Made the mistake of cruising facebook the other day. Oh. Let’s make that less creepy, shall we then? I actually did my quarterly read through of posts and shit. Pretty much same old same old. I made a note or two. On some sophomoric link was the old nonsense about trees and sound; if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it does it make a sound?
Even as a kid I figured it was existential, because as a physics question it’s stupid. 1) Laws of physics don’t change based on our perception, in theory they could, but then every statement is theoretical, you don’t need a tree or a forest 2) There are thousands of organisms that pick up the vibrations we call sound that live in the forest, a few hundred live on any given tree, so how the hell does anything do anything with no one around?
So as a kid I thought of it sort of like Schrodingers cat. Like you can’t tell whether the tree has fallen or not until you walk into the forest but once you do the tree will fall. Ok, that’s not a great example of the whole cat in a box thing, but, fuck you I was a kid. And it’s still existential. I mean if you put a cat in a box and the lid is on, you can scratch on the box and the cat, if alive, will scratch back. Not a theoretical one. Same with a theoretical forest.
The deeper question is a physics question. The perception of matter at all is based on vibration. We see a solid table where there is only a series of wood atoms, mostly space between them, ok, atoms that bind to make wood molecules, still, mostly space. Our “seeing” is refraction of light limited to the spectrum we can see, and it’s “being” is the frequency of vibration for lack of a better word. There are people reading this who actually know physics much better than I, and I realize how simplistic this explanation is, but don’t correct me unless it’s completely wrong and you can make it right in a paragraph.
The same thing applies to sound. The vibration of the disruption doesn’t change based on whether an organ to perceive it is around. For us dog people on the pragmatic level it’s exactly like Schrodinger’s cat; who gives a fuck? Seriously, it’s not like I named the tree or anything and the cat? Shit, even Schrodinger didn’t name that little fucker, not fluffy, hairball, Lucille, nope. Didn’t even give it his first name.
Heh. When I was traveling with the first ex Mrs Dawg, we got this ride North of Nashville; a retired couple in an RV. They were going down to the Keys to fish. They missed their grown children. The guy introduced himself as Bob and his wife as “My Wife”. The seahags bristles were up the whole 28 hours we traveled with them. She tried her damnest to get her name. The woman even referred to herself as wife, but, that might have been in part to fuck with the seahag. But you see my problem with Schrodinger’s cat. I know, it’s just theoretical, but still, shit, people name their digital pets and those aren’t even three dimensional.
I almost left a note, something like “In space no one can hear you scream, so if a tree was hurling at you in space, no, it doesn’t make a sound. Oh. Wait. This planet is in space. Try screaming.”
There were also all those fruity hallmark affirmation things, a lot of We Love Bernie shit, some Jesus shit, some shit from pages that sell things I once had an interest in, oh, and some lengthy explanation of a stupid math problem that went viral. The problem is simple; three apples equal 30, one apple and two bunches of bananas equal eighteen, one bunch of bananas minus a coconut equals two, so what does an apple a bunch of bananas and a coconut equal? 16 of course. No. According to dude the first several pictures of bananas were a bunch of four (though the fourth was that stylized banana falling off edge of picture, so it could have been a cleft banana) and the first coconut was two halves (or 5/8th and 3/8th depending how you look at it) so dude claims the answer is fourteen.
My first two questions were 1) who gives a fuck and 2) this went viral? The math is simple. It’d have to be, I admit to being awfully light in the physics arena, but I’m a downright idiot when it comes to math (ok, idiot savant, Tell me the percentage of my commission and I’ll tell you immediately how much I make on selling something at any price). If I remember my algebra right they never assigned a value to X and later fooled you with a lower case x. probably why they don’t do real equations with bad line art of fruit.
Yeah, ok. No facebook cruising for another three months. Oh. Wait. Anyone else getting google fucked? On android devices I’m on several apps I don’t even have because I’m signed in with a google account. GF claimed I was up all night on a program called Hangouts and I’m popular on a program called google circle. One is, I think, an instant messenger thingy. The other? Haven’t a clue. It’d be cool if someone with a clue could tell me, better yet, tell me how to have use of phone without google. If you didn’t know about those things, it’s cool of me to tell you. If an android is dropped by a cat into a falling forest …
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