The first eight minutes of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" synced with Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". They say the whole movie works. Of course, they also say that Slender Man is real.

This is the best one of these I've seen since they did it with "The Wizard of Oz", which is a better thematic fit if you think marijuana is great. As many Slender Man people do.

We talk about story beats, particularly in sequential art stories like movies and comics, and it's not just a metaphor. Language itself is inherently musical, regardless of whether you speak a tonal language, and stories themselves are often most satisfying when they have a musical-ish structure. On the flip side, even "Add It Up" by the Violent Femmes feels like a three-act play to me.

So while I don't think there's anything grand lurking here, there is probably something in our instinctive pull towards certain rhythms and changes in stories and conversations just like in music, the way most popular music was built on a handful of chord progressions.

If I had fuck-you money and an attention span worthy of the name, I'd start randomly pairing concept albums with movies just to see how often I get a decent hit. I bet it would be statistically significant, but then again something this subjective just screams confirmation bias.

There is crazy magic in our stupidly repetitive and predictable brains. Hell, sometimes even I think Slender Man could be real.

Mildly fun curiosity this time. Let's talk about Sir Francis Galton.

Galton was a lot of things, a polymath. He made some significant contributions to statistics and mathematics, which we'll get to in a second, but he's possibly best known as the father of eugenics. Galton was a cousin of Darwin's who took his findings on animal husbandry and breeding down a predictably shitty, racist, classist path.

The man advocated for the Chinese to take over Africa because they were, in his view, better. He didn't think the lower socioeconomic classes should have the rights of the successful, including the right to breed. He was, in the parlance of a friend, a shitbag made of dicks.

One of Galton's more curious discoveries transcended those prejudices, though, when he conducted an experiment at a county fair. Several hundred locals were trying to guess the weight of an ox to win a prize, and none of them came close. But when Galton gathered their submitted guesses and studied them, he found the median was less than ten pounds off, and the mean was essentially perfect, off by just a pound.

This is a weird result, when you think about it. A bunch of people making really bad guesses, many of them with no expertise in raising animals, collectively made a perfect estimation of the weight of an ox.

It's a credit to this bigoted shitheel that he didn't just dismiss the result as a statistical fluke, but actually published it and cited it as an unexpected phenomenon worthy of study: crowds can be smarter collectively than the individuals of which they are composed.

That finding was one of the major milestones on the path to what would become the field of study known as emergence, the idea that complexity arises from groups of simple individuals that are themselves incapable of that complexity. Many people think that intelligence and consciousness are themselves emergent phenomena: just get enough neurons firing, and consciousness will happen...somehow.

A really good overview of emergence (including Galton's story) is in this episode of Radiolab. It's one of my favorite hours of radio ever produced, and it covers emergent behaviors in populations of fireflies that blink in unison, business districts in New York City, Google's search ranking algorithm, and beyond.

But that's not why I wanted to write about Galton. I wanted to write about Galton because motherfucker figured out the best way to slice a cake.

Which doesn’t quiiiiiiiiite balance out being a proto-Nazi, but is something of a start.

(Note that the rubber band really only works if you use fondant instead of buttercream frosting on your cake, which if you do, you’re actually as bad as a fucking eugenicist.)