a = F/m

That’s Newtons formula for acceleration, the converse of his formula for force, F=ma.

The variables are a for acceleration, F for the force applied to the object, and m for the mass of that object.

Of course, there are a lot more equations that can explain acceleration in more detail, and account for its varied forms (dynamic, constant, centripetal, etc), but this is the one I’m going to use for today’s random thought.

The speed of events in the world is increasing. That’s an irrefutable facts. Things are happening faster, everything, anything, what ever you can think of, it happens faster than it did a century ago, a half-century ago, a decade ago, maybe even a year ago. This is the acceleration of modern life.

We’ll refer to it as a_ml.

That leaves two parts to the equation, the force and the mass.

The force, is, at the root, the advancement of our knowledge. Both in the breadth of what we know, and the depth of what we know about what we know. The rule of thumb for knowledge is that what we know is doubling every ten years. So, linear growth. That’s not to say that we’re going to make twice as many brilliant discoveries as we did in the last last decade, because a lot of what we’re learning is pointless mundane shit. We’re learning tons about how people interact with digital devices right now, but that’s not going to solve the world’s problems or give us limitless clean energy. It will just make the next generation of iPhone more attractive than last year’s model. But, there are some real advancements, and they compound on existing knowledge.

Discovering lighter alloy metals makes airplanes faster and more fuel efficient, so they can travel farther for less money. Discovering new ways to increase the density of batteries increases the usefulness of everything from electric vehicles to laptop computers to vibrators. And I don’t even know where to begin with the Internet. Things are moving so much faster every year that it is only a matter of time before the entire industrialized world is blanketed under a sheet of high-speed wifi. Right now, from my $99 iPhone, I can download an app that lets me call Korea, for FREE, over the Internet. For less than the price of a nice pair of sneakers, I can talk to some one literally on the other side of the planet.

We’ll call our force the force of knowledge.

F_k

That leaves mass.

The average weight of a human being is around 160lbs. That’s taking both men and women into account. All of the force of knowledge built up by the summation of human existence, and it only has to move less than 200lbs.

I’m not meaning that as a piss answer, either. The reason that Gutenberg printing press was such a big deal was because it enabled more people to have copies of a book, in most cases a Bible. Give a missionary a Gutenberg Bible, a direction and send him off to spread the Word. He’s dead? Eaten by cannibalistic Slavs? Oh well! Print another Bible and get another acolyte!

It only takes one person with an idea to tell another person about that idea. From there, you’ve got the magnifying effect of word of mouth. Bloggers are the modern day Gutenberg presses. They are the individual advocates of ideas that spread them to the masses, who in turn spread word about that blog. Professional news sources are turning more and more to individual bloggers for editorial and news content. Just like a missionary wandering into a town, a single blogger, at the right moment in time, with the right thing to say, can change the world for everyone.

So, for our mass, let’s go with the mass of a human.

m_h

Making our final formula a_ml=F_k/m_h

The acceleration of modern life is equal to the force of knowledge divided by the mass of a human.

And the point and impetus to all of this?

The Massachusetts senatorial election last night. Where a Republican swept the Democrats out of a seat that had been under their control since World War II. There is potential for this to be the harbinger of a Democratic slaughter come the 2010 midterm elections. I’m not going to go down the political rabbit hole right now, but I do wonder what is going to happen as the political pendulum speeds up. Just this time last year we were all screaming our undying love for Obama (ok, those of us not decrying him as a demon Muslim socialist), and now we’re already predicting his ideology’s imminent doom. If changes in the political wind can happen this fast now, what happens as they get faster and faster? What if the country can go from Red to Blue to Red in a single week? Or day? Or hour?

Think about this economically, too. The economic collapse of the last three years is more or less over, and we’re digging out from under it right now. Three years it lasted, on the outside. The Great Depression? Oh, about a decade. It might have lasted even longer if the war hadn’t happened. This is entirely due to the speed at which financial transactions can happen now. No more waiting for wires from across the Atlantic. You can have real-time satellite connections to any bank in the world from any place in the world. Give me a satellite phone on the top of Mount Everest and I can apply for a Visa card. There’s an entire business model that revolves around banks of supercomputers making billions of stock transactions a day, buying and selling on marginal increases and decreases in the value of the stock, slowly but surely inflating the market with machine trading instead of human trading. Which is only possible because of the speed at which information moves these days.

What makes me wonder what’s going to happen as things keep speeding up, but our biology doesn’t. Eventually things happening so fast are going to have a detrimental affect on us. We’ll be overloaded with information and be completely unable to function because we’re drowning in data. You can’t decide if the choice keeps changing, you know?

Just something to muse about. The math of change. The formula for progression.

a_ml=F_k/m_h

Accelerate.

The First Mayoral Debate of 2009

[Ok the stupid embed isn't working, you can find the whole thing here at WMCTV5's website.]

The participants:

• Charles Carpenter – Herenton’s old legal counsel. Crony. A non-figure.
• Carol Chumney – White. Lawyer. Blinks a lot. Lost the last election in a split ticket.
• Wanda Halbert – City Councilwoman. Playing this game to get some free press.
• Robert Hodges – Prince Mongo. Insane. Brilliant. Took a  high priced lawyer threatening a lawsuit to even get him on TV.
• Jerry Lawler – Former professional wrestler. But, this isn’t California. We’re not going to elect a D-list celebrity. Even if his ideas are good, if half-baked.
• Myron Lowery – Mayor Pro-Temp. One of the two people up there who stands a chance of winning this. I got the distinct feeling he was a closeted ‘mo. He wasn’t making a total fool of himself until he said Memphis didn’t have any debt, which is both ignorance and a lie to curry political favor.
• Sharon Webb – This woman is on the school board. She sounds like an uneducated hoodrat, which is telling of the Memphis City School System. She was either drugged, or drunk or both because the fucking man up there who gets government disability money for being crazy (Hodges/Mongo) sounded more coherent than her.
• Kenneth Whalum, Jr. – I…I don’t even know who this guy is but he scared the shit out of me last night. Then I did some research on him this morning and he’s just a different kind of crazy Christian.
• A C Wharton – Look, the tapioca comment was a fair one, but I’d rather have him and his pragmatism than one else up there. We’ve had insanity for 17 years. I think we deserve a little bit of a stable, steady hand, don’t you?

If you live in Memphis, or have lived in Memphis or have any interest in bizarre spectator politics, please for the love of all that is holy, watch this. Pour yourself a whiskey and enjoy the schadenfreude.

Oh, Memphis. They should rename you Bat-Shit Insane-ville.

My primary political goal is to represent the ninth congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. I have every intention of being a congressional candidate during the August 2010 election.

However, during the interim, recent events have compelled me to step forth to provide leadership and express my sincere feelings on how our city can continue to move forward, despite our current dilemma.

My recent retirement from the office of Mayor has created this situation and I feel obligated to seek alternatives to Myron Lowery and an ‘anyone can win’ mayoral race.

The city I love deserves better.

Therefore, I am also preparing a referendum resolution that would allow the citizens of Memphis to rescind the current charter amendment that elevated Myron Lowery to the office of Mayor Pro Tem. This resolution would prescribe limitations on the powers of a non-elected mayor.

It is clear to many citizens that my retirement from office created opportunities for Mayor Pro Tem Lowery and a puzzling list of mayoral candidates to turn our city backward. I am disappointed in Myron’s reckless style of leadership. He must be stopped.

We cannot allow Mayor Pro Tem Lowery to be elected mayor during the upcoming special election. Unfortunately, it is difficult to predict a clear winner with a complicated array of mayoral candidates in the race.

Therefore, I have pulled a petition to run in the upcoming mayoral special election.

- W. W. Herenton’s statement about pulling a petition to run for the office he just vacated, via the Commercial Appeal.

One thing you can say about Memphis. It is never boring here.

Obama | One People – The City

What you’re looking at is a visual representation of the voice/text data transmitted by AT&T on Obama’s inauguration day. The flat map on the bottom is Washington, DC. When the grid of dots rise up from that, you’re seeing increased local cell traffic. The map of the United States above that shows where that traffic is going. The farther a state presses out from the rest of the country, the more calls are coming from DC to that state. The timeline on the bottoms show you what point of the day you are looking at.

From the MIT Senseable City Lab that dreamed this whole thing up:

The City illustrates the emotional flow of the Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C. Through an analysis of the number of mobile phone calls made in Washington D.C. on Inauguration Day and the home state or country of phone origin, it is possible to see peaks of call activity as the crowd anticipates President Obama’s oath, a drop in call activity as the crowd listens to his inaugural address, and peaks again as the crowd celebrates the inauguration of the new President. Through their cell phones, those present at the historic event share their impressions with friends and family in vast numbers: on the morning of January 20th, call activity is two to three times stronger than usual, and it rises to five times the normal levels after 2 pm as President Obama takes his oath and people begin to celebrate.

Iceland is trying to out do America on the change-meter

Iceland’s new PM is probably the first openly gay head of state in history.

From the BBC:

Johanna Sigurdardottir, named as Iceland’s prime minister on Sunday, is the first openly lesbian head of government in Europe, if not the world – at least in modern times.

The 66-year-old’s appointment as an interim leader, until elections in May, is seen by many as a milestone for the gay and lesbian movement.

Up until now, if a gay man or woman has been prime minister, they have done their best to conceal the fact.

In Iceland itself, however, the new prime minister’s sexual orientation appears to be causing less excitement than it is abroad.

What is really historic about this new cabinet, says Skuli Helgeson, the general secretary of Ms Sigurardottir’s Social Democratic Alliance, is not the fact that its leader is a lesbian, but that for the first time in Icelandic history it boasts an equal number of men and women.

“I don’t think her sexual orientation matters. Our voters are pretty liberal, they don’t care about any of that,” he told BBC News.

Brandon Dill was in DC for the Inauguration

Full collection is on his Flickr.

The Only Story of the Day

Collecting the interesting bits from the election coverage from friends and new agencies here. I’ll update as stuff comes in.

• Honestly, that wasn’t Obama’s best speech. “You’re fucked, now here are vague promises it’ll get better.”

warrenellis BREAKING NEWS: Dick Cheney discovered concealing IED in wheelchair: “Them sand-gooks taught me a trick or two.”

• So, John Roberts’ first act to the new president? Fucking up his Oath. Roberts got it wrong, Obama didn’t.

• It has started. Going quiet while history happens. See you on the other side.

• And here we go – “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President Elect of the United States of America: Barak H. Obama.”

• Man, the announcer guy couldn’t sound like more of an officious prick if he tried.

• The chants of “Obama! Obama!” have begun in earnest.

• Dear God. So many people to walk out and seat. At least the crowd is being kept warm by their own body heat.

• Oh, hello. The LJ imagestream finally woke the fuck up and gave me something good.
  

• Jean Biden looks like she’d be an awesome broad to get drunk and listen to her tell stories.

• What the hell? They just announced Walter Mondale and Dan Quayle.

• 
  This is Jon Favreau. He is Obama’s speech writer. He is the youngest second youngest presidential speech writer. He is not related to the Jon Favreau who directed Iron Man. He probably makes the panties of all the wonkettes wetter than the Everglades.

• When Bush flies out of Andrews Airforce Base this afternoon, his plane’s call sign won’t be Airforce One anymore. It will be Special Air Mission 2800.

• Random thought – who the hell paid for all of the risers, port-a-johns and security?

• Obama comes out of the White House, and all of Washington goes deaf from the cheers. It is going to be a good day.

• Heh, Darth Veep apparently pulled a muscle in his back and is now confined to a wheel chair. What a lovely, humiliating end to that monster.

• A woman was hit by a Metro train, causing the closure of a few Metro stations down that line.

longtallanimal Everybody’s crazed from lack of sleep. It’s a lot like a baptist youth lockin, with less makin out.

From TheoGeo.

Give Bush the Boot

Taken by TheoGeo, who is in DC for the Inauguration.

This is Joe Quesada fingering the butthole of the Zeitgeist

Election Night Vegetarian Chili

This is what I served on election night, and it is wonderfully simple. Plus, like all chilis, this gets better the more it cooks down.

What you need:

• Big fuck-off pot.
• Vegetable oil
• Giant onion, red or white. Red will give the chili a slightly sweeter flavor.
• 1 clove of garlic
• 15 ounce can of pinto beans
• 15 ounce can of black beans
• 15 ounce can of kidney beans
• 28 ounce can of diced tomatoes
• 15 ounce can of diced tomatoes
• 1 cup water
• 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa
• 3 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 teaspoons cumin
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Cilantro to garnish

The Process
Put your big fuck-off pot on the stove, and pour some oil in the bottom of it. Turn the heat up to medium and let the oil warm up. You don’t want it too hot, at least not yet.

Dice up the whole onion, the finer the better. You don’t really want onion texture, but you want the liquid and the sweetness of the onion, which really comes out when you dice it finely. Throw that into the pot, stirring it around so it doesn’t stick.

Crush and mince up the garlic clove, then toss it in with the onion. Be careful not to burn either the garlic or the onion. You’re shooting for translucence in the onion and a strong smell from the garlic.

At this point throw in everything else. Open up the beans, drain out the liquid and toss them in. Tomatoes in after that. Water in after that. Then the spices. Stir it all up until everything is a uniform color. Turn the heat up to about three fourths of maximum, cover, and crack a beer.

The chili needs to simmer for at least an hour, preferably at least 2. While this is going on make some corn bread. The chili really needs a base to sit on, and corn bread is perfectly. I use Aunt Jemima corn bread mix because I am a culturally insensitive white male. Oh, and because it is simple to prepare and tastes like I want it to.

A note about the corn bread, do yourself a favor and throw in some chili powder into the mix. You won’t notice it straight out, but it makes a difference as a base for the chili.

At this point, you’ve got a pot of bubbling chili and a pan of golden corn bread. Cut out some corn bread and put it in a bowl. Ladle some chili out over the bread then snip some cilantro for a garnish. Enjoy.

If you’re looking for more of a kick with the chili, bump up the spice amounts. If you’re looking for something non-vegetarian, throw in a pound or so of ground beef or turkey when you’re sauteing the onions and garlic. Let it brown and then add in the rest of the ingredients.

And the best part? After the initial out-lay of money for the spices, a pot of this stuff (about 1.5 – 2 gallons with this recipe) will run you less than $10.

The summation of the election seen through the metaphor of sharing

Via Tim.

And under the bus she goes

Tim pointed this out to me earlier today.

And now, the afterglow

5 Percent Undecided

That’s what this is going to come down to. Assholes who can’t make up their mind. The people who take 15 minutes deciding what they want at a Baskin-Robbins. The guy who walks up to a movie theatre and has to think about what he’s there to see. The woman who spends an hour in book store, agonizing over which VC Andrews book to pick up next. Our fate is in the hands of the indecisive. In the hands of people who still can’t chose between two men after seeing them on the news every day for more than a year and a half. People who can’t make a choice when all the facts are at their disposal.

I guess, what I’m saying is that we’re all about to have the election dictated to us by a group of people who would get eaten by wolves because they would take too long deciding between running left and running right.

Yet another reason why I think that we should have state sponsored packs of wolves roaming our streets.

The Holograms. They are coming for us all.

From USAToday (Yeah, I know, but they lead the story):

NEW YORK — It’s election night, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer is in New York talking to an Obama campaign strategist in Chicago.

But instead of the split screen or window TV viewers might typically see during live remote interviews, the Obama spokesperson will be projected as a three-dimensional hologram, making it appear as if he or she is in the Manhattan studio with Blitzer. The network plans to conduct similar holographic interviews with representatives from the McCain campaign in Phoenix.

—–

“It’s so complicated,” Bohrman says. “The crew is basically shooting someone that isn’t there.”

CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There’ll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.

Bohrman won’t disclose the cost, but says, “We’re on our budget for election night.”

Talking heads are bad enough. But hologram pundits? I’m glad I’m not going on a drinking hiatus until after this is all over.

Obama’s closing remarks

Thanks, Alpha.

Curious about who is donating to the presidential campaigns?

All individual private donations must be disclosed, and since that make them public record, the New York Times put them all together for us in a nice searchable system.

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/campaign-finance/search-contributions.html

I’m glad there is this kind of transparency, but the privacy advocate in me is a little frightened by this much information being avaible on a website.

Tim pointed this out to me a few minutes ago.

This is what the face of idiocy looks like

The highlights of the story from Tim.

• Girl from Texas is volunteering in Pittsburgh
• Girl Twitters that she’s driving around the “bad side of town” looking for a BoA ATM
• Girl claims that after withdrawing $60 a big black dude mugs her and takes her money
• After seeing a McCain/Palin sticker on her car, alleged mugger comes back, beats her up some more, and carves a “B” in her cheek
• The B is backwards.
• Girl goes to a friend’s house and calls the cops.  The cops arrive, she says she doesn’t know which ATM she went to, and refuses medical treatment
• Black eye has no swelling
• Knife was “very dull”, which is why it looks more like a scratch than a cut
• Drives around with cops and eventually finds an ATM she thinks is “familiar” (wasn’t a BoA ATM), but claims that the mugging was outside the camera’s field of view anyway
• Several hours later Twitters about how she’s okay and going back to phone banking
• As of today, she has revised her statement to add boobie grabbage to her story
• Apparently the ATM she “thinks” it happened at had no video record of her going there.
• She confessed to faking the whole thing. Charges will be filed against her.

This makes my head spin

http://election.twitter.com/

That’s a real-time stream of tweets with content relating to the election. Sort of like Twittervision, but politcally oriented instead of geographically oriented.

This is going to be brilliant

Footage from Who’s Nailin’ Paylin, the Huster porn spoof of Sarah Palin. I don’t even care about the sex, I just want to see the bad acting and even worse story.