Miscellaneous

To follow up on the last post, it seems that the readership of this blog is rather limited. So if nobody reads this, I can treat this blog as a kind of lonely throne, from which I can espouse any kind of vulgary that I please. I could say the most offensive thing in the world without reprisal!! But then, the question arises, what is the most offensive thing in the world? I suppose everyone could come up with some revolting, yet slightly entertaining, idea. Just think about it…

I titled this blog “Misc.”, so to continue with that theme, I’ll move on to a completely unrelated topic: Trent Reznor is an evil genius. I was never a big nine inch nails fan, but I respected and enjoyed some of their music. Well, I have a new found admiration of Reznor’s genius, the brain behind the band. The marketing campaign for NIN’s new album, dubbed “Year Zero”, is absolutely brilliant. First, at recent live shows, fans “found” USB drives in the venue’s bathrooms. On the drives was a new track from the NIN album, and, of course, it quickly circulated around the internet. What a clever and cheap marketing campaign; no need for you Myspace. Even more scary brilliant, though, is this aspect of the marketing. Apparently, on t-shirts sold at the concerts, there is a scrambled message that leads to a particular website describing a government conspiracy to poison the drinking water. The conspiracy deepens from there. There are a whole series of connected websites which present a grim picture of the near future: no civil liberties, a brutal church state, holy war. While the owners of the website nor the label would give away any information about relations between the sites and NIN, Reznor released a brief yet tantalizing statement about the concept behind the new album. Check it out and feel free to get sucked into the conspiracy. It is hard not to admire the unbelievable creativity underlying all this.

Finally, to add to the miscellaneousity (not a word) of this post, I found this article very interesting. It seems that the emotion of sympathy is strongest when associated with a single case or person. That intuitively makes sense; a murder or missing person case of a single, high profile or beautiful person usually makes more news that the multiple larger-scale atrocities going on around the world. To quote a Marilyn Manson song, “The death of one is a tragedy”. So we can strongly sympathize with a single person, yet our feelings don’t scale up to higher numbers. The visceral reaction from the death of 10,000 people or 100,000 people doesn’t really differ. Since I’m a scientist, I’m used to looking at numbers and letting them largely determine my conclusions. So 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq, well over 200,000 thousand have died in Darfur. Shouldn’t I consider Darfur a bigger tragedy worthy of more attention? I think this research suggests that these kinds of questions are not valid. For whatever reason, human emotions are not governed by numbers, so you just can’t rank tragedies. Well, I suppose the conclusion here is that morality issues are incredibly difficult.