Speech at MTV Awards: “I’m halfway to my dream!”

Lisa Simpson on Robert Pinsky

The Coltrain of the quatrain.

BUSH ON THE MID-TERM POLL

I thought that we were
gonna do fine yesterday.
It shows what I know.

The Democrats are
the ones who’ll decide, you know,
how the bills will flow.

the cure for daydreaming

Proust says that the cure for daydreaming is not to daydream less but to daydream more, to daydream all the time.

We take cats as pets and then seek to thwart them in all of their natural urges. How emotionally limited are cat owners?

The best job in the world must belong to the research scientist who discovers a new species.

haiku & explanation

The left or right glove?
Spukhafte fernwirkungen
collapse wave function.



"Spukhafte fernwirkungen" is a conception of collapsing wavepackets put by Einstein, and translates roughly as "the spooky actions-at-a-distance." In this weird world of changing states between photons, things are one thing or another depending whether you're looking at it or not (unless perhaps it's happening at more than the speed of light, I think), thus this haiku and its companion.

I'm pretty confident that "Spukhafte fernwirkungen" is the right spelling. There's a 2002 paper by a couple of US scientists that nicely summarises the idea and the experiments carried out a few years before (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0201/0201036.pdf), and you find discussions of this concept on various forums.

It is also spelt "Spukhafte fernwirkung," and the -en ending I've employed replaces the definite article we use in English. I think this version is more often used when speaking in a German-language context, but in an English poem employing the German phrase I thought it better to go with -en.

Jed Bartlett: “You know how I know? Because smart people told me.”