Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Schroedinger's Laundry and Other Stories
I went to see Super Size Me last night. It is a very good movie, and I'll talk about it in a bit, but I want to back up to just before I saw the movie. While waiting in line with the friends I am seeing it with, the following conversational train of thought comes rolling out of our collective brains, all whistling and steaming with engineering-type cerebretion. (If it's not a word, it is one now!)
It is noted that I live not a block away in an apartment building. Because my apartment is located on the ground floor across from the mailboxes, it is deemed to be the ultimate in Slack Apartments. I then mention that although my apartment is in a prime slack location, my laundry facilities are on the top floor (the seventh) and therefore not conductive to Slack. Now having the laundry on the top floor of the building is kind of odd, but we decide that it doesn't much matter from the perspective of someone doing laundry, since because of the elevator, the distance is basically the same from all floors. However, it was pointed out to me that by going to the top floor, you would have more potential energy, and therefore--
"Stop!" I said. (Probably some of you are asking me to do the same...) "Physics is not meant to be applied to such daily tasks as laundry!"
See, the whole idea is based on the experiment in probability by Schroedinger in which he proposed the following:
take a box that totally shields its contents from observation, put inside a cat and a radioactive isotope, and seal up the box. Since you cannot observe what is happening, the probabilities that the cat is alive or dead are equal. Well, more or less. I am not an expert at quantum mechanics and have surely paraphrased the experiment horribly, but I think you get the idea. The gist is that the act of observing a (quantum) experiment may affect the experiment itself.
Now, once rolling, the concept of physics in relation to cleaning one's socks just can't be stopped, and we come to Schroedinger's Laundry. Once you dump your clothes in and close the lid, and viewing this from a quantum physics perspective, does it not follow that now they are now every color at once, just as the Cat is both alive and dead at the same instant? And following that further, does it not follow that every article of clothing could then become a left sock (as well as a right sock) simultaneously? So therefore, depending on what time you open the laundry machine, you could very well have a different number of socks than when you started (call this opening it at a "wrong time"). To correct an imbalance, you would have to be able to create an opposite wrong time that has the same imbalance, but on the other foot. It's all very theoretical, of course, and feel free to correct me if I mutilate something past the point of recognition. Otherwise, I suppose that's the lowdown on the situation between quantum physics and laundry. Be careful opening up the washing machine next time.
Once we were in the theater, not much more happened (other than my introduction to a particularly tasty Nanaimo bar) and the movie started. Super Size Me is a really good flick. Morgan Spurlock manages to make a very entertaining, very informative, very eye-opening look at the fast food industry and the way food has evolved in America. His main focus is on McDonald's of course, but the whole film is quite good. I thought the bit about the stomach surgery was a little too much though. Especially good are the art pieces used, as they are quite disturbing, but in a good way. I think.
The movie got me thinking, not about McDonald's or about fast food, but about lobbyists and capitalism. I mean, here we have this food industry, represented in Washington by lobbyist people whose sole job is to do whatever they can to ensure that their clients' business is not hampered by the government. One can only imagine what kinds of plying and wheedling that goes on there and who knows how much money is spent. I'm sure it's no different in Canada, just on a smaller scale perhaps. It's kind of depressing when you think about it. What we're seeing now is the results of what happens when you have these astronomically successful corporations that can spend absolutely scads and scads of money purely on the goal of making even larger scads of money, all while staying just on the right side of legal. Hence, you have marketing that is very very heavily directed towards children (to the point where it borders on brainwashing), food that affects your body in very addicting ways, and a team of crack lawyers that can defend what they do every step of the way. I'm not saying that they're responsible (we, the consumer, are as much at fault for letting them be the way they are) but rather that they aren't doing anything morally wrong. At least in the eyes of the System.
The same logic can be applied to the copyfight in that you have these huge organizations that represent the major record labels (although that may depend on your definition of represent...) and happen to be making money at the moment. They are fighting as hard as they can against anything that could challenge that situation. Downside is, in the copyfight we aren't talking about people's health. It is hard to take care of yourself when there are billions and billions and BILLIONS of dollars being poured into efforts to make you do otherwise. Against the bankrolls of the world's largest companies, the government can't help either. In short, the System is broken.
Unfortunately, there really isn't a solution. Sure, we could always give that Communism thing a go, but last time I checked, it wasn't really doing that well either. The thing is, that as broken as everything is, it's still what we've adopted, and since everything is still A-OK with the majority and in the spirit of democracy (which I do think to be the best way to govern, at least in theory), I have no choice but to respect that and go with the flow. Pay my taxes, vote in elections, not cause trouble. In short, be a decent citizen. Besides, it's not all bad, right?
Right?
¶ 1:33 p.m.
I went to see Super Size Me last night. It is a very good movie, and I'll talk about it in a bit, but I want to back up to just before I saw the movie. While waiting in line with the friends I am seeing it with, the following conversational train of thought comes rolling out of our collective brains, all whistling and steaming with engineering-type cerebretion. (If it's not a word, it is one now!)
It is noted that I live not a block away in an apartment building. Because my apartment is located on the ground floor across from the mailboxes, it is deemed to be the ultimate in Slack Apartments. I then mention that although my apartment is in a prime slack location, my laundry facilities are on the top floor (the seventh) and therefore not conductive to Slack. Now having the laundry on the top floor of the building is kind of odd, but we decide that it doesn't much matter from the perspective of someone doing laundry, since because of the elevator, the distance is basically the same from all floors. However, it was pointed out to me that by going to the top floor, you would have more potential energy, and therefore--
"Stop!" I said. (Probably some of you are asking me to do the same...) "Physics is not meant to be applied to such daily tasks as laundry!"
See, the whole idea is based on the experiment in probability by Schroedinger in which he proposed the following:
take a box that totally shields its contents from observation, put inside a cat and a radioactive isotope, and seal up the box. Since you cannot observe what is happening, the probabilities that the cat is alive or dead are equal. Well, more or less. I am not an expert at quantum mechanics and have surely paraphrased the experiment horribly, but I think you get the idea. The gist is that the act of observing a (quantum) experiment may affect the experiment itself.
Now, once rolling, the concept of physics in relation to cleaning one's socks just can't be stopped, and we come to Schroedinger's Laundry. Once you dump your clothes in and close the lid, and viewing this from a quantum physics perspective, does it not follow that now they are now every color at once, just as the Cat is both alive and dead at the same instant? And following that further, does it not follow that every article of clothing could then become a left sock (as well as a right sock) simultaneously? So therefore, depending on what time you open the laundry machine, you could very well have a different number of socks than when you started (call this opening it at a "wrong time"). To correct an imbalance, you would have to be able to create an opposite wrong time that has the same imbalance, but on the other foot. It's all very theoretical, of course, and feel free to correct me if I mutilate something past the point of recognition. Otherwise, I suppose that's the lowdown on the situation between quantum physics and laundry. Be careful opening up the washing machine next time.
Once we were in the theater, not much more happened (other than my introduction to a particularly tasty Nanaimo bar) and the movie started. Super Size Me is a really good flick. Morgan Spurlock manages to make a very entertaining, very informative, very eye-opening look at the fast food industry and the way food has evolved in America. His main focus is on McDonald's of course, but the whole film is quite good. I thought the bit about the stomach surgery was a little too much though. Especially good are the art pieces used, as they are quite disturbing, but in a good way. I think.
The movie got me thinking, not about McDonald's or about fast food, but about lobbyists and capitalism. I mean, here we have this food industry, represented in Washington by lobbyist people whose sole job is to do whatever they can to ensure that their clients' business is not hampered by the government. One can only imagine what kinds of plying and wheedling that goes on there and who knows how much money is spent. I'm sure it's no different in Canada, just on a smaller scale perhaps. It's kind of depressing when you think about it. What we're seeing now is the results of what happens when you have these astronomically successful corporations that can spend absolutely scads and scads of money purely on the goal of making even larger scads of money, all while staying just on the right side of legal. Hence, you have marketing that is very very heavily directed towards children (to the point where it borders on brainwashing), food that affects your body in very addicting ways, and a team of crack lawyers that can defend what they do every step of the way. I'm not saying that they're responsible (we, the consumer, are as much at fault for letting them be the way they are) but rather that they aren't doing anything morally wrong. At least in the eyes of the System.
The same logic can be applied to the copyfight in that you have these huge organizations that represent the major record labels (although that may depend on your definition of represent...) and happen to be making money at the moment. They are fighting as hard as they can against anything that could challenge that situation. Downside is, in the copyfight we aren't talking about people's health. It is hard to take care of yourself when there are billions and billions and BILLIONS of dollars being poured into efforts to make you do otherwise. Against the bankrolls of the world's largest companies, the government can't help either. In short, the System is broken.
Unfortunately, there really isn't a solution. Sure, we could always give that Communism thing a go, but last time I checked, it wasn't really doing that well either. The thing is, that as broken as everything is, it's still what we've adopted, and since everything is still A-OK with the majority and in the spirit of democracy (which I do think to be the best way to govern, at least in theory), I have no choice but to respect that and go with the flow. Pay my taxes, vote in elections, not cause trouble. In short, be a decent citizen. Besides, it's not all bad, right?
Right?
¶ 1:33 p.m.
