first crush? Got it. All of Shakespeare’s plays, translated into Klingon and then represented in binary? Got it. A digital recreation of the Mona Lisa as it would look if it were painted by Andy Warhol? Got it. It’s all there, hidden somewhere within the infinite possibilities, if you know where to look.

Although the digits in pi are not randomly generated, the digits are expected to turn up in about the same manner as if they were randomly generated. In other words, in the first million digits of pi, you’d expect to see approximately 100,000 ones, 100,000 twos, 100,000 threes, and so on. And so far, that has held true, but we cannot claim to know that it will always be true. That’s the nature of infinity; even if we know one googol of pi’s digits, we still know essentially zero percent of them. There is always some possibility that, for reasons yet unknown (and perhaps unknowable), the digit seven will suddenly stop appearing in pi somewhere after the 44 quadrillionth digit. And if it does, then any sequence containing the digit seven that has not yet appeared…will never appear. In fact, it’s possible that all but two digits could stop occurring in pi, and pi could still go on forever without repeating. And although these may sound like mathematical abstractions – outcomes that will never occur – we cannot say for sure.

I would like this meme better if it contained some hedge words like “probably” or “maybe”, but it doesn’t. It’s presented as a sexy math fact – a quotably nifty truth that might not actually be true. It has that “gee whiz” appeal, but it does little to prepare one for the brain-busting unknowableness of the infinite, with its endless possibilities. And for my money, it’s aimed in the wrong direction. To me, it’s a far less interesting possibility that pi might contain every imaginable number sequence, and a far more interesting possibility that it might not.

World War C

Strap on your pointy party hats, folks, because this is my 100^th post on StupidBadMemes. (*sniff* They grow up so fast!) And keep those hats firmly strapped to your head, because we’re also celebrating the holiday season! Holiday holiday holiday! “And what holidays are we celebrating?” you ask, eager to participate but bizarrely unaware of your surroundings. Lots of holidays, really:

1. On December 5 people of the Jewish faith concluded their eight-night celebration of Hanukkah;
2. On December 21 many cultures will celebrate the passage of the winter solstice
3. The Kwanzaa celebration, observed by Western African descendants living in the Americas, begins on December 26 and lasts for one week;
4. On December 31 anybody who uses the Gregorian calendar will prepare to ring in the new year with alcohol and fireworks (because those two things should always be used in conjunction).

And yes, there’s the behemoth itself: Christmas. Although the actual Christmas holiday covers only one day – December 25 – it has grown into a monstrous celebration that begins earlier and earlier each year. Christians follow a man who preached about self-restraint and simple living in every aspect of one’s life, and to honor his teachings they spend gobs of cash they don’t have buying presents for people who don’t really need them, all the while decorating their houses with the gaudiest possible combination of inflatable snow globes, plastic Santa Clauses, and obnoxiously-colored lights.

And the self-victimization…my, how conservative Christians love to make themselves unhappy during the hap-happiest season of all by thinking about the gross injustices they’re forced to suffer at the hands of liberals, atheists, and other people who don’t agree with them 100% of the time. Most Christians aren’t like this, mind you, but a very vocal minority of the Christian population likes nothing better than to prattle on about the so-called “War on Christmas”. In this entirely fictitious “War”, God-fearing men and women are having their rights to celebrate Christmas slowly eroded away by the nefarious forces of the ACLU (the American Civil Liberties Union, or, if you’re a conservative Christian, the Anti-Christian Liberal Union). Hardline conservatives have drawn a line in the sand: you’re either with them or you’re against them. If you dare say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”, you’re against them.

What is so offensive about the phrase “Happy Holidays”? Is it because the phrase doesn’t mention Christmas specifically, which is apparently the only important holiday that happens between Thanksgiving and New Years Day? Is it because the phrase acknowledges the existence of other holidays at all, and by extension other religions? How insecure do you have to be in your own faith if you cannot handle a simple acknowledgement of other holidays besides the ones you like to celebrate? People don’t say “Happy Holidays” to personally spite Christians or Christmas, they say it to be inclusive. They say it to avoid marginalizing any particular group, not to hurt the majority.

I say to you, conservative Christians who are offended by “Happy Holidays”: inclusivity is a good thing. Like it or not, we no longer live in castles surrounded by moats that keep out anybody who is different from us. We live in an integrated society, and you’re going to have to accept the fact that not everybody believes or celebrates the same way you do. It is not a sin to wish for them to enjoy their holiday season as much as you should enjoy your own. So stop whining, pour yourself a cup of eggnog, and give somebody a hearty “Happy Holidays!” See…it’s not so bad.