Pop Music

First things first, I apologize for the unexpected hiatus.  The holidays were a pretty kickin' time on my end.  I skipped posting on Christmas, because Christmas.  I didn't post that Thursday, because I had spent 13 hours at work that day, and I was just too mentally exhausted to write.

I spent my New Year's eve puking, which is pretty common for me.  What was uncommon was the fact that I hadn't had anything to drink beforehand-- I was sick with the stomach flu (or cancer, according to WebMD).  And last Thursday I forgot to post, because I am a moron.  But everyone knows that already.

On to more pressing matters!

Scooter Braun owns the future... of popular music.  And he motherfucking knows it.  He's still consolidating power at the moment, but he has tested the waters and has managed to part the red sea.

And I have no gooddamn clue how.  It makes no sense.  This fact is the exact opposite of his chosen domain (pop music), which makes so much sense it's insultingly boring.

Most of you are probably looking at me like I'm crazy.  But I'm not crazy.  I have charts and numbers and science to back me up, and science would never lie to me.  Most of you don't even know what a Scooter Braun is, but since you're not abjectly retarded, you know it's his stupid redneck face I shared in an image a while back.

I'll repost it to catch the slower members of the audience up:

Scooter Braun.  Know the name.

Like many people in the music industry, Scooter works behind the scenes.  He's in the shadows, pulling various strings to make the aggravatingly catchy, yet bland and repetitive music in the "popular" genre sell millions of copies.  Luckily for nostalgia, time will eventually roll up its sleeves and wash off all the shit so the great music being made right now can shine.

This is why your grandpa makes fun of the music you listen to, and why 'oldies' stations can stay in business, despite the fact that, by definition, they cannot add any new songs to their playlists.  These 'oldie' stations only play the great music that survived the test of time*.

Not counting things like Rebecca Black's Friday, but we'll get to that in a bit.  First, you need to know that Scooter is the man behind Justin Bieber's success.  And you also need to accept that Justin Bieber is pretty damn successful with tweens.  He isn't the most successful, but he's up there when it comes to outright net worth.

I couldn't find inflation adjusted numbers, but I get the feeling that successful tween stars pretty much all follow the same pattern.  Most tweens just buy some artist's shit, and then they move onto another artist.  Tween stars never stay in the spotlight (and make bank) for long, because their audience A) doesn't know shit about dick and B) grows up.  Except for Justin Bieber.  Justin... is still famous.  Don't believe me?  Have a Google search hits chart:



Yeah, he's still beating his peers in the "shitty music" category.  And, he's more or less turned it into positive press-- the worst thing you can say about him is that he makes bad music.  So does Ke$ha (I honestly can't be bothered to care enough to see if I spelled that right), at least Justin doesn't look like he'll give me herpes at 500 yards.  Ok, and he's spoiled and a brat, but he's also 18.  As far as I know, that's sorta average for that age group.

Bieber is still in the spotlight.  And he's been there longer than any of his direct tween competitors, and shows very few signs of imploding.

But, it was Scooter Braun who put him there, and Scooter Braun who knows his shit.  Here, have a link: Read.  Don't look into the exact reporting here (not that it's bad/wrong/falsified, but its not what I want to bring to your attention), but Braun's reaction and comments.  He's smart. He doesn't sound like someone bumbling around with a one hit wonder, he sounds like a man who understands marketability on a level no one has yet to even comprehend.

How do I know this?  I compiled another chart of Google hits, this being the stuff in music that you heard approximately 10 billion times in 2012, against Bieber:



** Notes about this chart at the end of the post.

If you read that New Yorker article, you already know that Scooter signed Carly Rae Jepsen. What you now know is he also signed PSY.

 Only Friday remains... and Friday is the inverse of Scooter Braun.  Is there anyone here who thinks Rebecca Black has a stable superstar career ahead of her?  She is, actually, more or less set for life.  Oh, you didn't think super popular YouTube videos made money?  They make fucktons of money, if you can break into the millions-of-views level.  And Friday did that in spades.

Sure, she got teased, but she has money to spare.  She dropped out of school, but, with some smart investments,  she could do perfectly fine investing her profits and living on the interest.  And that was two years ago.  The difference is that she'll never be taken seriously, on a musical level.  Ever.

I've heard music snobs say that "Call Me Maybe" and "Gangnam Style" are "Brilliant, but horrible songs", despite the fact that, to my admittedly piss-poor ear, the only strong difference between them and Friday is the lyrics and effects used.  This is because Scooter Braun is a goddamn superhero.

(I am aware that Gangnam Style is a parody.  But, it has become the super-mega hit that it's making fun of, so it's valid.  And personally, I'm still sick of hearing it.  Bring it on in the comments if you disagree.)
 
Scooter Braun owns tweens, when it comes to pop music.  The next batch of radio hits?  Gonna be his.  He is a man to watch, if only so you know who to hang in effigy later.

*Not that all old music on the radio is good music.  But the average is skewed in favor of objectively good pieces.

**Terms were picked that were most favorable to the artist.  Nine times out of ten, that meant the song and not the person making the song,  Also, searching Friday on its own led to one weeeiiiirrrrrd trends chart.  I have no idea what the hell is up with November, but the searches for 'Friday' in every November since 2004 skyrocket.  It's absurd.

Please Say Tuned

So, I was going to do a post about some web dev stuff.

But then I stumbled on to something alarming.  Maybe.  I'm still crunching numbers.  It is two in the morning, and I have work tomorrow, but, man, what.  What.

If this all tends how I think it will, take a good hard look at this picture:

I know, he looks "unable to open the fridge" retarded.  All evidence points to this being camouflage,  much like a tiger's stripes, but for teeming masses of people rather than the savanna.

This man owns... pop culture, at least in terms of music.  Like, literally  every big pop hit that came out in 2012... him.  He did it.  It's his fault.

This man is a mastermind.  Full post to follow with more details.  But look, oh Humanity, and despair - your destroyer is at hand.  And he's totally a goddamn redneck.

I'm moving.... eventually!

You should probably read this post listening to Billy Joel's "Movin' Out".  Have a youtube link for ease of access:

Ok, now that you've got the proper soundtrack, I have some news to announce   This will no longer be the primary portal to the blog.  This particular website may or may not still exist in some fashion, but I will start directing traffic elsewhere.

I'm still writing, mind you, because writing is important.  It's a skill I want to be gooder at.  And, hopefully, I can still make people laugh with words and teach them a little bit about this weird universe we live in and/or point and laugh at stupid people doing stupid shit.

But, guys, I do a lot more than just write boring old English.  I can write in Java and Python and Common Lisp.  And I want to start sharing that too.  You see, I have some cool/weird ideas for webapps that I'd like to start writing and hosting for people to try.  All of the source code will be open, obviously, and some of it would be stand-alone programs that you'd download.  Other parts would be web applications and I want a place to host those.

And I'd like to start a side blog that's devoted to nothing but computer science/software engineering.  Instead of trying to be funny/sarcastic/a giant asshole, I'd write more technically for assistance in using things like Apache Tomcat, or the Google Web Toolkit or Python or how to cron a script.  This was actually my original intent with this blog, but then I thought no one would read that, and I wanted to be read.

Now I've realized that I might as well just write what I want to write, and if I want to be read, I'll stop fucking around and write for Cracked.

All of this really should be under one umbrella, and as you might have guessed, most web hosting services don't allow the degree of customization that I'd be looking for.  So, I want to host this eventual website out of my house, and build it myself.  I'll also be able to get some free CS-sideblog posts out of the adventures I'm going to have making all the planned software tech I want to use play nice in the sandbox with each other.

What does this mean for you, dear reader?

Not a whole lot.  If all goes as planned, Blogger will still be hosting a variant of this blog, as I still like to pretend that someone will stumble upon this and like it and make me Internet famous.  However, it'll get a lot more computer science-y, which I will balance out with a banner of a unicorn.

The transition probably won't happen for a few months.  Why?  Because my dorm's firewall is a cast iron bitch to work around, and my attempts to set up a router to bypass it have not gone well (fun fact: you can't stick shitrail on 32kb of memory.  Like, nothing.  It might as well not even exist).

Yay for getting my own webzone!  Also, yay for copping out a post to talk about this instead!

Quantum Immortality... because you're dead. Probably.

So, two days ago, I talked about some pretty far out shit man.  There was like, atoms, and immortality, and like all these crazy things happening at a level so small, we can't even see it with light based microscopes, and in a very general sense, lots and lots of weed.

Metaphorically, of course.  The last time stoners ended up anywhere near a quantum physics experiment, people started talking about how the LHC was going to create black holes and send us back in time, simultaneously, with the outside possibility of sending the black holes back in time and creating more paradoxes than a season of LOST.

Which, by the way, was bogus.  In order for black holes to be created by the LHC, gravity would have had to take a hike.  And everyone knows if gravity suddenly stopped working, scientists would be way to busy floating around and shouting 'weee!' at the top of their lungs.

XKCD counts as scientific opinion, right?

Actually, we'd all float up into the upper atmosphere, suffocate, and die, while the Earth violently broke apart beneath us.  Planet-wide fissures would erupt as the continents rended themselves apart, causing massive volcanoes, tusmanis, and earthquakes.  Most of what you might hold on to the keep yourself on the ground would be destroyed, as the ground itself started breaking apart and drifting away.  After a little while, even if you were in some shock-proof concrete bunker, you'd be fucked because the atmosphere would fade away as the planet that keeps most of that in check would break apart.

Well, that turned out to be grim.  The lesson here, kids, is that life is meaningless, because at any instant someone could type 'import antigravity' into python and rip the world apart.  Also, you're not special and all love is a lie.  Now go run along and play, also, have a good Friday tomorrow!

*ahem* Back on topic!

We did talk last time about the Many-Worlds approach to quantum physics, which basically says that whenever there is a binary probability where one state must be chosen, instead both states happen.  The most popular example of this is electron spin.  If you were to rig up an experiment where if the electrons spin one way, you die and another way, you live, you'd do both-- because the electron would spin in both directions at the same time.

Got it?  Great.  Obviously, you can't be alive or dead, so the moment someone came to see the results of your quantum experiment, in one universe, you'd die.  In another one, you'd live.  If you ran the experiment N times, N - 1 times you'd die, but there would always be one universe where you're alive.

Now, how often does quantum behavior like this happen?  Well... no one is really sure, due to decoherence. Decoherence is when another atom manages to snap the superimposed atom out of its 'both' state and into a 'one or the other' state, so in practice, we never see two events that should not be happening at the same time, happening at the same time.

I refused to scroll down after seeing that "Impossible Geometry" got 528 hits. The Getty Image Archive will not drive me insane today.   I'm gonna go sacrifice a goat to Cthulhu and the other Elder Gods now.

So, it's very possible that stuff like this is happening pretty much all the time-- considering the billions of atoms that are knocking around in the general space around you, surely some are getting superimposed and decohered at any given moment, right?

So, when you factor that into the whole '100% survival rate' supplied by the Many-Worlds theory... well, you can't die, can you?  Your friends might think of you as dead, but there is always a universe where you survive the car accident/gunshot/ piano dropped from the 10th floor window of an apartment building.  What's even weirder is that from your perspective, nothing would have changed-- its not like you suddenly get transported into the universe where crows are finally sick of our shit and rise up against us (which is only a matter of time).  Everything else would be the same, outside of a few atoms being in a slightly different spot.

Death becomes something that happens to other people-- sometimes you're in the universe where someone else miraculously survives, sometimes you're in the one where that dude dies.  Well, technically, you'd be in both... but we're aware of only one universe at a time.. right?

Maybe.  No one has really done any work here-- as we're well outside the bounds of science at this point, but technically, every time an atom snapped out of a superimposed state, both realities that could have been from that state play out.  Most of these are not lethal, so there should be billions of 'yous' each in their own universe.  Now, there is some debate on how different each universe is.  After all, can subatomic particles make _that_ much a difference?

I don't know.

The psudo-science breaks down after a while-- there must be causes for death that are not involved with subatomic interactions, or then everyone would live forever in some play out of the universe, which doesn't fit.  And then you start realizing that any cause of death that we would contemplate has nothing to do with subatomic interactions, so we'd die in almost any case we could consider anyway.

The other issue is which universe is chosen for "you" when your life isn't on the line.  Assuming all universes aren't unfolding in perfect parallel, when someone else runs the experiment on themselves, do you see them die?  Technically, no, as there will always be a you in some universe that watches them live, but which one are you experiencing?  Who chooses that?  How?

So, yeah.  You might live forever because in some universe you always narrowly avoid death.  So, life isn't actually short at all.  Good luck explaining that tattoo of those Chinese characters that mean 'stupid american' to your grandchildren!

Quantum Improbability

Guess what's back!  November is over, I have another bizarre and objectively bad 50,000 word rough draft to my name that you can totally check out here (because I forgot to actually supply a link here during November): Foxtrot

It's not even technically done-- I skipped parts at the end and never actually finished writing the finale.  I'll get to that soon, I swear.

So, what should I write about to commemorate the blog still existing?  Yeah, I was thinking bizarre pseudo-scientific theories about immortality too, what a coincidence.

I'm not talking about how that life extending drug discovered a year and a half ago, although, holy shit, have you heard about that?  It's like a super-molecule, it takes on more middle age life shortening diseases than Bruce Lee takes on ninjas.  Also, any time your research group is "obese mice" you have to be doing something right, because fat mice look hilarious.

It would totally sound exactly like that fat nerd from high school. 

No, I'm talking about weird philosophical concepts that get their start in some strange phenomena we run into in quantum mechanics, because it turns out if you tack 'quantum' on top of anything, people will flip their shit first and think later, and most people skip the latter step by force of habit.  It's how McDonalds is still in business.

Which means I'm going to have to be careful and not end up like this asshole and get it all goddamn wrong.  Quantum Mechanics doesn't somehow prove the power of positive thinking, or God, and anyone who says that either is referencing the wrong experiment or trying to understand high level concepts without first even beginning to grasp the basics.

The experiment you're looking for about the power of positive thought was started by Masaru Emoto, who claimed that he could get water to form more regular repeating molecular shapes by taping, to beakers of water, the same messages your mom left you in your lunch box in elementary school if she loved you.  His experiments have never managed to work through a double-blind test, so all the other scientists make fun of him.  They also make fun of you when you buy into his bullshit.

So bear with me as we get a little technical for a bit, before dropping out to the wider implications that people actually want to read about.  Because if numbers and physics of very tiny sub atomic particles made you happy about life, you'd all be scientists.

Anyway, the theory is called quantum suicide, which is a little weird for a theory about immortality but again, bear with me.  It took me a while to dig up a real link, but as I understand it from people far smarter than me at Princeton, the basic idea is this-- actually, no wait, back up.  We should probably cover what we're talking about first.

Flip the board, Jensen!  They're not ready!  Also, did your wife kick you out of the house and make you sleep in the office again?

Quantum Mechanics is the attempt by science to understand what the heck his happening at the smallest level of existence-- at atomic and sub-atomic particles.  It turns out, electrons, neutrons, protons and all that jazz do not play by the same rules that you and I do when it comes to concepts like mass, acceleration, force and energy.  They regularly pants classical physics, like a bunch of stuck up brats making fun that old man in the corner who smells vaguely of prunes, talks about how things were 'back in his day', and may or may not just have pissed himself.

So, scientists designed an entire new body of physics, quantum mechanics, to deal with these assholes.  A large part of quantum mechanics is that we, uh, can only really guess at most of it.  Really-- at the smallest level of existence, nature is governed more by probabilities than actual hard numbers.  The problem is that sometimes these probabilities are sort of alive/dead either-or things.  You can't have a probability, it has to be one or the other.

Light is a classic example-- it's either a particle (called a photon) or a wave (called a wave).  It behaves drastically different as a particle or as a wave, and particles and waves themselves are mutually exclusive, you can't be both (one has mass and matter, the other is a transfer of energy).

Except, it could be either thing depending on how its feeling that day.  And sometimes, its both at the same time, until it makes up its mind (which it tends to do the moment a scientist tries to prove its always in one state)-- I'm sure you heard someone ranting about this once.  A lot of things in quantum mechanics are like this, the most popular being electron 'spin'.

Electrons spin either up or down, except when they are in a superimposed state and we have to say that they're both.  At the same time.  Just run with the paradox.

The idea is that if we were somehow to rig up a device that would kill you if electrons were to spin one way, and leave you alive if they spin the other way.  So... are you dead?  You've got a 50% chance of survival... but nothing would happen until someone actually came to check on you, and the electron 'decided' which way to spin, right?

You should recognize this as Schrodinger's Cat, except now you're the cat.  Also, you can thank me for the Internet love later.

Now, its time for some weird shit-- according to the Many-Worlds theory, you must be alive.  But to the experimenters, you could be dead.  Welcome to the mind-fuck, ladies and gents, so sit your ass down and pay attention.  There are coloring books for those of you who just lost higher-order brain function in back.

Yes, the bad man who kept saying things that should not be is gone.  Orange is a nice color.

Ok, so how the hell does that work?  Simple (oh, hai, blatant lie, how are you?).  The reason is that its not that the electron is in some 'undecided' state, its in both states, so by forcing a binary decision on it, you've actually rent the universe in two, one where the electron spins down, the other where the electron spins up.

You see, you've put yourself in a superimposed state-- one where you're dead, and one where you're alive.  And the alive state will persist, no matter how many times the experiment is run.

I'll talk about the bizarre effects of such a theory in another post, but have some other food for thought.  The other prevailing theory of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpetation more or less says that systems forced into such a superimposed setup automatically collapse, and the electron is forced to chose one or the other.  However, because no one really knows what state you're in until someone checks on you (going back to the many-worlds theory here), the mathematical consequences for both are the exact same.

According to Many-Worlds, you will always survive in some universe.  According to Cpenhagen, you can survive, its just very improbable that you do.  The only thing that is different is that you have made your own existence very improbable.

I sorta forgot this was a thing...

I totally forgot to update throughout the ENTIRE MONTH OF OCTOBER.

Because, you see, I am a moron.

Epsilon minus semi-moron, to be exact

And the worst part is that, guess what, I'm doing NaNoWriMo again, so November is blacklisted.

I know.  I had this really cool post about the lack of intelligent life that had visited Earth, and the statistics that backed up the fact that we might have intelligent life and they simply haven't gotten here yet.  And the iPad mini came out, which is like shooting fish in a barrel.

There was so many easy blog posts throughout the month of October that I literally could have coughed and ended up with a tech link that was begging for a blog post.  I know.  I'm sorry.

However, I have a solution.  I'm going to livestream my November novel.  As you may or may not recall, the last time I tried this, I posted parts of the novel as I wrote them to the blog.  That rapidly fell apart because I would go back and make changes, thus meaning there were several posts that didn't actually add any story.

However, if I were to say, make a publicly view able Google Doc, you guys could watch me write in real time.  Which you'd totally want to do because I just might randomly bust out ASCII porn.  I might, in addition, try to set up an IRC server to allow for chat about the novel I'm writing.

I won't lie, I stole the idea from the naked novel project, but this gives everyone involved more flexibility.  You can read my rough draft, I don't feel retarded re-posting parts after edits.  Plus, once you see my crazy-as-balls novel idea (when I told my roommate my concept, his first reply was, "You were wasted when you came up with this, weren't you?"), I'm sure you guys won't mind missing out on the usual twice a week rantings about technology... when I actually remember to post that is.

However, setting up an IRC server may turn out to be a pain (the dorm firewall and I don't get along), so novel chat may get axed.  But I'll see you guys Novemeber first, with a shiny perma-link to a Google document, that will contain the rough draft of Foxtrot (title subject to change).

annnnnnnd still not today

No post today because I'm hungover.

If anyone actually read this, this might cause a problem... lawl, we all know that's false.  Regular posting to resume next week.