Dark matters

It's one thing to lose the car keys, or to forget where you left that true crime paperback with the lurid cover; they'll turn up eventually. But astrophysicists appear to have mislaid approximately 80% of the universe. Actually, it's probably always been missing, but it took them this long to notice. The problem it appears, is that things move too fast--things in orbit, that is--stars orbiting within galaxies, galaxies orbiting about one another. Given the puny amount of mass we can observe, they should be flying off in all directions. We would need five times as much "stuff" to explain what we see in the telescope. Quite the three-pipe problem.

Left: a map of the missing "stuff"

With Jesuitical aplomb as regards matters of uncertainty, physicists declare the missing rest of the universe to be "dark matter," invisible, and thus far undetectable. As an explanation, it reminds me of the cartoon where a blackboard is covered by an endless and intricate equation, totally indecipherable except for the phrase in parentheses in the middle: "then something magic happens."

No doubt we will someday discover that the loss can be accounted for by totaling up mateless socks, lost airline luggage, daylight savings time, balls in the rough, inventory shrinkage, evaporation, lost homework assignments, bets laid down on inside straights, and the countless other little dark matters that remain beyond our ken. Until then, we take the invisible on faith.

Barbed reply

If the internet is--as Sen. Ted Stevens maintains--a bunch of tubes, it could sure use a dose of Liquid Plumber. The most persistent rap against the web has been that it's almost impossible to tell whether you are getting good information or not. In a time of reputation management, viral marketing, buzz doctors and spin control--not to mention the assortment of more pedestrian rumormongers, outright liars, and smear artists--who can you believe? Then there are the soreheads, the crackpots, the professionally paranoid, and the wearers of tinfoil hats. It boggles the mind (if the mind is not already boggled).

I assumed that somewhere in the jungle of social networking tools that is burying traditional media like a collapsed barn under grapevine, there would be a service that allowed the surfing community to tag specious content as crap. Something like :
428 readers reported (link to offending content) to SepticTank.org.
Tags: bogus (412), twaddle (15), how do i log in? (1)
Veracity score: 00.23%
But there's no such thing. I should know because I checked it out… on the internet.

Community self-policing works pretty well on individual sites like Wikipedia, but we lack a scheme that will apply to the whole ball of bits. Long before the days of cyberspace my friend Allen proposed the following, which can be taken as a model. Repeal all traffic laws and give every driver a dart gun. Each time a driver jumps the light, cuts someone off, straddles both lanes, or drives while shaving, a vigilant motorist fires a barbed dart with a red flag into the body of the offending vehicle. Collect enough flags and police wave the idiot over and ask him to step out. Then a big electromagnet lifts his car into the maw of a portable crusher. Harsh perhaps, but then Allen is a bit of a sorehead himself.

Topical relief

I hear occasionally from a web-usability guru who was kind enough to advise me during the NCPR website redesign. He dropped me a note this morning to say how much he liked the results, but he cautioned me on the dangers of fragmenting the news into too many topics--citing the mess of Yahoo's old topic-driven navigation system. I had already been thinking about this as a result of going to a major news site yesterday, and finding that of all the things going on in the world, their top story featured a guy who had been walking around with a two-and-a-half inch nail driven into his skull by a nail gun.

Here we see the freakish x-ray, and here is the guy himself, seemingly unharmed. He says the weirdest thing is that the surgeon chose a claw hammer as the best instrument to do the extraction. Owww! Not having had enough, I then Googled "nail in skull" and found that this is not only an irresistible topic of discussion, it happens way more often than one would think. There was the guy who drove the four-inch nail up his nose into the brain, then there was the guy who wandered into a Portland hospital, complaining of headache. The cause--twelve nails shot into his head in a failed suicide attempt. And the guy from South Dakota with the three-inch nail near the brain stem, and on and on.

An hour later, I closed my gore-spattered web browser and realized that I never did find out what was happening in the world. But on that one topic, I had it nailed.

Bobby plus 40

When a talking head these days cites the "post 9/11" world and how dangerous it is, it might be worthwhile to consider the halcyon days of 1968. That year the Soviet Union had 20,000 nuclear weapons targeted on hair trigger at the US, and we were targeted right back. They had just crushed Czechoslovakia's bid for liberal autonomy in the heart of Europe with tanks and machine guns. China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, killing and imprisoning millions. The War in Vietnam was at its peak, with a weekly US body count in the hundreds. At home, protests drew more than a million demonstrators into the streets. Martin Luther King was gunned down and cities burned across the country. Bobby Kennedy was gunned down on the brink of winning nomination for the presidency, and his party's convention in Chicago brought a new term to the American lexicon: police riot.

In the North Country that year, the last sound one heard before dropping off to sleep was the distant rumble of B-52s from Plattsburgh and Griffiths Air Bases, carrying their nuclear payloads around in circles, waiting for the "Go" code. Like many in my age group, I shifted my allegiance (grudgingly at first) from Eugene McCarthy to Bobby Kennedy. But by June I was ready to believe. How long would we have to live under the shadow of violence and fear? Then came the gunshots, and an answer of sorts.

The feeling of insecurity is a relative thing, and fear is an optional response. How we behave given the dangers we face is the measure of character.