The times they are a changin'

Well since we last wrote, lets count what's happened.

-Barack Obama was elected president, and the minougherty's froze our collective balls off for 8 hours in order to watch it happen in person. (Pictures coming soon!)

-The Motherfucking Arizona Cardinals are going to the Super Bowl? They aren't who we thought they were? (A bunch of losers?)

Jesus.

We have a black president and the cardinals are in the superbowl.

I think this proves once and for all... well it proves nothing, but if you'd asked me a year ago if these two events would happen in tandem I would have spat in your face out of joy and because i like spittin.

In dynamics, we say that when a small change in input creates a drastic shift in output, what results is a catastrophic bifurcation. A way to think of this catastrophic bifurcation would be to imagine all the possible space-times existing together. Every decision of every human, ant, bacteria, and every possible matter interaction is constantly modifying these space-times.

In one space-time, for example, everything in the universe next to ours is exactly the same as in this one, except for the fact that you didn't eat breakfast this morning (or did eat breakfast, or whatever.) You not eating created a little ripple in space-time, splitting the events of that universe ever-so-slightly from the events of this one. Each of these splits is called a bifurcation. Over the span of, say, 1 billion years, the effects of you not eating could very easily spawn events that would drastically split the two universes into something completly unrecognizable from eachother, but in the short term, it's not all that likely to matter.

A catastrophic bifurcation occurs, for example, when a couple hundred thousand people in a few key states decide to change their minds and elect the first non-white leader of the free world or when Larry Fitzgerald catches a leaping pass in the back of the endzone to end 60 years of mediocrity. (You must understand that I'm not equating these two events in order of importance, only in that a relatively small shift in input created a drastic shift in output.)

These inputs don't just have the possibly to change some distant future, they drastically change the present. Where you not eating breakfast caused a ripple in space-time, The decisions of people in North Carolina, Indiana and Pennsylvania created a tsunami. On January 21, our world became immediately and drastically different than it was the day before.

What does it all mean? In dynamics, these jumps are the definition of chaotic behavior. It means that even if we understand all the inputs, they way they interact can create entirely new and previously unthinkable results. Hence sometimes we get some really weird shit going on. The Arizona Cardinals stomping a team that beat them 2 months earlier two days before the inauguration of Barack Obama would be a nice dual example. Do they have a direct link? No. But in the scope of worldwide interaction, they aren't really that far off from eachother. When a system experiences a catastrophe, nothing, not even seemingly unrelated aspects of that system are unaffected.

We root for the underdog and we love Barack's message of Change because humanity, especially young humanity, loves catastrophe. Not the biblical kind, mind you, but the mathematical kind. Catastrophe lets us believe that yes, sometimes, our decisions or our actions do actually effect something more than whether or not we get cranky before lunch.

Speaking of lunch... I'm out.