Insane Clown Posse is insane and so despite how much they enjoy the miracles¹ of the natural world, the operational mechanics of magnets continue to elude them. But they’re not alone.

It’s easy to say that magnets emit a magnetic field, but when you get down to it, that statement that needs more explanation. What is a magnetic field, and more importantly why does it cause that repulsion and attraction. The strange truth about most things we take as a given is that there are scads of underlying assumptions we ignore because at some point it’s easier to just take it as a given.

That’s not to say there aren’t people out there who truly understand magnetism, but chances are you’re not one of them.

Feynman’s ‘explanation’ of magnetism via a chain of questions running down into more and more general and fundamental truths reminds me of this great bit by Louis CK:

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Footnotes

1. Miracle in this instance meaning things science has explained quite well, but are still ‘magical’ in the poetic sense. [↩]

It’s funny that I came upon this video today, less than a week after ‘rebranding’ my blog to celebrate to awesomeness of everything.

I don’t listen to Insane Clown Posse, and the whole Juggalo sub-culture is in turns baffling and terrifying, but you can’t deny that they’re right about this one. The world is amazing, even before we look at the stupendous ways we have shaped the world around us.

I’ll let Devin Faraci, finish off my thoughts on this:

So much of what is around us is incredible and beautiful and transcendent… but it’s funny to hear a couple of idiots in clown paint who can’t rap and who love the word ‘motherfucker’ telling you this essential, wonderful truth.

PostBourgie linked earlier today to a sick video that reminded me why white¹ is so frequently, and so deservedly, seen as a synonym for lame²:

Update: YouTube took down the original video I linked to, but there are many copies out there so I changed my post to point to an active one.

I also wanted to describe a little bit about how I feel about each of the three raps in the video. Mos Def’s is the first and probably the weakest, but it’s got a real laid back delivery that makes it feel more casual than most of the rap freestyles I’m accustomed to. Black Thought’s is the best overall with a throughline to the lyrics, lots of great similes, and just so smooth and controlled. Eminem’s, the one that seems to be seen as the best by the majority of people, is probably the best from a pure rhyme spitting level. He’s got a couple great lines in there, and he doesn’t let the beat slow down his frenetic flow. That said, he doesn’t win it in my eyes because he hasn’t grown up and started rapping about something other than teen pop stars, prescription drugs, and general violence. He can get a lot of rhymes out of that material — ‘kill a koala’ and ‘maul a chihuahua’ come to mind as does the killer line ‘My dick is so big, if I add another inch to it, you would swear when I raped you that you was actually into it’ — but I’m over it and so should he.

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Footnotes

1. Nobody thinks of Eminem as white [↩]
2. I had slightly more to write about this awesome video, mostly related to how white I am and was ignorant of the existence of these ‘cyphers’ and whatnot, but my browser crashed without auto-saving. C’est la vie. [↩]

A few months ago, a study came out saying that unhappy people watched more television which prompted me to ask if watching TV makes you unhappy and my answer was, of course, no. In fact, I specifically stated that watching TV actually makes me happier overall.

So the recent study that watching TV relieves loneliness was not a surprise to me. In my previous post, I actually predicted it:

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

It didn’t quite take 30 years for TV to shift the data, but my point remains. One of the reasons I enjoy television more than I do movies is that the longer form of storytelling allows stronger connections to the characters. This goes beyond a need for social connectedness, though this study shows that this is clearly a factor, and into the ability of television to ask deeper and more fundamental questions than film.

Movies often seem grander in some respects, but I think that most of that view comes from film’s greater opportunity, not greater ability, to ask these sorts of questions. In two hours, a lot of ideas can be examined but they cannot be explored to any real depth. In addition, in two hours characters can be examined, but they will most likely not change in any appreciable amount. But television dramas have characters that change drastically. A movie could attempt such changes, but it would be seen as absurd by critics; in two hours, for those sorts of changes to occur would break the audiences willing suspension of disbelief.

In addition, movies require a real dramatic thrust and driving action, and so the framing of the characters always relies on that structure, unless you’re doing a very indie film with no expectation of heavy distribution. Television, on the other hand, can explore multiple characters by virtue of their long-term status. In a movie that tells the same high level story as Lost or Kyle XY or other character dramas, you might get some amount of time devoted to side characters, but nowhere near the attention to detail that television offers; with television, you can truly get immersed in a world.

It’s that immersive quality that makes television more capable of not only examining a world and its inhabitants but also touching you with the answers it uncovers.

Once again, Shep Smith cuts through the bullshit at Fox News. It doesn’t matter if the torture worked. You don’t fucking do it.

And yet, these numskulls he’s surrounded by continue to parrot idiotic talking points. There aren’t two schools of thought about any of this. Torture is wrong. Even if it worked (which it doesn’t) it is still wrong.

Why is this guy still working with Fox News? He should join a real news organization.

Yesterday, I sat down and watched a spectacular lecture about primate sexuality I found through Boing Boing. One thing I learned, among the many many fascinating things I learned over the course of the lecture, was that men produce more testosterone when near women. I also learned that testosterone spurs the growth of facial hair. And that’s why I have virtually no facial hair…

What always confused me about Coldplay’s newest album was that North America got Violet Hill first and Europe got Viva La Vida first, when it was clear that the latter was the superior song by virtually every metric. Does it deserve to be Song of the Year? Well, I’ve been sort of away from the music world for a while so I’m not going to pretend to have a strongly held opinion on this. But at the same time, I have to wonder if a song whose greatest strength, at least with respect to me, is that it reminds me of a fantastic promo video for NBC’s upcoming show Kings is really deserving of Song of the Year? Maybe it’s just me and my dangerously growing obsession with all things TV. Regardless, congrats to the Coldplay boys; it’s still a pretty good song.

I have to amend my previous assessment about John Kerry’s speech. I had missed a lot of the build up beginning of his speech, and thanks to the youtube video of the speech over on Andrew Sullivan’s site I saw the whole thing. And there’s some really good stuff in there. He still sounds like a bit of a tool, but the words are there, and a lot of Biden’s more convincing rhetoric echoes this speech, though Biden’s delivery was better. But I was overly flippant about John Kerry’s speech which, when heard in its entirety, is really good and stands up to the others of the night.

For all you Middleman fans out there (and for the rest of you who don’t know what the fuck Middleman is but like absurdity):

This video is much much funnier (and cuter and awesomer) without the background music.