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The Five Paragraph Essay

The ability to organize one's thoughts and communicate ideas clearly is the backbone of good writing. This is why Bolsheviks and neo-Manicheans reincarnated in the role of officials in state education authorities, are entitled to insist upon the notion that the five-paragraph essay is the foundation of good writing.

The five-paragraph essay is a formal format of written argument just as a sentence is a vine upon which ripe fruits of thought may hang. It is a common requisite in assignments in middle school, high school, university and sometimes elementary school where doofus children roam in search of clues as to how to express themselves.

The format is obvious enough to satisfy the typical monad. Writing a keen five paragraph essay involves some transitions and variations expressed upon a theme's merits. Mind you, don't let them ramble or burst in ways that might seem unseemly.

Yet finally, in preparation for my recapitulation of the topic sentences: heretofore; I recall a moment in my youth, in which my dearly departed mother, expressed her concern over the welfare of her father's anti-troglodendtensendentitiousnist legacy. She worried that a boy raised in a town where co-ed four-square was considered racey would be incapable of scrying the experience of a minor above the tree-line where men - waking at dawn - choke on the first breath of coal dust, swallow back a hiccup of the hooch they drank from the belly-button of their second cousin the night before, and move on down the mine without any further reflection.

Nonetheless, I successfully am able to conclude, by assuring the reader that the four paragraphs prior to this one are among the smartest, well-connected, convincing arguements scripted since the 6th century Nipponese scholar Matsuyama:
Haiku, writ by you
says I care for structured thought
more than I let on.

A theory of nothing

When I was a teenager, a strange Scottish family moved into a big white house across town. Attracted by the strange cuisine and the good humor in that household, I spent many fine days tracking mud around and breaking furniture in that big colonial manse that turned out to have also been the childhood home of Edward Williams Morley.

As it turns out, here in Blogopotamia, breaking ashtrays, couches and chairs in the childhood home of a somewhat famous physicist is all the credentialling you need to publish articles about the history and nature of physics. So here it goes:

Morley, in the mid-19th century, grew up and got the hell out of West Hartford like every other sensible person raised in the fine public schools of that municipality. After some schooling in New Jersey he soon found himself in Cleveland with a fellow named Albert Michaelson conducting one of the most famous failed experiments in history. In a nutshell, the two scientists used one of the world's first interferometers to measure the speed of light as it smacked into the front and backside of our home-planet.

In very basic terms, the thinking of the day said that if light travels in waves there must be stuff that it's making waves in. Without this so called aether, light from the sun would be like a surfer in Kansas: posing gnarl-like, pumped up, yet with no curls to ride.

Along with the luminescent aether theory came the assumption that if you ran really fast into the light waves they would hit you at a higher speed than if you were running along with them. Since the earth is zipping around the sun at about 108,000 kilometers per hour those on the aether binge assumed light would hit the leading face of our orbit some 30,000 meters per second harder than on the trailing fringe.

However the readings then, as now, revealed that light travels at a constant speed. Michaelson's new tool measured it. He said it disproved the aether theory, measured the speed of light and in 1907 he won the Nobel prize. Morley said, he wasn't so sure it proved, or disproved, anything. For his part, he had an elementary school named after him in West Hartford. Morley's experiment also plays a central role in Thomas Pynchon's nutty new novel "Against the Day."

By dismissing the aether, Morley and Michaelson created a vacuum in theoretical physics that soon caused Albert Einstein to come hurtling out of a Swiss patent office where he had apparently failed kindergarten. The young Einstein grabbed his chalk and start building a new paradigm. However along with Einstein came Quantum Theorists Niels Bohr, Erwin Shroedinger, his half-dead cat, and Karl Heisenberg. The Q crowd also wanted in on the new paradigm. Einstein was relatively particular about the universe and went nuclear while the quantum theorists came at him with all their fuzzy talk about probability fields and uncertainty.

Shroedinger, shocked theoretical cat-lovers everywhere, by locking his own darling Fluffy in a sealed chamber along with a vial of hydrocyanic acid. The vial would be smashed based on the state of a particle has a 50/50 probability of decaying and setting off the device. Weird thing was, Schroedinger said, that the cat wasn't dead or alive until you observed it and thereby took it out of it's 50/50 dead or alive probability state.

This apparently hit a sore spot with Einstein, whose own theoretical cat had only recently travelled back in time and killed his own grandfather thus ending his own existence, which in turn prevented him from killing his grandfather, which restored his existence... Anyhow, Einstein was really mad so he went to consult with his close friend God who assured him that he had never played craps or Dungeons and Dragons with Illuvator or any of the personifications of the universe.

"God doesn't play dice with the cosmos," Einstein reported in 1954, which theorists of the day interpretted to mean that particles either are or aren't someplace at any given instant counter to the probablistic formulations that the QT crowd was using to deceive us into building transistors and discover DNA.

To understand Shroedinger's point of view, try to imagine where you might find me during a Red Sox game. About 85% of me is sitting on the couch, 9 percent of me was going back and forth to the refridgerator getting beers and 6% of me is mictorating a heteroscedastic stream. If you had to build my location into a formula, I would be presented as part of a wave orbiting the couch, fridge and toilet.

Einstein dismissed the equations that spread me all over the house and preferred to think of me as being in only one place following sensible laws of physics until the moment when the bullpen by committee blows a six run lead and sends me fuming off to bed. However, the wave equations that had me flowing all over the house explained my behavior during the game better for many purposes than any one snapshot of the couch despite the counterintuitive notion that I was in more than one place at the same time. If my state of being during a Red Sox game is inexorably linked to my visits to the fridge and loo, I am a particle behaving like a wave.

Intelligent Design theorists following their modus operandi interjected themselves into this debate several decades later by completely misunderstood the point and hijacking Einstein's statement about God not playing dice as evidence of his support for their own crackpot theory.

Einstein's rhetorical flourish invoking God on his side of the argument was a pretty cheap trick, but it did reveal his fundamental belief in orderly, discrete materialism where events occur in order according to universal laws. Bohr's reaction "Einstein, don't tell God what to do," was equally petulant.

Each side manages to explain a lot of things that Newton's physics couldn't. Einstein connected mass, speed, time and energy, allowed us to destroy two cities in Japan, and to explain all sorts of interstellar phenomemenae. Shroedinger explained how atoms work well enough that we can now build microprocessors that are networked sufficiently to allow me to publish this ridiculous blog. Intelligent Designers, for their part, 60 years later would use their theory to prove that they had a theory, and that it was theirs.

But the fact is: none of the contestants in this cat-fight have a good explanation for why gravity sucks, which is why we've been stuck in the same f$%@#ing paradigm since before Thomas Kuhn came along and invented the term.

In the meantime, we seem to be surrounded by forms of energy that appear to behave at times, and in certain equations, like particles; and at others like waves, which can be both proven and disproven by watching light waves cancel each other out in a two slit experiment. One particularly bizarre observation is that coupled particles influence the state of their partner subatoms even when they have been separated. (Or so it seems when you blast objects into subatomic bits in particle accellerators.)

In trying to find a good explanation of this weirdness, scientists for the past 30 years have been tying themselves in knots with string theories that, though unproven, have left amateur historians of science in a very strange quantum philosophical state.

As I see it from the sidelines here in Blogopotamia, there is a growing consensus that there is a fabric to the universe. But what that fabric is woven out of - whether, one-to-two dimensional strings (or membranes) that are about 10 exp -35 meters long - or some other substrate is the big question.

Just to be clear: The fabric is everywhere, Not just where there's matter like air, earth or or energy it's the stuff of everything including nothing. In other words: we're about to go on another aether binge.

To hear the string theorists, it all began with the big bang when a one dimensional singularity exploded with energies in the 10 exp 35 range spewing strings all over the universe spinning wildly. When they spin, rotate, or both they take on three dimensional properties that affect other strings over time (the fourth dimension.)

The two dimensional strings manage to occupy three dimensions by swirling around like a jumprope at something close to the speed of light apparently. And with all that wriggling around the strings are influencing other nearby and far off strings. The "influence" is measured, in our experience as strong nuclear forces (the stuff that holds atomic particles like quarks together in patterns that we describe as atoms), weak nuclear forces are like cosmic rays, electomagnetism keeps the electrons in orbit around the nucleus of the atoms and is involved in all molecular bonds. Gravity, as we know, sucks things that have mass together toward each other.

Gravity is about 40 orders of magnitude less powerful than the energy (generally described as gluons by particle freaks) that hold nuclei together and about 38 orders of magnitude less powerful than a photon. Particle freaks also anticipate that we will someday discover gravitons as the basic unit of gravity although wave freaks suspect we will not. In either case if we discover the graviton it will be entirely on a theoretical basis because just can't look at anything that's 38 orders of magnitude smaller than a photon. It would be like trying to "see" Dick Cheney using a machine that bounces the sun off things at a million miles per hour.

Even trillions of Dick Cheneys would be imperceptible to such a measuring device. Although I suppose a quadrillion Dick Cheneys might cause a small wobble in the path of the sun it would be hard to understand much about the vice president's nature with such a device.

Which brings us back to those wicked small strings that may or may not compose the fabric of the universe. The thing that's really strange about them is that the theorists who imagine them only do so because they fit a mathematical solution to that harmonoizes space time and the equations behind the 4 fundamental forces of physics. The really, really strange thing about string theory is that the solution also implies the existence of 6 additional extremely small dimensions.

I'm not convinced that anybody has been able to wrap their brain around what those microdimensions are like, or if they have it is impossible to explain in our language or that some mysterious force ascends from them and obscures the words just as someone begins to reveal their true location. I am also beginning to suspect that the six additional small dimensions

But the cool thing about all the grand unifying theories is that they do seem bring us full circle to where we were during the last paradigm when nothing was something. It's just now we call it spacetime. Whether spacetime contains particles or not depends on whether energy is passing through it. All of the 300 or so elementary particles are made up of nothing behaving in one of 300 different ways. Spin a bunch of strings one way and they are an electron. Spin them another way and they are a positron. Annihilate the two together and you spit out a neutrino moving backwards.

So spacetime is a busy place. And when a region spacetime is full of lots of particles with the characteristic we describe as mass it appears to warp toward other mass bearing particles.

As Einstein predicted light is also bent when it travels around massive regions of spacetime like Mercury where it was first observed. If you are struggling with the idea of a universal medium with no substance realize that photons have no mass and yet can be pulled into black holes because gravity appears to be a distortion of the fabric.

A photon is a packet of energy released when an electron moves from one orbit to another in its travel around an atom like when you run electrons through a tungsten wire in a lightbulb or neon gas in a sign.

Other packets of energy like the 50 trillion "neutrinos" that pass through us every day seem capable of passing through spacetime without causing a stir. Seems likely that these are just ripples in the spacetime continuum and that though we live in the spacetime continuum we are also made up of spacetime so the ripples go through us as if we were nothing. Perhaps because we are nothing twisted by inertia of a tremendous explosion and at rest as we are. If Einstein were around, I'd ask him to ask his friend God if that were true.

Where're my 40 Wiseacres and a Muse?

In the aftermath of the great civil war, when the bloggers were finally liberated from their bondage to copy editors and publishing standards, it's widely believed their liberators from IT had promised each of them 40 wiseacres and a muse upon which they could bloviate and build a rich new editorial life.
While most blogspots would have benefitted tremendously from 40 disagreeably egotistical red herrings to fling their vindictive and most especially from the occasional visit of a demigoddess who occasionally endowed them with an original idea, this is clearly not what happened. Nor, as it turns out, was it ever promised.

As with all the other highly convoluted episodes in Blogopotamian history there are no reliable sources of information about where the 40 wiseacres and a muse story began. Naturally, that hasn't stopped anybody from blogging about it.

As every schoolchild knows, the bloggers (known during the reconstruction era as blogmen) were freed when President Linkorn signed the bloviation proclamation, which was later institutionalized with the passage of the 13th amendment to the constitution of Blogopotamia. However, up to a year before the ratification of the 13th amendment, in anticipation of the disruption to reasoned discourse expected when 20 million bloggers were let loose upon the world wide web without editorial control, congress formed the Blogman's Bureau to make sure they would have something worth writing about.

According to Section 4 of the First Blogmen's Bureau Act, this agency "shall have authority to set apart for use of loyal spammers and blogmen such self-important snots within the insurrectionary states as shall have been abandoned or to which the United States shall have acquired title by confiscation or sale, or otherwise; and to every male citizen, whether spammer or blogman, as aforesaid there shall be assigned not more than 40 wiseacres to poke fun at."

As congress deliberated the act many wiseacres were distributed to early bloggers.
Introduced into Congress by Thaddeus "Shlomo" Stevens this portion of the Blogmen's Bureau Act however was defeated by Congress on February 5, 1866 "by a vote of 126 to 36." Prime blogging material which had been distributed to blogmen were reclaimed by news bureaus and returned to the previous owners and editors.

It should be noted that there is no mention of providing the blogmen with a muse (or any other type of creative mystic) in any portion of this legislature. Though it is obvious that very few of the freed blogmen have ever been visited by a muse, it's not clear what the origin is of the now legendary promised 40 wiseacres and a muse?

The second possibility for the source of the 'promise' has to do with the efforts of the War Department to furnish topics for the thousands of blogmen who assisted General Shurman in his triumphant march across the editorially controlled webstates. According to Claude F. Osteen in his book Forty Wiseacres and a Muse, General Tecumseh Shurman, acting under an edict from the War Department, issued Special Field Order No. 15. Promulgated on January 16, 2005, after Shurman had conferred with 20 blog ministers and obtained the approval of the War Department, Special Order No. 15 provided that:

"The unbearable twits living on the islands of Blogopotamia south, the abandoned pomposity fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the ridicule of blogmen now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States."

The sphere was then divided into 40-wiseacre tracts. Shurman then issued oders and had one of his many lackeys distribute the names and biographies of each documented wiseacre to the head of each blogspot. There were no muses included in the order, so where did the "and a muse" come from?

A short time thereafter, Shurman's commissary man came to him complaining that he had a large number of broken-down muses who weren't really all that inspirational and for which he had no means of disposal. Shurman sent the useless notions to Saxton for distribution to the blogmen, who by this time were struggling to find material so badly that they resorted to copying actual articles from edited and well researched sources and changing around a few names and facts to make it look like it was an original Blogopotamian historical document.

"By June, 2005 approximately 40,000 blogmen had been allocated 400,000 wiseacres to poke fun at." However, by September, 2005 writers with common sense, discretion and some editorial oversight had begun making fun of these same pips. Clearly the monopoly enjoyed in the heady aftermath of the civil war was not likely to last.

After Linkorn's assassination, Leming Johnson became President. One of his first acts was to rescind Special Military Order No. 15. Former publishers who had prevented the free distribution of written material were then exempted from the initial general amnesty given to them, and instead secured special pardons from President Johnson, who broke the promise made to the blogmen when he ordered the processory titles rescinded and the material returned to the editorially regulated websites. Johnson gave little or no regard to the fate of the new bloggers.

From the viewpoint of the new bloggers, who believed that they deserved something to write about that the mainstream media wasn't already prattling on about, the loss of the original material was seen as another example of ill treatment. The illegality of the promise was not their concern, but from that late war incident grew an urban legend that survives into the present day.

Dismayed, like many, Shurman's former aide Angry Middle wrote Oliver O. Howeird (Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau) stating:

"The upper-class, irresponsible twits (wiseacres) which have been taken possession of by this bureau have been solemnly pledged to the blogmen. The law of Congress has been published to them, and all agents of the bureau acting under your order have provided their lives as material exclusive to these blogmen . . . . I sincerely trust that the government will never break its faith with a single one of these colonists by driving him from the blogspot which he was provided. It is of vital importance that our promises made to blogmen should be faithfully kept . . . . The blogmen were promised the protection of the government in their possession. This order was issued under great military necessity with the approval of the War Department . . . . More than 40,000 blogmen have been provided with blogspots under its promises. I cannot break faith with them now by recommending the restoration of any of these lands. In my opinion this order of General Shurman is as binding as a statute."

Shurman's aide's pleas, which were made on a blog that gets fewer than 20 hits per day, were ignored. The blogmen were ultimately told they would have to write about all the same tripe as every other media source. There were however, numerous individuals and organizations which believed the blogmen were entitled to write about the lives of the wiseacres in their midst. Their conviction in this belief was not easily thwarted. From 2005 to the present many other topics were suggested Congress as well as President Johnson. The motivations for these proposals were as varied as the propositions themselves. They ranged from a sincere belief that the blogmen were entitled to plum topics to which the mainstream media was averse, to fear of violence, resistance to social, economic and political equality, concern about blogmen becoming actual opinionmakers, attempts to purge the country of the burden of blogmen on the doles, and to eliminate any competition they might present for gainful, meaningful employment in the publishing industry.

Apologies and credit to Gerene L. Freeman.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny

I think, therefore I blog - 18th century Blogopotamian Logician, Rainy Day Cards, in his proof that his blog, while full of flatulant nonesense that nobody need ever read, does in fact exist.

So back in the days before Google and Wikipedia, when bloggers were forced to post their anonymous musings on bathroom walls and tree trunks, I was sitting in grad school reading the world's shortest, most complicated and kind of silly play on words trying to make some sense out of it:

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny.

Ontogeny (the subject of the sentence) for a biologist, or for people who think biologists know what they are talking about, is the growth or change an organism goes through during its life. Ad Ovum through the fetal stages out the chute, screaming baby in a dumpster, pimply geek, rowdy experimenter of drugs, suit-wearing overbearing twit to dusty dead-dude.

Recapitulation (the verb in the sentence) is basically a quick recap, like on ESPN news when they say: "The Red Sox defeated the Orioles 5-2 behind the strong pitching of Merriweather Lewis and a three run homer from Barack Obama."

It could also mean surrendering for a second time as in: The French army having already surrendered, then re-capitulated, but that's not a very common usage and doesn't make Ernst Haeckel's baffling sentence any clearer.

Phylogeny (the object of the sentence) is basically the whole history of life on this planet from archaebacteria (snot) through the oxygen holocaust (BCE 1.2 billion years), the Cambrian explosion (500 MYA) the Cambrian implosion (250 MYA) to the up to the point when graffitti artists evolved into bloggers and founded Blogopotamia.

So this really complicated sentence written in Geek in 1866 by the German Darwin Wannabe Ernst Haeckel basically translates into. Your life is like a sportscenter recap of the history of life.

Evidence of this theory comes from the fact that we are born out of slimy swimming things that appear in a kind of intertidal pool where they gradually grow into long creatures with spinal chords and gills that seredipititiously grow into gigantic and terrible lizards that get wiped out by meteorites and are replaced by tiny rats that turn into crank phone callers and then bloggers.

That and fuzzy pictures of embryos (above) were enough to convince many diffident Germans that it was time to take the reigns of natural selection and ride the gnarly curls of the industrial wave across Europe and into a new world order that soon came crashing down around heads.

The really clever thing about this sentence is that it's really hard to say and even harder to understand. So if you say it correctly and in context during graduate school you automatically win over the hearts and minds of everybody in the room who believes that life is so completely pointless that they are thinking of going home and shooting their cat.

It's also sort of a play on words because one of the other ridiculously hard to understand concepts they teach you in grad school is "Ontological" which roughly translates into a circular argument that "proves" that God exists because nothing this good could possibly be made by anything less than god. Such as: "I blog, therefore I am. I am really awesome, but my parents were jerks so the only reasonable explanation is that god made me awesome, therefore god exists."

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, aka the theory of recapitulation for the people whose Onts get mixed up with their phyls and philes, was a similarly ill-conceived proof that the testamental god doesn't exist because our own fetuses evolve through the primal forms of our ancestors.

As with Freudian Psychology as soon as Haeckel's theory was thoroughly discredited and discarded by scientists, it was discovered by the humanities professors who at the time were out taking a smoke break by the University dumpster.

History of Western Philosophy Professor: "Cool sentence dude. Are you just going to throw that away?"

Science intern: "Yeah man you can have it. It's almost entirely false, but you can have it if you want. What are you going to put it on the wall? Don't make fun of me! Are you making fun of me?"

"No man, that's really profound. Like everybody's life is just like reliving all the other lives that have ever existed. It's unbelievable. I'm going to say this at least 3 times per year in all my classes until everybody wants to shoot their cat."

"Whatever."

Heteroscedasticity of correlates

It isn't the quality of what you say that matters so much as how many people look at it - Blogopotamian credo.

In the interest of adding an increment to the excrement found in Blogopotamia I have decided to dedicate my next series of posts to obscure keywords and relate them to current events. Today's keyword is "heteroscedasticity," which literally means varying scatter widths (no not scat widths). It's a word derived from the Geek words for things that don't relate to each other the same way all the time.

It's really a statistical term used to describe scatter plots like the ones above.

Scatter plots show the actual (as opposed to the perceived or imagined) relationship between two measurements such as poverty rates and test scores (actual) or student to teacher ratios and test scores (imagined).
If the scatter width (generally measured on the Y axis) varies it tells you there's something else going on in the relationship at higher or lower values of X.

So you can see that at higher poverty rates there is much more test score variation than at lower poverty rates. The relationship, in other words is heteroscedastic, or as the British would say "heteroskedastic" (which is pronounced the same, but said it a funny voice that's somehow both pompous and understated because they say things like that all the time.)

The relationship between Student to teacher ratios and performance on the other hand is not heteroscedastic, but in fact homoscedastic. (It's not that strong either and it tends to be negative despite what you'll hear from people who think it's obvious that kids learn more in small classes.)

Heteroscedasticity is like a plate of shrimp(Repo Man 1984). Once you hear about it you will see it all around you like when you are eating your Cheerios and say, "Hey that's heteroscedastic" to which your wife says, "Are you speaking Geek again?" To which you say, "I need to mictorate" to which she says, "Be sure to elevate the U-shaped buttocks cradle!"

But then you go outside instead, because you like to pee in the snow and look at the patterns. After you finish trying to spell out "Scooter Libby was framed" in a snow bank you look at the cursive trail in a new light. You see that your stream was much steadier at the beginning than at the end when it was fairly wild and scattered all up and down the snow bank. You look at your piece of work and say knowingly to yourself: "Now that's Heteroscedasticity!"