Butterfly Backpack

Butterfly Backpack

I recall a tale for my buddies

of my adventures in Saskatoon

I was just chilling

it was a quarter past noon

I was at the mall, just people watching

and that's when this cute girl walked in

sporting a butterfly backpack

Hahaha, this story isn't mine.  But I came up with a theory 10 years ago when I heard this story about the cute girl with a butterfly backpack.  This era in history is sometimes referred to as the information age and it's only appropriate that there are some laws/forces that govern information.  Whether it's Shannon's Theory that determines how many bits of data is required to transmit information in a noisy environment or my theory about how information travels.

Everybody knows (at least everybody with an engineering degree) that electricity always takes the path of least resistance.  Usually it will find ground.  But that makes you wonder if information has a path of least resistance or whether it has a general direction that it prefers to travel.  I would like to posit that information always makes its way such that it will cause the greatest hurt.  The writers from Friends were on the right track when they talked about the "chain" or "link" (not sure of the terminology they used) when Ross cheated on Rachel during their break.  The writers' idea was that Ross had to determine how the information of his cheating could travel back to Rachel and he had to some how disrupt this chain in order to prevent Rachel from finding out.  So yeah, I posit that information travels in such a way that it will cause the greatest hurt.  Sometimes that path is not the shortest possible path but that part of the theory will have to be cleared up later with a corollary.  Perhaps this phenomenon is due to the gossipy nature of humans but whatever.  I'll leave it to my graduate students to figure out the details of all the mechanisms that apply to this theory.

Here's an example of my theory.  Say you're a girl and you randomly make out with a guy that you just met on an airplane.  That information will somehow make its way from your mouth, through who knows how many people, and it will find its way to a boy that has liked you for months and months and it will crush him.  Nobody knew that the boy liked you but maybe the information knew.  How does the electron know that one wire leads to ground while the other one doesn't?  It just knows.  I was thinking about this while trying to sleep so I woke up to write it out because I was tired of losing good ideas due to being half asleep when I came up with them. Anyways, Professor Joe signing off.  Peace out.